At stake in two cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court is the “very existence” of America, according to attorneys who have filed briefs in support of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and the California state constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
“The natural family is fundamental to our very existence,” Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, said as his organization filed friend-of-the-court briefs.
“Thriving societies need healthy children who grow up into responsible citizens,” he said. “Healthy children require committed parents who will sacrifice their own desires for the well-being of their children. This is all created within the context of natural marriage between one man and one woman.”Justice Marvin Baxter of the California Supreme Court, in his dissenting opinion in the 2008 case affirming same-sex marriage, warned of the consequences of judicially ordering a change in the standard for marriage.
“The bans on incestuous and polygamous marriages are ancient and deeprooted, and, as the majority suggests, they are supported by strong considerations of social policy,” he wrote for his court. “Our society abhors such relationships, and the notion that our laws could not forever prohibit them seems preposterous.
“Yet here, the majority overturns, in abrupt fashion, an initiative statute confirming the equally deeprooted assumption that marriage is a union of partners of the opposite sex. The majority does so by relying on its own assessment of contemporary community values, and by inserting in our Constitution an expanded definition of the right to marry that contravenes express statutory law.”
His warning?
“Who can say that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, an activist court might not rely on the majority’s analysis to conclude, on the basis of a perceived evolution in community values, that the laws prohibiting polygamous and incestuous marriages were no longer constitutionally justified?”
