The above headline is from a post yesterday at BarbWire.com by Dr. Michael Brown. Here was the headline of an article last week at Breitbart.com: “Legal Scholars Urge Disobedience to Gay Marriage Ruling.”
It is good news indeed that some people are waking up to the fact that it’s time for more Americans to be taught the U.S. Constitution — not the law school version or the Obama version — but the Constitution as the Framers wrote it and then explained it for many years in additional writings. (Click here to learn more on the topic.)
Below is an extended excerpt from Dr. Brown’s article and tomorrow we’ll look at the Breitbart piece.
I’ve been saying that 2015 is the year of pushback, and this might be the most significant act of pushing back so far: A group of legal scholars, most of them university professors, have declared that the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage this past June 26th is not “the law of the land,” and they are calling on all office holders, together with all presidential candidates, to join them in rejecting the Court’s decision.
Make no mistake about it: This is really big news.
These scholars, who teach at schools like Princeton and Oxford and Notre Dame and Boston and Boston College and Michigan State and Kansas State and Vanderbilt and Hillsdale and the University of Toronto and the University of Nebraska, state that the Court’s decision “has no more claim” to being the law of the land “than Dred Scott v. Sandford had when President Abraham Lincoln condemned that pro-slavery decision as an offense against the very Constitution that the Supreme Court justices responsible for that atrocious ruling purported to be upholding.”
They note that “Lincoln warned that for the people and their elected leaders to treat unconstitutional decisions of the Supreme Court as creating a binding rule on anyone other than the parties to the particular case would be for ‘the people [to] have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.’”
They also cite James Madison, who in 1788 had this to say about the balance of powers: “The several departments being perfectly co-ordinate by the terms of their common commission, neither of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers.”
But these professors and lawyers are not simply making a philosophical statement about the Court’s Obergefell vs. Hodges ruling.
They have issued a call for action, reminding “all officeholders in the United States that they are pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the will of five members of the Supreme Court.” They also call on “all federal and state officeholders” to “refuse to accept Obergefell as binding precedent for all but the specific plaintiffs in that case.”
Read more: BarbWire
Image credit: www.townhall.com.
