Michael Schuttloffel is the executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference.
by Michael Schuttloffel
The judiciary… will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 78
Alas, not quite.
The Founding Fathers, formed by deep study of history’s various attempts at free societies — John Adams was reading Cicero’s “Orations” at 14 instead of staring at Facebook — established a system of government still in place 224 years later. Yet they could not foresee all. Today, the judiciary is very dangerous indeed, for our robed, unelected guardians have decided that Americans and their elected officials are not fit to decide many of the most consequential issues of our time.
Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that Congress and the states do not possess the power to forbid the killing of unborn children, the court stands on the verge of what some are calling a potential “Roe v. Wade for marriage.” The Supreme Court will soon decide whether the people of California have the right to amend their state constitution in favor of marriage as it has been understood for all of human history, and whether the federal Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional.
Not receiving as much attention is the fact that the Kansas Supreme Court is more than holding its own in terms of judicial activism run amok. In February, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that, despite the fact that she has no biological connection to the two children in question, a woman from a broken-off same-sex relationship has full parental rights, contrary to the wishes of the biological mother. That ruling is already being cited by a Topeka woman who also wants to assert parental rights over a child she has no biological connection to, but who she had agreed to “co-parent” with her former, same-sex partner (despite the breakup, they are co-parenting and foster parenting a total of eight children). The father, who answered a craigslist ad seeking sperm, heroically wants only to be free of any obligation to the child he helped create.
If you are disturbed by these proceedings, the culture holds you in contempt. Each day, from the comfort of their television studios and editorial board rooms, self-imagined freedom riders congratulate them- selves for their labors in the vineyard of “civil rights.” Fighting for civil rights is a much less daunting endeavor now that it does not involve having dogs sicced on you or hoses turned on you, and instead, means going on talk shows with oversized coffee mugs to scoff at opponents of same-sex marriage.
If you believe that every child deserves a mother and a father, and that this obligation trumps the total sexual freedom of adults, the culture has ruled against you.
Soon, the highest court in the land may, too.
