Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Judicial Arrognace and Gay Marriage In Iowa


Professor Matthew Franck makes a powerful case against the "judicial arrogance" of the Iowa Supreme Court in its decision to foist gay marriage upon the state in Law, Feelings, and Religion at the Bar in Iowa. Here is one particularly salient quote:
"The laws of marriage and family, of divorce and custody, are efforts to address such questions rationally, if necessarily imperfectly, with the moral health of each party concerned being something to be optimized to the greatest extent possible. In the nature of things, someone’s preferred notion of a “relationship” that needs “affirming” is always going to be left outside the moral pale, or so one would have thought until now. But on the Iowa court, all such questions, answered slowly and haltingly by G.K. Chesterton’s democracy of the dead, the living, and the yet-unborn—otherwise known as “tradition”—are swept aside by the judges’ solicitude for the “excluded” whose self-esteem is wounded. When desire becomes the foundation for a right, beware. Nothing in what passes for reasoning in Justice Cady’s opinion can stand against the next claimant—perhaps the polygamist—who presents himself as needing affirmation for his relationships. This is not a slippery slope we have before us. It is the sight of a levee breaking in a spring flood."
You can read the whole argument here.

Born and raised in Iowa, all I can say is I'm ashamed to be a Hawkeye today.

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