In 2004, when asked about gay marriage in the Vice Presidential debate, Sen. Jonathan Edwards (D-SC) insisted that it was a non-issue, because, “under the law of this country for the last 200 years, no state has been required to recognize another state’s marriage.”
Edwards, a master salesman, disingenuously failed to include the word yet at the end of the sentence.
He also ignored what conservatives had realized years earlier: the strategy for the gay rights movement was to get one or more states to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, then use this as a pretext for forcing all other states to recognize such “marriages” by invoking the Full Faith and Credit clause in the Constitution.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn continued this charade by refusing to consider theĀ common law prohibitions against sodomy–which predate our Constitution by over a thousand years–and force Kentucky to accept gay “marriages” from other states.
In so doing, Heyburn has forced Kentucky to accept a definition of marriage that is akin to forcing one to recognize a naked emperor as fully-clothed. (Declaring falsehood to be true does not make it any less false.)
Once again, a small but well-connected and vocal minority has succeeded in getting the courts to impose on states what could not be accomplished via legislation.
Conservatives understood that, to defeat gay “marriage”, a Constitutional Amendment is necessary. That Amendment must either (a) define marriage as one man and one woman, or (b) declare that neither the federal government nor the several states may regulate marriage, and remand that back to religious institutions.
But make no mistake: no state law, no State Constitutional Amendment, no federal law, will stop this. Only a Constitutional Amendment or a national Christian resurgence will carry the day.
But until we get the latter, we have no chance of getting the former. And the decline will continue.