GOP Senators, It’s Your Last Chance To Stop The Roe v. Wade Of Marriage

In the Daily Kentucky New Era newspaper the day after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the top left corner of the front page read only: “IT’S GOOD. — The U.S. Supreme Court Passes On — SEPARATE COACH LAW. — And Says That it is Constitutional — Other News.” That was it for the Kentucky paper on “separate but equal,” a court decision that was supposed, wrongly, to settle key questions of civil rights, constitutional law, and race relations in America. The New Era barely batted an eye at the decision. 

The lesson for anyone with more than a gnat’s eye view of history is that a given moment can seem uneventful or even positive if you mistake the time, the issue, and the nature of things. The lesson for politicians is even clearer. Take care wading into deep waters of civil and natural rights, because the truth will come to light eventually, as it did with “separate but equal,” as it did with the journey from Roe to Dobbs. It often takes time to think, argue, and discuss, and frankly, it often takes errors to compare with good policy before the American people can decide properly what to do about a given difficult issue such as civil rights, abortion, or marriage, which has now become yet another deep societal debate, only in its infancy of consideration after Obergefell.

Now the Supreme Court has a long history of getting out over its skis, so to speak, and attempting to settle such complex issues with decisions such as Dred Scott, Plessy, Roe, and Obergefell. It is a kind of oligarchic temptation to which the court has repeatedly succumbed. And it has been an error somewhat particular to the Supreme Court — until now.

It seems that the Senate — and, by its leadership, the whole of the Democrat-controlled Congress — is about to join the court in that same downhill slalom to the dustbin of history, if they pass the unrealistically named Respect for Marriage Act this very afternoon. Unless the Respect for Marriage Act is voted down, the Senate will attempt to second the haste of the court’s Obergefell decision by trying to codify gay marriage, which looks, as Plessy did to the headline writers of the Daily Kentucky New Era in May of 1896, like an uncontroversial bill.

Senators who think they will be hailed as champions and protectors of marriage equality may have a somewhat narrow view of history because they woefully underestimate the power of what the Declaration of Independence called a candid world that can come to understand certain self-evident truths about Nature and Nature’s God if given the time to hear out the arguments, test the ideas, and consider seriously whether something is truly a right.

Now, this is precisely what the Senate minority and its leadership are meant to do. They are, by constitutional design and by the blessings of the filibuster, able to stop the majority from committing the sort of hasty errors

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