Part 2: Obedience to God and the U.S. Constitution. Read part I here.
Relying on their personal prejudices and convictions jurists like Justices Kagan and Ginsberg may abuse the authority they are supposed to derive from the U.S. Constitution to fabricate whatever rights they please. But when their fabrication, however construed from the enumeration of rights in the Constitution, effectively denies or disparages the antecedent rights retained by the people, that is plainly forbidden by the Ninth Amendment’s language, and can have no force of law. This prohibition is even more imperative when the rights involved are unalienable rights, possessed from the moment of creation.
When it comes to the ongoing campaign by elitist faction judges to impose the specious right of homosexuals to marry on the people of the United States, it’s especially important to note the use of the word “disparage” in the language of Article IX. People can argue, if they like, that the recognition of homosexual marriage in no way denies or interferes with the right of heterosexuals to marry. But the word “disparage” broadens the purview of the prohibition, to include anything that belittles, denigrates, deprecates or trivializes.
The institution of marriage involves not one but several instances of unalienable right including, but not limited to:
- The parental right of authority over biological offspring, arising from the natural responsibility to care for them;
- The intrinsic right of offspring to sustenance and care from their parents, arising from that same natural responsibility;
- The right of parents to assert familial belonging and defend the custody and care of children as their natural duty, over whom no others may assert any interfering authority inconsistent with the common interest of all in the well-being and safety of any and all human offspring, as it effects the perpetuation of the species as a whole, and the particular communities people form in order to secure it.
By its very nature homosexual marriage may deny or disparage the natural right of one or the other of a child’s biological parents. In any case, it disparages the specific responsibility from which the unalienable rights involved in family life arise, since it denigrates and trivializes the assumed commitment to procreation naturally involved in the formal definition of marriage, and the panoply of legal privileges and protections associated with the institution. Indeed, by formally eliminating that assumption it formally eliminates the presumption of governmental authority universally associated with the family as an institution, and indeed as the first form of government over human society.
In respect of the family, every man or woman was naturally entitled to the respect and authority associated with being the princes (first ones) of the household. The family is thus the paradigm through and in which the general capacity of human beings for sovereign power can be naturally verified. (It is not an accident that the elitist faction’s determined effort to overthrow the general sovereignty of the people is associated with a specious assertion of right that intrinsically undermines respect for the natural responsibility and authority of biological parents over their offspring.)
Moreover, the family paradigm also validates the feasibility of responsible, good government derived from the natural inclination of human beings to heed the voice of conscience when it comes to their responsibility to humankind, as individuals and as a species. Parents, answering the call of nature instilled in them by their Creator, have generally accepted and successfully carried out the responsibility for procreation, despite the fact that the human capacity for self-conscious choice deprives the human call of nature of the reliably commanding regularity that seems to be characteristic of most other living things.
The family offers natural proof that human beings are generally capable of self-government. Could this be why, in many oligarchic societies, the elitist rulers were careless about respect for family mores amongst those they regarded as their inferiors, but studiously careful formally to encourage respect for the responsibilities and bonds of family life amongst themselves? Is that because it’s easier to rule over people when the image of self-government in their daily lives has been degraded to such a point that their role as parents and respectful children no longer reminds them every day of their capacity as rulers, teachers, and leaders, and in turn of the dignity of being the equal and self-respected subjects of naturally lawful authority?
Montesquieu, the French political thinker whose analysis of republican self-government profoundly influenced the understanding of government among America’s founding generation, wrote at length about the relationship between a society’s norms and laws with respect to family, and the form of government therein established or endured. Checks and balances among the various natural estates of society were important to the preservation of the form of government required for liberty.
In like fashion, respect for the responsibility, authority and rights of the natural family are important to preserving the character of the people required to sustain it. By deprecating the natural family, the elitist faction’s push for homosexual marriage denigrates respect for the natural authority, responsibility and self-discipline associated with natural family life, to the detriment of the people’s capacity to sustain and exercise the right of self-government that is the sine qua non of the republican form of government the U.S. Constitution requires.
The Ninth Amendment is the key to thwarting the elitist faction’s effort to deconstruct the practical moral foundation of self-government in America. Without question, the Ninth Amendment protects the unalienable rights of the family and the whole apparatus of laws, immunities and privileges that have existed in the United States to sustain society’s respect for those rights. Also without question the pretense of fabricating a right to homosexual marriage is already systematically assailing that apparatus, so that the religious, moral and habitual respect that the natural rights of family have enjoyed in the United States is now being prosecuted, persecuted and punished, abusing the authority of law.
If the U.S. Supreme Court proceeds to weave a specious fabric of law requiring respect for homosexual rights, including marriage, their decision will be, in effect, a combination of the Dred Scott Decision and the infamous Fugitive Slave acts, that jettisoned the doctrine of unalienable rights for all, and sought to force people to abandon what natural right and conscience both plainly announce as our just rights, derived from our natural obligations to God and our humanity.
As people of conscience, and partisans of rightful liberty, Americans worthy of the name will have no choice but to reject this decision. Some will decry or defend this as “civil disobedience.” But where wrong is imposed by abusing the power of government, there is not law but tyranny. In the case of the unalienable rights of the God-endowed family, in resisting this tyranny we obey both God and the U.S. Constitution.