Take California's ban on same-sex marriage. On Election Day in 2008, 52% of the state's citizens approved the ban by voting for the infamous Proposition 8. To all but the most myopic among us, it was obvious that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution:
"...nor shall any State...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."Marriage is a religious sacrament. A church which refuses to marry a same-sex couple is within its rights, but the state has no place prohibiting it.
That a majority of California citizens endorsed fear- and faith-based discrimination, by the way, is irrelevant -- we live in a representative republic governed by laws, not in a democracy ruled by ideological convenience. That's why we have judicial review.
Fortunately, yesterday a federal judge struck down the patently unconstitutional ban. His ruling surely will be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which should be hard-pressed to favor California's wispy, laughable arguments over the Law of the Land.
And then there's the noisy dustup over a developer's proposal to site a mosque two blocks from where radical Islamists murdered more than 2,600 people on September 11, 2001. Opponents of the plan call it "inappropriate" and "disrespectful."
(The incurably inarticulate Sarah Palin tweeted, "Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate!" Noting Palin's use of the made-up word "refudiate," one blogger tweeted back, "If Republicans can demand that immigrants speak English, can't we demand same of Sarah Palin?" It's impossible to overstate what a dolt this woman is.)
Ok, back to intelligent discussion here. The First Amendment to the Constitution begins,
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."No, those words don't guarantee the developer's right to build his mosque near Ground Zero. They simply preserve one of our nation's most precious principles.
So when we say that we support constitutional principles, do we mean it or not?
In my opinion, anyone who seeks to block this mosque is flouting the constitutional principle of freedom of religion. The louder the protests, the clearer the message -- these folks show themselves to be nothing more than unprincipled xenophobes, thus confirming to the terrorists that they've gauged their target accurately.
We're better than that. Or we should be, anyway.
We find it easy to pay lip-service to our liberties when defending something we agree with. It can get downright uncomfortable, however, when a black citizen must acknowledge that a KKK chapter has a right to assemble peaceably, or when a Christian citizen realizes that the free exercise of Islam is protected, or when a heterosexual citizen has to defer to the Constitution rather than to his homophobia and allow a gay couple to enjoy the same pursuit of life, liberty and property.
Talk is cheap -- liberty has a price. Either we buy the principles we're selling or we don't.
I do.
