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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Federal lawsuit seeks to overturn Massachusetts homosexual marriage

Rev. John Rankin of the Theological Education Institute has filed a lawsuit in a Federal District Court seeking to overturn the regime of homosexual marriage that was imposed on Massachusetts by its Supreme Judicial Court.

As someone who practiced law for nearly 15 years, I can tell you that his argument is extremely interesting and very fine. In essence, Rankin says that the Massachusetts Judicial Court has destroyed our concept of unalienable rights and thus our system of Constitutional Law by declaring that classes of people possess rights, not individuals. In American law, individuals possess unalienable rights for they have derived them from the Creator.

Goodridge violates the nature of personhood as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment, where the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property are ascribed equally to all persons, as individual persons, and not due to membership in any given group, whether objectively or subjectively defined, whether fixed or malleable in declared nature.

The class of people who would engage in same-sex "marriage" is not even a true class of people, as it is "malleable" or changeable. The result has actually been to destroy the rights of others and create "super rights" before which all others must yield. Thus, while claiming it was upholding rights, it has actually destroyed all rights by making them alienable. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did this without even considering what it was doing with respect to Federal Law and our Federal Constitution. The result is that courts or legislatures can create new rights according to the whims of the season.

Under current federal law (e.g. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), civil rights, congruent with the Fourteenth Amendment, cannot, nor ever have otherwise been assigned to a malleable identity, to subjective choice. Goodridge thus rewrites federal law, and without examining the issue. If such malleability and subjectivity were consistently applied in this context, there would be no boundaries in place to restrict the possibility of consanguineous, polygamous or group marriage. And beyond this context, if applied consistently, malleability of individual and group identity for the sake of perceived government benefit opens up a Pandora’s Box which Balkanizes civil rights.

Notice what Rankin is saying: under the current regime, there is no brake or impediment to a government legalizing incest, polygamy or group marriage. I can't say what success Rev. Rankin will have - in this political climate, probably none apart from a Divine intervention - but I believe he has posed important questions, questions which no one seems to be articulating or which at any rate no one has dared to argue where it might count.

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