Yet now SCOTUS justices can rewrite the Constitution to include anything they deem fit by appeal to nothing more than their own ideology. Even if you support “gay marriage,” be alarmed. Be very, very alarmed. The Lawless Five just abolished the whole concept that amending the Constitution requires a super majority in the two Houses of Congress and among state legislatures. It now only takes Five Lawless Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States to amend the Constitution.

On July 31 at the American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award Luncheon, former Justice John Paul Stevens declared that, while the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment establishes a right to “gay marriage,” it does not protect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

Now when it comes to the issue of “gun rights” I have no personal dog in the hunt (so to speak). I’m not a gun owner. In most circumstances I wouldn’t recommend keeping a gun at home because I think statistically a gun kept at home is more likely to be used on someone in the home than on an intruder (though I wouldn’t want an intruder to know that I don’t have a gun at home).

Still, I marvel at Stevens’ ability to reject an application of the Fourteenth Amendment to a right clearly enumerated elsewhere in the Constitution (viz., “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” in the Second Amendment) while affirming its application to a supposed right not elsewhere even remotely alluded to in the Constitution (viz., the right of a person to marry a person of the same sex).

As Harvard-trained lawyer Brian Troyer commented, “You need look no farther to see that liberal jurisprudence has nothing to do with law or the Constitution except in the instrumental sense that when liberal judges pronounce their judgments on these issues they invoke the document as their excuse for imposing their personal policy preferences.”

In Obergefell v. Hodges Justice Kennedy, writing for the bare majority (Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan), based the case for the oxymoron that is “gay marriage” on the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. So far-fetched was the connection that its effect was to dumb down intelligible words that have an historical context to the subjectivity of a Rorschach inkblot test or a reading of tea leaves.

The text of the Constitution now means anything that five SCOTUS justices want it to mean. That, in turn, has the quite serious effect not only of tarnishing the Court’s reputation as impartial jurists but also of eradicating Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which specifies how the Constitution may be amended: “The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution… which… shall be valid… as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states….”

What did Kennedy and the four other lawless justices see in the Fourteenth Amendment? Its first paragraph states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” According to the Lawless Five, “gay and lesbian persons” are being denied a “fundamental right” to marry someone of the same sex whom they love.

This rationale overlooks the obvious. Everyone has a right to be married under the definition of what marriage is. “Due process” and “equal protection” for all citizens of the United States are not denied when persons who do not meet the definition of marriage are not allowed to redefine marriage to conform to their desires. The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman preceded the Fourteenth Amendment and those who framed and passed the Fourteenth Amendment did so with the understanding that it in no way, shape, or form had changed that definition.

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