The Anti-Sam Brownback Blog

In a Focus on the Family article about yesterday’s hearing on the proposed federal anti-gay marriage amendment, these paragraphs stuck out to me:

Brigham Young University Law professor Lynn Wardle, meanwhile, said federal protection is important because the courts are subverting the will of the people.

“The people want this,” he said. “Eighteen out of 18 proposed state amendments that have come before the voters have been passed by margins that are overwhelming—from 57 percent to 86 percent.”

Wardle added that he hopes congressional interest will highlight the importance of making sure the people have the right to define traditional marriage—not the courts.

The will of the people. Say you asked a random person on the street, “What is a democracy?” I am willing to bet that the most common answer would be along the lines of, “There are votes to decide issues and the side with the most votes, wins.” In other words, majority rules.

The funny thing is, our founding fathers were afraid of this very idea. While they wanted to take power away from the King, they were also afraid of something they called “The Tyranny of the Majority.” Perhaps James Madison said it best in Federalist Paper 63:

“…an institution may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions…. …there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.”

This is the reason we have an independent judiciary that is appointed for life. They are meant to be out of reach to anyone who would influence them. This is why they are to be impeached under only the most egregious of circumstances. The courts are the “temperate and respectable body of citizens” that prevents the majority from running roughshod over the rights of the minority.

Madison had such incredible foresight. Written in 1788, # 63 accurately predicts how the courts finally ended institutionalized racism during the civil rights era. How many of us today are “ready to lament and condemn” the racism of our collective past? Brown v. Board was an enormously unpopular decision at the time, yet today those people who hold the same position are ridiculed and scorned. Was the country “ready” for integration. Maybe not. That did not change the ethics of the decision.

For that is the true meaning of Democracy. All people have equal rights. Even those in the minority. Everyone has the right to vote for legislators that write laws, but also the right to live in a country where all can be free.

Will I be telling my grandchildren in 50 years about how I lived in a time when two people who loved each other were not allowed by the government to marry? I hope so. I hope they will think of it like I think of Brown v. Board. What were they thinking?