INVENTORY OF INSANITY: PART I -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE CLUELESS

          In the second month of the sixth year of misrule by the cadre of miscreants that is politely referred to as the Obama Administration, an inventory of some of the more egregious infamies and distortions that recently plague us is in order -- if only to underscore the urgent need for relentless resistance by those who still cling to the principles and precepts of our Founders.  The first item discussed is the recent judicial atrocity assaulting the institution of traditional marriage in Virginia.  Other installments will soon follow.

            What laughably passes for a federal court in this dismal era recently ruled that Virginia's constitutional and statutory limitation of marriage to unions between one man and one woman violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  This decision is an outrage against both law and reason.

            To any sane and sober observer, the notion that the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses – drafted mainly to address the plight of freed black slaves in the wake of the Civil War -- were somehow intended to invalidate the nationally recognized institution of heterosexual marriage is beyond absurd.  It is a flat-out insult to the intelligence and integrity of generations of our ancestors, both remote and recent, who would have uniformly responded to the notion that two men could "marry" each other with incredulous scorn, if not snorting hilarity. 

            Yet the reasoning underlying  the Virginia court's decision requires a belief that the constitutional framers intended to codify a "right" to invoke the state's blessing and benefits for a form of sexual union that was overwhelmingly condemned as criminal and infamous when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted – and, indeed, until at least the 1960's. 

            Had someone asked President Jack Kennedy, for instance, for his position on "gay" marriages in 1962, he would have likely responded that he hoped all marriages should be gay (as opposed to somber) celebrations – unless he understood the word "gay" in its contemporary distorted sense.  In that case, he would no doubt have scornfully dismissed his questioner to be escorted to a loony van by the Secret Service. 

            Our divided society today agrees on few things, but one thing they do agree on is honoring the admirable and patriotic men and women who successfully fought World War II as the Greatest Generation.  There can be no doubt – no doubt – that members of the Greatest Generation (including its more liberal members, like President Kennedy) would have overwhelmingly condemned the bizarre notion of "marriage" between two men as utterly offensive and unnatural.  Yet that sound societal consensus, based upon principles and mores honored by civilized society for millennia, is today condemned as irrational and invidious by deranged federal judges whose decisions are based upon leftist ideology rather than the Constitution bequeathed to us by the Framers.

            It is depressing enough, therefore, when arrogant federal courts invalidate duly enacted state laws through grotesque distortions of the Constitution and blatant usurpation of the legislative function.  But insult is added to injury when the outrage is perpetrated by third-rate legal minds who exercise the excessive power of a federal judge simply because they have attracted the political favor of Obama and his Democratic minions due to their race and/or sex. 

            Judge Arenda Wright Allen, a black female Obamacrat, wrote the legally incoherent decision purporting to invalidate the historically and naturally ordained truism that marriage is, and always has been, confined to a union between a man and a woman.  The latter proposition is no less self- evident than the unassailable fact that a hydrogen atom is confined to a union between one positively-charged proton and one negatively-charged electron.  Denial of either of these immutable truisms is irrational and oxymoronic.  Couching the lunacy in the guise of what purports to be a judicial decision does not make it any less lunatic.

                                                                  

                The Sources the Judge Forgot to Cite-check Before Invalidating Marriage
                             
            Judge Allen's opinion was based upon the theory that the Virginia Constitution and marriage laws violated the federal Due Process Clause because they infringed upon the fundamental right to marry without compelling justification.  This reasoning is patently spurious .  First, the only right to marry that the Supreme Court has recognized as fundamental was the "deeply-rooted" right to marry as understood and invariably defined by the laws in effect when the Due Process Clause was adopted – i.e., marriage between a man and a woman.  Secondly, there are many compelling justifications for limiting legal marriage to unions between a man and a woman, the most obvious of which is to encourage and facilitate the propagation of a vigorous population and the maintenance of healthy family units for the procreation and raising of healthy children.

            Wholly apart from her flawed constitutional reasoning, however, the fourth sentence of Judge Allen's opinion graphically demonstrated that she has not even mastered the fundamental elements of constitutional interpretation or legal writing.  Setting forth what she probably considered the grand foundation for her opinion, she stated:  "Our Constitution declares that 'all men' are created equal."  Had she included a citation for this assertion, as the standards of elementary legal writing require when one quotes a constitutional or statutory provision, she (or one of her law clerks) would have discovered what any well-trained lawyer would have known in the first place:  that the Constitution does not declare what she claimed. The proposition that "all men are created equal" is found instead in the second clause of the Declaration of Independence, which is not part of the Constitution, and not law at all.  Judge Allen later lamely corrected this blatant error in the opening predicate for her opinion, but only after, and only because, outside commentators had spotted and publicized her egregious fallacy, with appropriate derision.

            Yet the ineptitude of Judge Allen's opinion is not entirely surprising.  Having gained  extensive experience in reviewing the qualifications of candidates for federal judgeships both as a Senate Judiciary Committee Counsel and as a Special Consultant on judicial nominations at the Justice Department, I am familiar with the exacting standards that should be required of a federal judge.  Although she was unanimously confirmed for her post by the automatons that pass for U.S. senators today, Ms. Allen did not remotely satisfy those standards.   Initially, she received her law degree from a third- or fourth-tier law school, North Carolina Central University.  Although attendance at a substandard law school is certainly not a disqualifier for judicial appointment, an otherwise highly distinguished legal career would surely be necessary to dispel any doubts in that regard.  But Ms. Allen's career plainly lacks the blue-chip distinction expected for appointment to the powerful lifetime post of a U.S. District Judge.  Her service as a Naval JAG officer was honorable, but hardly the kind of credential qualifying one for the federal judiciary.  Her unremarkable stint as an Assistant U.S. Attorney was followed by equally unremarkable service as an Assistant Public Defender – a flat, or arguably downward, career trajectory.  A search for any published scholarly legal writings by Judge Allen was unavailing. 

            These are simply not the kind of credentials that would otherwise qualify a lawyer for appointment as a life-tenured federal judge.  It is apparent that Judge Allen was nominated by Obama because she was a liberal, Democratic black female with credentials that were just respectable enough for an affirmative action appointment.  The ill-reasoned and error-riddled opinion she wrote to support her presumptuous imposition of same-sex marriage upon the Commonwealth of Virginia is what one would expect from such a political appointee.

            Of course, ill-reasoned ideological decisions supporting the oxymoron of same-sex marriage and similar leftist policy goals are by no means the exclusive province of under-qualified judges.  Equally outrageous decisions enshrining such destructive policies as abortion-on-demand, pervasive and perpetual racial preferences, and unfettered federal regulatory  power such as that reflected in the Affordable Care Act have been written by judges and justices with the very highest credentials.  The left-leaning, ideological approach to judicial interpretation that produces such legal atrocities is primarily attributable to an endemic disregard of the constitutional text drafted by the Framers in favor of the policy prerogatives and preferences of the ruling leftist political class and its allied liberal cultural and educational elites.  That distorted approach to the law is predominant today in both the most elite and most pedestrian circles of the legal profession.  Until that ideological stranglehold on our legal system is removed, little sense, and lest justice, can be expected to emanate from the courts of the United States.