 |
 |
|
|
From Mark's Desk: Defending the Rule of Law in Tennessee by Senator Mark Norris Senator Lamar Alexander hit the nail on the head. In an address to the Shelby County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner, he said that our country needs judges who “follow the law rather than make it up as they go along.” Truer words have never been spoken. Alexander’s timely remark comes after decades of activist courts reading into state and federal constitutions certain “rights” and prohibitions which were never written into those documents in the first place. We end up with courts in Massachusetts imposing homosexual marriage and, in California, banning the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, the Supreme Court created the controversial “right to an abortion” and struck down the legislature’s attempt to require a waiting period and parental notification. In so doing, Tennessee went even further than the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. This week in Nashville, Senator David Fowler (R-Signal Mountain) will present SJR 127, which I am co-sponsoring, calling for a state constitutional amendment to clarify that nothing in our Constitution creates a right to an abortion. It should not have had to come to this, but it has. The judiciary has increasingly usurped the authority of the legislative branch. As William Kristol wrote in a recent edition of the Weekly Standard, “when courts cast their political preferences as constitutional law, only a constitutional amendment can answer them.” Similarly, it should not be necessary to amend our Constitution to define marriage as only the union of one man and one woman. Unfortunately, it has become necessary. As President Bush said in his State of the Union address, “If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process.” Thus, I am also co-sponsoring SJR 27 urging adoption of the Federal Marriage Amendment. The rule of law is diminished by the rule of judges who, in Senator Alexander’s words, “make it up as they go along.” Is it any wonder, then, that the Mayor of San Francisco has authorized thousands of homosexual marriages in violation of California law? Judge Robert Bork, President Reagan’s unsuccessful nominee to the United States Supreme Court, has monitored the disintegration of society at the hands of “activist courts” for more than a decade. In his most recent book entitled Coercing Virtue , Bork underscores the ultimate threat imposed by such judicial activism: The family has no value beyond its importance to the individuals in it….If the individual belongs only to himself…there is no moral obligation to obey the law or to take part in the national defense; there is no obligation to family, neighbors, nation, society, or to anything outside one’s own skin. We are witnessing this in Tennessee. In a recent column, Commercial Appeal columnist Wendi Thomas addressed homosexual marriage and concluded that she doesn’t care whether gays unite because “it doesn’t diminish my rights or affect my daily life in the least.” That is the attitude we must guard against if we are to survive as a civilized society. That is what is at stake in Nashville. |
