Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Slick Jurisprudence

(Reprinted from the issue of March 24, 2005)

Yup, another judge has ruled that legal bans on same-sex “marriage,” or what I like to call sodomatrimony, are unconstitutional. The idea is sweeping like wildfire through the judiciary. In this case, the judge was one Richard A. Kramer of San Francisco.

No big deal. The ruling didn’t even make the front page of the pro-homosexual New York Times, which is wont to hail such judicial atrocities as “historic.” Even liberals recognize that they have become routine.

Kramer had no new or interesting arguments. He had only a lame analogy to the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on “separate but equal” racial accommodations. Ho-hum!

Let’s remind ourselves of something so obvious we tend to forget it. Kramer was talking about the California state constitution, but the point applies to others, including the U.S. Constitution.

Judges now declare freely that constitutions “mean” things that nobody ever imagined they could mean. The men who wrote, ratified, and for generations interpreted these documents simply never dreamed that they could possibly “mean” what wacky liberal judges now insist they must mean.

Put otherwise, the authors of these documents hadn’t the faintest intention or notion of mandating future liberal agendas. Yet that’s what the judiciary is now saying they did. So when they adopted the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, for example, they were banning state laws against abortion — whether they knew it or not!

And we are to think it took the powerful brain of Harry Blackmun to figure this out? That’s an unwarranted compliment to Blackmun’s intelligence, and an insult to everyone else’s.

We are witnessing something the American Founders warned us against again and again and again: the usurpation of power. Some, like Jefferson, saw that this could be done by the judicial branch. But nobody foresaw the extent to which it could be taken. The modern judiciary has exceeded the worst fears of the Founders. Our judges have surpassed even Bill Clinton in making common words meaningless, and with far worse practical consequences.

It will keep happening until the American public learns anew what “usurpation” means and does something about it. Until then, we have no active remedy for one of our worst political evils, the judicial abuse of power.

Judges like Kramer will go on doing what they do with complete impunity. They know their jobs are safe.

Millions of Americans are alarmed and enraged by judicial assaults on the right to life and the nature of marriage. Yet we don’t hear them using the words “usurp” and “impeach.” For some reason, they still accept the virtually sacred status of the judiciary, even as it works to destroy what’s left of our traditional way of life.

Alexander Hamilton, an early advocate of judicial review, assured Americans that of the three branches of the new federal government, the judiciary would be “the least dangerous.” But though this might have been true, and may even still be true, this is a long way from saying it is not dangerous at all, especially if the other two branches allow it to run riot.

And it may be in their interest to do just that. When Franklin Roosevelt met opposition from the U.S. Supreme Court, his solution was not to curb its powers, but to stuff it with appointees who would do his will, promoting centralization at the expense of the states and the Constitution.

The result was a judiciary that was far more powerful, and power-hungry, than it had been before. We are still living with it.
 
The Mother of God

With Easter just around the corner, Time has produced an unexpected cover story — on the Blessed Virgin! More specifically, on her (partial) rediscovery by Protestants.

Since the Reformation, of course, Protestantism has looked on Marian devotion with suspicion, disapproval, and even hostility. Today, in some quarters, that is changing. Growing numbers are realizing that they owe some sort of devotion to the Mother of God.

To Catholics, this seems obvious. The very fact that she is our Lord’s Mother, who joyfully accepted her role and followed Him all the way to Calvary, certifies her holiness.

But because Scripture says so little about her, there has been a gulf between Catholics, who recognize how much is implicit in Tradition, and Protestants, for whom the Bible must contain everything Christians believe. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends what you mean by “mother.” Catholics mean quite a lot by it.

And yet that old Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach set the Magnificat to his profound music. Even in the 18th century Protestants could still feel reverence for the Mother of God. In his first chapter, St. Luke records her astonishingly eloquent praise of the Lord; how can anyone who reads her words belittle her role in the plan of salvation?

Protestants have traditionally argued that Catholicism detracts from the honor due to Christ by honoring Mary. But John Henry Newman, whose devout Protestantism eventually led him back to Catholicism, pointed out that the reverse was arguable: Once Protestants demoted her, the way was open to doubts about even Christ’s divinity. Once the holiness of the mother is forgotten, he said, there is less reason to believe in the holiness of the Son.

Protestantism has always had a powerful tendency toward the anti-dogmatic “liberalism” that Newman said he had spent his whole life opposing. Where do you stop subtracting once you’ve started? A whittled-down Christianity may be comfortable; unfortunately, it just isn’t Christianity.

Today we find that liberalism even within the Catholic Church. In a recent interview, Notre Dame’s Fr. Richard McBrien says he is open to the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalen, as asserted in the pop novel The Da Vinci Code!

Does anyone want to bet that the current head of Notre Dame’s theology department believes in the Virgin Birth?
 
Deep in History

I hope our Protestant friends, who take Scripture so seriously, will also rediscover the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, in which Christ makes the doctrine of the Eucharist so shockingly explicit that many — perhaps nearly all — of His disciples fall away, and He even asks the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave me?” (I discuss this at more length in my newsletter.)

For many years Newman thought the Anglican Church had found a happy middle way, the via media, between Catholicism and Protestantism. But he was finally forced to admit that this was a delusion; it was all or nothing, and only Catholicism offered “all.” There could be no splitting of differences, no compromise.

To be deep in history, Newman said, is to cease to be Protestant. Nothing like Protestantism can be found in early Christianity, when the New Testament hadn’t even been assembled yet. Scripture itself leads us to the Mother of God, the Eucharist, the Church.

Happy Easter!


SOBRAN’S thinks the Roman persecution may tell us something vital about the early Church, contrary to The Da Vinci Code. If you have not seen my newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran