USA - Nobody should be surprised if the high court fails to uphold the understanding of marriage common to the last ten thousand years or so of human civilization.

Has Marriage Already Been “Redefined”?

by Kenneth D. Whitehead

Nobody knows how the Supreme Court will ultimately rule on the two cases concerning so-called same-sex “marriage,” the California Proposition 8 case and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) case, on which the high court recently heard two days of testimony. However, some of the comments made by several justices in the course of the hearings on these two cases point to at least one possible way, dismaying to contemplate, in which the court might well invalidate DOMA in particular, in spite of what would seem to be the unassailable truth it represents in affirming that a true marriage must be a conjugal relationship between a man and a woman.

The non-lawyer citizen could not but be disconcerted by the way in which the court found it necessary to go into non-substantive issues such as whether the two cases were properly before the court at all, since neither the state of California nor the federal government was willing to defend in court the law pertaining to it; and hence the question was raised whether those who were defending these laws had the standing to do so. With the whole world watching, and the absolutely fundamental social question of what marriage is at stake, the justices nevertheless seemed unconcerned about dwelling on what seemed to be legal quibbles, sometmes even appearing to be little better than bickering pettifoggers themselves.

Yet sandwiched in between what seemed to be some relatively trivial and even inconsequential procedural questions, glimpses were afforded of how some of the justices apparently view the legal question of marriage itself, and they proved to be even more disconcerting than the procedural wrangling.

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