Are The Courts Dictating The Law?

• Reform Party presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan denounces what he calls "a judicial dictatorship" making decisions contrary to what Americans and their rightfully-elected representatives uphold.

On Dec. 20, 1999, the American people were given a brute demonstration of how their constitutional right to govern themselves has been usurped by an imperial judiciary. They may also see just how far that imperial judiciary has gone in repudiating the moral order, as Western civilization has always understood it.

The Vermont Supreme Court gave advocates of homosexual marriage what they have repeatedly failed to win before the bar of public opinion. The court unilaterally ceded to homosexual liaisons all the legal benefits of married couples, and declared outdated and obsolete the Judeo-Christian idea that traditional marriage deserves special consideration. The Vermont judges have thus, in an afternoon, overturned thousands of years of tradition and law that defined marriage as a sacred bond be tween a man and a woman. This is judicial dictatorship.

On the very same day, a federal district judge in Cleveland ruled that a voucher program passed by the Ohio Legislature was unconstitutional, be cause parents used the vouchers to send their children to religious schools. There in a nutshell is the mindset of the judges who now rule over us: "Gay marriage good; religious schools bad." Without the consent of the American people, a social revolution is being imposed upon them from above by unelected judges appointed for life and answerable to no one.

WE THE PEOPLE

We, the people, are, with little pro test, ceding control over the most basic aspects of our public life to such judges. The pseudo-conjugal arrangements en dorsed by the Vermont Su preme Court would likely never have won the support of Vermont's people or even of its generally liberal legislature. But the voucher program struck down in Cleveland was supported by the people of Cleveland and their representatives. When Americans are no longer able to decide, through their elected officials, the most fundamental questions of their public lives, they are no longer living in a democratic republic.

I condemn these two illegitimate judicial decisions, as I condemn Roe v. Wade and other decisions where federal and state courts have ruled in unconstitutional and immoral ways. It is time the American people took back from these arrogant judges the right to make the decisions that govern their daily lives.