'Moderate Republican'

The judge who authored the California gay marriage decision:

In the days leading up to the California Supreme Court's historic same-sex marriage ruling Thursday, the decision "weighed most heavily" on Chief Justice Ronald M. George -- more so, he said, than any previous case in his nearly 17 years on the court. . . .
But as he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.
"I think," he concluded, "there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."
Yet he described his thinking on the constitutional status of state marriage laws as more of an evolution than an epiphany, the result of his reading and long discussions with staff lawyers.

What Justice George overlooks is the question of who makes the laws in a democratic polity. It is not up to judges to arbitrarily re-write the laws that the people have enacted through their freely elected representatives. If the people of California wished their state laws to recognize same-sex unions, they could petition their legislature to enact such laws.

The gay marriage issue has always advanced by legislative fiat, due to judges like George who engage in the sort of bizarre theoretical speculation that analogizes the husband-wife marriage to Jim Crow.

Once judges start chasing "the mirage of social justice," they inevitably leave common sense far behind. It's the David Souter Syndrome. Justice George is exactly the sort of fellow we could expect John McCain to appoint to the federal bench.

If we're going to have liberal judges on the bench, let Democrats appoint them.