National Review calls California Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer to the carpet for his ruling that struck down California's state law requiring marriages to be between a man and a woman.
Most worrisome is Kramer's holding that this law has no rational basis, a holding the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court also made in its ruling last year. The "rational basis" test is the judicial test of a legislative enactment that is supposed to give the MOST deference to the legislature and the LOWEST amount of scrutiny to the constitutionality of the law itself. As long as SOME rational purpose related to the state's powers underlies the particular law, it is constitutional.
Traditionally, marriage relations have always been a concern of the state. The purposes of the domestic relations laws of the various states included: (1) promoting procreation; (2) preventing illegitimacy; (3) establishing the property rights of spouses; (4) protecting widowed spouses, and more. To hold that the requirement of one man/one woman marriage has no rational basis means that the state's traditional role and concerns are baseless. That is a result only a tyrannous judiciary could reach: throwing out more than 300 years of English and American common law with no more consideration than the beggar on the street corner normally receives.
Dangerous precedent indeed.
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