Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street. 10 years ago today, June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court granted same-sex couples the legal right to marriage. The infamous Bergefeld v.
Hodges ruling has proven to be among our nation's most consequential and harmful decisions, especially. for children. Even though, to borrow a phrase originally written about Roe v. Wade, Its ruling in the case, quote, is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be. courts across the nation and government officials Still have treated a Bergefell as if it accomplished much more than it actually did.
In Obergefell, the court asserted that civil marriage is not about the procreative union or potential of husband and wife, but instead marriage is a government device to give benefits to adult companions.
However, numerous courts since have ruled that because marriage has been historically associated with child rearing, Obergefell must require states to also give licensed same-sex partners legal access to and custody of children otherwise not theirs.
Now of course same sex couples cannot procreate.
So advocates pointed to reproductive technologies as the means for fulfilling this imaginary mandate. Thus, to satisfy the demands that same-sex couples had for children, children are now bought and sold through IVF and surrogacy. Mothers are rented for their wombs. Fathers are reduced to sources of genetic material. Human connection is manufactured, not created through meaningful relations.
And the family is drained of its profound nature as God intended it to have, as well as its significance, a significance that historically warranted authority and immunity. This kind of legal manipulation. While the court may not have intended the anti-human techno-regime that has resulted from Obergefell, it did leave wide open these legal questions. Rather than merely expand marriage to this other relationship, as we were told at the time, Obergefell was a flat rejection of marriage as God had designed it and as it was always understood. And lawmakers and judges were strongly pressured to succumb to this new vision by activists.
And yet, there are ways for officials to honor the natural family and resist the hostile innovations against it. For instance, states can maintain original birth certificates that record the child's mother and father and exclude entries for persons who are neither. States can settle child custody contests with a default rule in favor of fit natural parents and against genetic strangers. States can enforce already existing adoption laws, requiring, for example, the non-natural mother or father. of the child to adopt before becoming considered a legal parent.
Rather than inexplicitly creating exceptions for same-sex couples. In so many states, the most essential questions about who makes a parent have not been carefully addressed, but instead have been liberally interpreted to favor nontraditional family arrangements. Two years after O'Bergefeld disrupted the institution of marriage, another case, Haven v. Smith, Ruled that birth certificates no longer needed to show the genealogical mother or father. And that was intended for the sole reason that same-sex partners could be named parents of the child born.
even though one or both were not even related to or even have adoptive relationships with that child. Even worse, to keep up with the emerging gender ideologies, numerous courts have ruled it unconstitutional to presume the husband of the woman giving birth is the natural father or even a man at all. And many other examples abound of courts similarly misdefining or just defying words in family law statutes in order to accommodate progressive ideas of sex marriage and so called gender. Activist lower courts have taken up and ran with radical interpretations that Obergefeld left open. And yet the fact remains that Obergefell in and of itself does not require any of these policy upheavals.
For example, Obergefell never brought before the Supreme Court how states should treat paternity, legitimacy, custody, adoption requirements, or birth certificates. The court majority in Obergefell did not even cite, much less evaluate, the pedigree or justifications for even one state law on any of those issues. And even if it had, the Supreme Court has no authority to invalidate historic state laws without ever having had a case before it on that specific question. Normally, the court would evaluate each statute and then rule on the case. In other words, Obergefell did not, and it could not, topple any of the historic state laws about the makeup of family that were not presented, briefed, argued, or even identified in those proceedings.
Similarly, the Obergefell decision doesn't raise or resolve the question of a child's relationship to his mother and father. And yet, because of Obergefell, many subsequent rulings have, for the first time in the history of the world, for that matter, treated these laws that protect children as somehow unconstitutional. Elected officials have every reason to refuse ousting these venerable families. Family law standards that have existed in our nation's history and to reinstate any of them that have been set aside. Put differently, all the progressive advocacy and liberties that other courts and lawmakers have taken with Obergefell simply are not binding.
Though it may have changed the legal definition of marriage, it stands on dicey legal ground. Even more, it has no legal authority whatsoever to change the definition of family. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for a version of this commentary that you can print out or share with others, visit us at breakpoint.org.
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