The Supreme Court’s decision just before it went into summer recess to strike down a Texas sodomy law was heralded by gay rights advocates as a change in the Supreme Court’s attitude. It had just the opposite effect on more traditional sensibilities, eliciting a “here goes the neighborhood” response from friends like Cal Thomas, who wrote in a column before the decision, “If the Texas sodomy law is struck down (as it probably will be), then it is fair to ask, what’s next?” The extreme left sees the decision as an endorsement of the homosexual way of life; so does the extreme right, but each side sees it positively and negatively, respectively (that’s a lot of adverbs).

In fact, the Supreme Court – if it’s working correctly, which is appears to be doing – should not care about upholding a homosexual agenda or a conservative agenda. It should care about upholding the constitution, and if in the process a particular way of life appears to be endorsed, that is a necessary side-effect, but not the focus of the Supreme Court’s decision.

The job of the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution and, if necessary, render invalid state or local laws that conflict with the Constitution. I don’t suppose many people take the time to read the full text of Supreme Court cases; instead, they rely on news blurbs which summarize the court’s decision. If one took the time to read Supreme Court rulings, one would find that, most of the time, cases that appear earth-shattering are ruled in such a way because of mundane legal reasons, not because the members of the Court are ideologues. In this instance, the Texas sodomy law was struck down not because the Court believed in gay rights, but because the law was fundamentally in conflict with the 14th amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law for all citizens. The Texas sodomy law made sodomy illegal for same-sex couples, but not for heterosexual couples, creating a double-standard against a particular class of people: gay men (or women) cannot engage in sodomy, but heterosexual couples can. It’s as simple as that, and it’s why the Supreme Court ruled the way it did.

Talk about “litmus tests” for Supreme Court candidates is ridiculous on its face (as the Supreme Court might say), since the folks who are responsible for appointing members of the Court want justices who believe in the same ideology as them. Thankfully, justices over the years have put aside their own ideologies (“what do I think is right?”) in favor of a more objective approach to the law (“what is best for the country?”). This is how we have people like Earl Warren, appointed by Eisenhower, delivering some of the most liberal opinions in Court history. Employing litmus tests to stack the court in a certain way would most likely be irrelevant once a new justice realizes the import of his position, and is antithetical to the Constitution, which created a Supreme Court that was supposed to be free of influence from any group (hence the reason why justices are appointed for life and why they can only be removed by impeachment or resignation). A “litmus test” to put a particular kind of person on the bench – currently, Roe v. Wade is the test – is underhanded and undemocratic.

For people like Cal Thomas to insinuate that allowing consensual homosexual sex in a private home is like opening the floodgates to hell is ridiculous. A law like the Texas sodomy law is a ridiculous law to have, for it is detrimental to the heterosexuals among us, as well. It establishes – by rule of law – the ability for the government to set a particular moral standard and arrest people in their own homes for violating that moral standard. Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was criticized for his comments about the potential decision, stating that if sodomy became legal, so too would bestiality, incest, and bigamy. I ask: what is the government’s compelling interest in preventing bestiality or sodomy? It hurts no one except those who feel that it is morally wrong; to these people, it is – as we say in French – none of their damn business was private citizens do in their own homes. As for incest, that has always been illegal and will continue to be, for the government has a compelling interest in preventing the kinds of problems that accompany incest (I speak of birth defects and a gradual contamination of the gene pool). It also has a vested interest in preventing bigamy for legal reasons.

And let’s talk about marriage, for it is a hot topic. Any law (like the Defense of Marriage Act currently in Congress) that mandates marriage only between a man and a woman will be struck down by the Supreme Court on the same fourteenth amendment grounds. Why? Married couples are granted certain rights to each other – for tax purposes, probate purposes, at the hospital, for insurance reasons – and a dozen other places. Gay couples, who cannot marry in the traditional sense, would be denied that equal protection for reasons beyond their control simply because they do not marry in the same way that heterosexuals do. To define marriage as occurring only between a man and a woman would deny them the privileges accorded to married heterosexual couples, which is impossible under the fourteenth amendment. As far as the Constitution goes, there is a good reason to allow homosexual marriage: it has nothing to do with a homosexual agenda; it has everything to do with the Equal Protection clause. By contrast, the argument against homosexual marriage is purely subjective and based entirely on religious and moral reasons – but whose morals? To deny homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals based on a subjective rationale that has nothing to do with rule of law is also undemocratic.

Cal Thomas implies that the sanctity of marriage and heterosexual sex is proven in Scripture. But Scripture is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. We’re talking about rule of law, here, not rule of Bible (curiously, law based in the religion of a majority group is the same way that countries in the Middle East are run. Is Cal Thomas with us, or with the terrorists? The answer is: whenever it’s convenient for his opinion). Democracy in the United States is about equal rights based on reason, not subjective rights based sometimes on reason and sometimes on religious morals. While conservative folks like Thomas preach that they favor less government intrusion, they mean that they favor less government intrusion – for them, but more government intrusion for people with whom they disagree. Once again, a measure resorted to by the Middle Eastern dictatorships that Thomas hates so much.

But I’m not here to engage in ad hominem attacks. I’m here to state that Supreme Court decisions are made with the law in mind, not some socio-political-economic-cultural ideology in mind. The Supreme Court hates making rulings based on ideology, and well they should: it is a court of law, and when law starts entering the realm of subjectivity, that’s the end of the democracy we’ve enjoyed for two hundred-plus years.