“We must confess we are shocked at the violence and servility of the Judicial Revolution caused by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. We scarcely know how to express our detestation of its inhuman dicta, or to fathom the wicked consequences which may flow from it. — This decision has sapped the constitution [sic] of its glorious and distinctive features, and seeks to pervert it into a barbarous and unchristian channel — Jefferson feared this Supreme Court, and foretold its usurpation of the legislative power of the Federal Government. His prophecy is now reality. The terrible evil he dreaded is upon us.”

As many of us warned, this opinion is already being used to crush Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. This was not lost on the Tribune, which added, “To say or suppose, that a Free People can respect or will obey a decision so fraught with disastrous consequences to the People and their Liberties, is to dream of impossibilities. No power can take away their rights. They will permit no power to abridge them.”

The New York Tribune was equally dismissive: “The decision, we need hardly say, is entitled to just as much moral weight as would be the majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”

OK, I’ll come clean. The above quotes are not in reference to Obergefell. But they might as well have been. These quotes addressed the Supreme Court’s equally illegitimate 1857 Dred Scott decision. Whereas, in Dred Scott, the justices defied natural law and presumed a “right” for whites to own blacks, the court’s 2015 Obergefell decision likewise defied natural law and presumed to deconstruct and redefine the institution of marriage.

Both decisions are illegitimate, and here’s why. For the U.S. Supreme Court to justifiably overturn some law duly passed by the United States Congress, its opinion must be deeply rooted in one or more of the following:

A clear reading of the U.S. Constitution;
Some prior court precedent;
History and the Common Law;
Our cultural customs or traditions;
Some other law enacted by Congress.

As the high court’s four dissenting justices rightly observed in Obergefell, the “five attorneys” who invented this newfangled “right” to “gay marriage,” failed, abysmally, on each and every requirement.

The same was true of Dred Scott.

And so both opinions should be summarily ignored.

As President Andrew Jackson famously quipped of a Supreme Court opinion he thought usurped his executive authority, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

After the Dred Scott decision was released, Sen. William Pitt Fessenden, R-Maine, who later served as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of treasury, said this: “[It is charged] that I am undermining the institutions of the country by attacking the Supreme Court of the United States! I attack not their decision, for they have made none; it is their opinion.”