Restoring Traditional Marriage in Texas

Restoring Traditional Marriage in Texas

By

James Scott Trimm

Our nation is built upon the Constitution.  The Constitution limits the power of government and is a chain that binds the governmental leviathan.  But activist judges who believe they have the power to act unconstitutionally are destroying our nation.  They believe they have the power to violate the separations of powers, and to violate the rights of the states and the people.

Major victims of this destruction of the US Constitution have been the Right to Life and the American family.  In the recent judgment from the US Supreme Court inventing a right to a gay marriage out of thin air, the late Justice Anton Scalia famously wrote in his dissenting opinion:

"I write separately to call attention to this Court's threat to American democracy... This practice of constitutional revision... robs the people of the most important liberty... the freedom to govern themselves..."

-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

When government intrudes on liberty we do not say "in for a penny, in for a pound" and then give the government even more power as its reward for having intruded on liberty in the first place.  So while government should not be creating marriages, we should not say that in the meantime because the government has usurped the power to license and certify marriages, the government should now be allowed to further usurp the power to completely redefine marriage.

According to the Texas State Constitution, marriage is a union between one man and one woman.  I would further add that this union is generally consummated by the reproductive act.  For this reason we call sexual intercourse "the marital act" and a marriage can be annulled in Texas if either spouse is permanently incapable of engaging in the reproductive act.

If two persons desire to enter into a legal partnership contract that has nothing to do with the reproductive act, then they should certainly be free to do so.  And what those persons do or don’t do in their own bedroom is none of my concern.  Freedom means that other people will believe and do things with which I don’t like or agree, and I will like and do things with which they don’t agree.  But that does not mean that we must redefine “marriage”.

Now we get to the key question: does the federal government have the power to redefine marriage?  Does the State of Texas have a path to restoring traditional marriage in Texas? 

No the federal government has no such power and Texas does have a path to restoring traditional marriage in our state.  The solution is to be found in the new 2016 Texas Republican Party Platform which reads:

Overturning Obergefell v. Hodges- We believe this decision, overturning the Texas law prohibiting same sex marriage in Texas, has no basis in the Constitution and should be reversed, returning jurisdiction over the definition of marriage to the states. The Governor and other elected officials of the state of Texas should assert our Tenth Amendment right and reject the Supreme Court ruling.

But how can the Governor and other elected officials of the state of Texas assert our Tenth Amendment right and reject the Supreme Court ruling?  The answer is found elsewhere in the Platform which reads:

State Sovereignty- Pursuant to Article 1 Section 1 of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government.  Therefore, federally mandated legislation, which infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas, should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified. Regulation of Commerce in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution has exceeded the original intent. All attempts by the federal judiciary to rule in areas not expressly enumerated by the Untied States Constitution should be likewise nullified. Any federal enforcement activities that do occur in Texas should be conducted under the authority of the county sheriff.

But how can we actually accomplish this?  How can the State of Texas nullify a federal court ruling from the US Supreme Court?  The answer is the Texas Sovereignty Act!

The Tenth Amendment reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people

This means that the federal government (the Supreme Court included) does not have any power that the states have not specifically delegated to the federal government in the Constitution. 

Nowhere in the US Constitution is the federal government delegated the authority to define or redefine marriage.

The Supreme Court claimed to base its ruling on its interpretation of the 14^th amendment.  This argument fails for two important reasons:

First of all the fact that homosexuals are not interested in entering a union between one man and one woman generally consummated by the reproductive act, does not mean that they are victims of discrimination.  Likewise if I am not interested in fighting fires, I cannot demand to be recognized as a fireman and require that the definition of “fireman” be altered to include me.  (By the way this has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with reproductive biology.)  Homosexuals cannot perform the reproductive act because frankly, their parts don’t fit together for that act.

Secondly the US Supreme Court is not the ultimate and final interpreter of the US Constitution.  The Supreme Court has become the final interpreter of the Constitution for one simple reason: because they say they are.  The Supreme Court usurped this authority, claiming it for itself in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison.  Nowhere does the Constitution assign this role to the Supreme Court, they simply have it because they say they do.

The framers stated that the US Constitution is a compact between the member states, and that as such, each state has equal standing in determining for itself the meaning of the Constitution.  The tenth amendment states that the states and the people retain all powers not delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, and nowhere in the Constitution did the states delegate to any branch of the federal government the power to be the ultimate and final interpreter of the Constitution.  The Supremacy Clause never mentions the Supreme court, but appears to indicate that state judges would make these judgments.

I encourage you to read more about the Texas Sovereignty Act by clicking here.

Yes we can restore traditional marriage in Texas!