True

Mark Shea:

Since the Courts Get to Decide who is Human...

...it only stands to reason that they also get to decide what marriage is.

At least till civilization breaks down.

Now entering the next major "What could it hurt?" phase of catastrophic social experimentation.

...

Democracy is another of those "almost sacred" traditions that I wrote about here. But it's not sacred and it's not eternal. It works just so long as you have a Christian or post-Christian culture that still holds by custom and convention what it no longer holds by creed: namely, things like the doctrine of original sin, natural law and the fear of God. As long as a culture has such things, even in lingering form, democracy functions as a restraining valve on original sin by keeping power from being concentrated in the hands of too few. That was, after all, the purpose of the Constitution: to set everybody at cross-purposes because nobody could be trusted.

However, when the culture narrative changes and we stop conceiving of freedom as "freedom to do what is right before God, no matter what Caesar may try to compel me to do" and instead start conceiving of freedom as "my personal power to do whatever the f*ck I want" (and f*ck is the precisely descriptive operative word here), democracy is doomed because we lose the basis for our dignity as human beings by defying the God who is only conceivable basis for saying that the individual matters more than the Hive. Once you have seen through every transcendental value as a mere subjective wish projection, once you have eliminated "I ought" from human vocabulary, what says "I want" remains. And the winner of the "I want" scramble for power is The Strongest. Period.