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Welcome Center plans can proceed ... The seven wonders of southwest Oregon ... Our View: Bravo, Ashland voters ... Welcome Center plans can proceed ... The seven wonders of southwest Oregon ... COMMENTARY Chris Honoré: Supreme Court grapples with tradition, suffrage Comment By Chris Honoré DailyTidings.com By Chris Honoré Posted May. 11, 2015 at 12:01 AM By Chris Honoré Posted May. 11, 2015 at 12:01 AM » Social News Part of George W. Bush’s legacy, to include Afghanistan and Iraq, will be his two nominations (Samuel Alito and John Roberts) to the current Supreme Court of the United States. The appointments are for life and are the gifts that keep on giving (consider the Citizens United decision and the hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act), which is why any presidential election has far greater import than just the election of one individual. Truth be told, I’m not a fan of this court and I also acknowledge that I’m not an attorney and often find legal language dense and inaccessible. But oral arguments before the court are another matter. The justices recently heard what is likely one of the last civil rights cases yet to be definitively settled in America: the issue of same-sex marriage. Why should gay couples not be able to marry anywhere in America with all attendant rights offered heterosexual couples? Listening to some of the comments/questions posed by the individual justices was generally disheartening, but then I acknowledge that I base that response on my conviction that there is no there there. Whether couples of any sexual persuasion should be allowed to marry is a question that should easily be answered in the affirmative. Look no further than the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Shouldn’t any individual be allowed to marry the one he or she loves? Is this question really open to interpretation? But apparently there are doubts in the minds of some justices, which I took to mean that the Equal Protection Clause does not, in their opinion, automatically apply to all Americans regardless of sexual orientation. Justice Antonin Scalia stated, “The issue, of course, is not whether there should be same-sex marriage, but who should decide the point.” He opined that it should be the people or their elected representatives, not the courts. Justice Stephen Breyer, surprisingly, echoed Scalia’s concern when he said, “Suddenly you want nine people outside the ballot box to change (what has been a global institution for thousands of years).” Justice Roberts pointed out that Maine voted to ban same-sex marriage in 2009 and then reversed themselves in 2012. He did not seem to have a problem with a state voting on the Equal Protection Clause and worried instead that a high court decision would truncate debate. What is there to debate? With regard to the above statements: When have we ever voted on the efficacy of, say, the First Amendment, or, in this case, the Fourteenth Amendment? Do we really get to vote on whether black and white people can marry (once pejoratively referred to as miscegenation)? History and long-standing tradition also weighed heavily on the minds of some justices regarding whether they should broaden an institution (one man-one woman) that has existed for millennia. Justice Anthony Kennedy said “millennia keeps coming back to me in this case.” How tradition impacts what is a constitutional right escapes me. The subjugation of women has characterized societies for centuries and yet we, as a nation, have concluded that women should have all the rights and protections of our Constitution afforded men (granted, women’s equality is still a work in progress, e.g. equal pay for equal work). Why is tradition even remotely relevant to this constitutional matter? John J. Bursch, counsel defending the ban on same-sex marriage, insisted that the institution of marriage is under siege and that births out of wedlock had grown rapidly since 1970. This is a lame and specious argument, and he failed to demonstrate any connection between such births and same-sex marriage. In the same vein, as hard as advocates of the ban try, they cannot establish that allowing people of the same sex to marry diminishes or harms the institution of marriage. The court should have definitively settled the constitutionality of same-sex marriage several years ago; they chose not to. Let’s hope this time their decision will be overwhelmingly affirmative and unambiguous. Look for it sometime in June. Chris Honoré lives in Ashland. 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