According to Radio Iowa, Fred Thompson is about to run afoul of a curse that afflicts intelligent people in politics. He egregiously aggresses against the oppressive myopia, imposed by short-sighted interest group politics. On the issue of so-called “non-traditional” marriages, Thompson is about to anger both sides.
Candidate Thompson took a constitutionalist approach to the issue and threw down the gauntlet to zealots pushing both extremes. Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson backs an amendment to the U.S.
Constitution that would forbid judges from forcing states to recognize same-sex marriages that are legal in other states. Many Christian conservatives in Thompson's party, however, favor an amendment that would ban gay marriage in all 50 states. This should be enough to do what is right on the issue.
If voters in a randomly selected state demanded a referendum and overwhelmingly voted to allow homosexuals to marry, so be it. This is their state and their state law. If a neighboring state strongly felt otherwise and legislated accordingly, bravo for them.
We are a union of fifty unique and elegantly varied micro-cultures. We are not Generica, and an overbearing Federal Court system has no right to shove some synchronized, Stalinist standard down all of our throats. And yet this simple and obvious appeal to Federalism and the rights of our states to actually decide issues, will prove anathematic to many on the Left.
To many doctrinaire liberals the canonical and epoch-making Civil Rights decisions that destroyed Jim Crow bestowed the Judicial Branch of government an unquestionable moral authority. The judiciary came to be viewed by some politically Progressive elements of American society as de facto Platonic Philosopher Kings. As dispensers of justice, they were believed to possess enlightenment beyond the limited horizon of the under-educated voting public that they enforced benevolent order upon.
While others were constrained to narrow and dogmatic interpretations, these geniuses found the ethereal substances that dwelt in constitutional penumbras. That other America was not brain-washed by a false belief in Judicial Exceptionalism, and quickly found these activist judges to be tyrannical arses. Fred Thompson could have played this like a typical Pol.
Had he stopped at bashing activist judges of the ilk that Dahlia Lithwik and Lawrence Tribe would like to see manning the barbican-topped ramparts of judicial Despotism; The Right Reverend James Dobson wouldn’t question the fidelity of Fred D. Thompson’s spiritual qualifications for higher office. Unfortunately for Fred Thompson, his philosophy stands grounded on a gravaman of wisdom and balance.
He doesn’t want the dystopic world posited by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaiden’s Tale, any more than he enjoys seeing the vile Charles Schumer reenact Allan Drury’s prophetically anti-utopian Advise and Consent every time an important judicial nomination came to the fore. He seeks an Aristotelian Golden Mean when it comes to the power of the Federal Judiciary and role of The Constitution in adjudicating the vital moral issues. It earns him apoplectic hatred from both directions, but he sticks to his constitutional guns.
"You've got to be awfully, awfully reticent to go in and do more than is absolutely necessary in terms of a constitutional amendment and federalize what doesn't need to be federalized to solve the problem," Thompson says. "They understand that, appreciate it. I think they think that mine is a good approach.
I can't say that they think it's a better approach than one that I might have, but I think that they respect my position on federalism." In other words, Thompson understands that any public servant, from PVT Pyle to President Reagan, swears an oath to defend and uphold the United States Constitution. In taking this oath, that public official must prevent the perverted perturbation of Constitutional fidelity.
The document’s framers intended The Constitution to serve as a vehicle to provide sound governance, not as a Christmas list of activist societal engineering. Thus Fred Thompson does not favor a Constitutional Amendment banning homosexual marriage. He probably would veto a Constitutional Amendment banning flag burning.
Then he would follow that veto with one of the all-important Amendment to enjoin canine domestic pets from defecating on the publicly owned pedestrian thoroughfares of America’s towns and cities. As Fred D. Thompson reads the Constitution and The Bill of Rights, he makes it all the way through, and notices the vital presence of The 10th Amendment.
Candidate Thompson decries the foolish and risible use of The United States Constitution as a partisan legal vehicle for inane score-settling. He despises the collectivist impulse to enforce one narrow and bigoted view of philosophy down the throats of the citizenry inhabiting fifty unique and capable states. It is simply not the role of the Federal Government to tell anyone who the can and cannot marry.
There is no Federal mandate to admonish the fifty states concerning whose marriage they must recognize or shun. Americans desiring greater social diversity should truly believe in the proper relevance of the 10th Amendment. Fred Thompson understands, James Dobson and Charles Schumer do not.
Fred Dalton Thompson should therefore be our nation’s next President.
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