Thoughts on Supreme Court rulings

....and yes, this would be the two rulings on the "Defense of Marriage Act" and the overturning of California's Proposition 8.  Both are going to be very quiet in the short run, but could have disastrous effects in the long run, as (a) we forget that family law is really about weaker vessels and (b) we confer a degree of respectability on behavior that many would have previously avoided. 

However, the biggest problem with the rejection of the appeal of the overturning of Proposition 8 is the means by which the court arrived at that decision; they decided that the people who had worked to pass Proposition 8 had no standing to defend it when public officials abdicated their duty to defend the law.

In other words, if an executive doesn't like a law, but can't get the legislature to work honestly to repeal it, he simply finds a group to sue for its repeal and refuses to defend it.   It's a concentration of power that King George III would have loved, and one that all freedom-loving people ought to abhor, no matter what their political views.