Some of the nation’s most esteemed legal and political scholars have issued a statement calling upon all public officials and American citizens to resist the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Obergefell v. Hodges case that redefined marriage for every state in the nation because the ruling is unconstitutional and therefore illegitimate.

The statement, which appears on the American Principles Project website, is signed by prominent legal scholars such as Robert P. George of Princeton and Gerard V. Bradley of Notre Dame, along with 60 other academics who see the ruling as “lacking anything remotely resembling a warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution” and “must be judged anti-constitutional and illegitimate.”

They go on to argue that society will be harmed by being denied the right to hold out as normative a relationship that every society must cultivate for its perpetuation. “This compelling interest is strengthened by the fact that there is strong evidence to support what common sense suggests, namely, that children fare best when raised by their married mother and father who are both responsible for bringing them into the world and who provide maternal and paternal influences and care.”

It will also allow individuals and organizations who embrace the traditional family to be “vilified, legally targeted, and denied constitutional rights in order to pressure them to conform to the new orthodoxy” – a scenario which is already unfolding in the United States.

If Obergefell is allowed to stand, it will open the door to additional attempts to redefine marriage.

Robert P. George

It also undermines the rights of Americans to engage in self-government because the decision over-ruled the will of the people in many states where ballot initiatives were decided in favor of traditional marriage and the clarification of state Constitutions. .

“We stand with James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in recognizing that the Constitution is not whatever a majority of Supreme Court justices say it is,” said Robert P. George, founder of American Principles Project, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and one of the authors of the statement. “We remind all officeholders in the United States that they are pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the will of five members of the Supreme Court.”

As a result, they are calling upon all state and federal officeholders:

• To refuse to accept Obergefell as binding precedent for all but the specific plaintiffs in that case.

• To recognize the authority of states to define marriage, and the right of federal and state officeholders to act in accordance with those definitions.

• To pledge full and mutual legal and political assistance to anyone who refuses to follow Obergefell for constitutionally protected reasons.

• To open forthwith a broad and honest conversation on the means by which Americans may constitutionally resist and overturn the judicial usurpations evident in Obergefell.

The sixty-four legal scholars who signed the statement emphasized that the course they are advocating is neither extreme nor disrespectful of the rule of law, relating their position to that of President Lincoln who regarded the claim of supremacy for the Supreme Court in matters of constitutional interpretation as incompatible with the republican principles of the Constitution.

Quoting from President Lincoln’s first inaugural address, the scholars said that if Americans succumb to the idea of judicial supremacy, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

The statement from the scholars said, “To treat as ‘settled’ and ‘the law of the land’ the decision of five Supreme Court justices who, by their own admission, can find no warrant for their ruling in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution, would indeed be to resign our government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. That is something that no citizen or statesman who wishes to sustain the great experiment in ordered liberty bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be willing to do.”

Click here to read the full statement.

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