Stare decisis and Obergefell

Countless times in the coming weeks, we are going to hear our Democratic colleagues appeal to stare decisis, the legal principle that the Supreme Court should not overturn existing precedents, but should instead "stand by its previous decisions." Trump's Supreme Court nominee must be resisted, our liberal and Democratic brothers and sisters will tell us, because s/he may violate the principle of stare decisis by joining other members of the Court in voting to overturn previous decisions like Roe v. Wade, which invented a right to abortion in the Constitution, or Obergefell v. Hodges, which invented a right to gay marriage in the Constitution. These decisions, we will be told, are "established precedent" and "settled law," fixed guideposts in our legal system that simply must not be disturbed.

If our liberal, Democratic friends had been truly devoted to the principle of abiding by established tradition and precedent, perhaps they should never have sought to overturn a societal, cultural, religious, and legal precedent that had existed for millennia across the entire face of the earth, namely, the precedent that marriage is to be defined as an institution between a man and a woman.

If such hoary and universal precedents, which have stood the test of time, persisting unquestioned for thousands of years, can be cavalierly tossed aside in a spasm of abstract moral reasoning by the Left in their endless march forward into the Brave New World, then, surely there is nothing sacred about a two-year old opinion like Obergefell and it can be overturned, too.