Letters: Constitution doesn’t demand gay marriage

Five justices on the Supreme Court engaged in an exercise of tyrannical judicial legislative power and usurped the democratic process by reading gay marriage rights into the equal protection clause of the Constitution, which the people never intended to be there.

Constitutional amendments are written to remedy specific problems; when people wrote the 14th amendment, they were specifically extending to blacks the same legal rights that the law provided everyone else. They clearly did not intend for it to be used to justify same-sex marriage because there was no effort to redefine marriage or repeal the sodomy laws.

Blacks were being denied the same legal rights as everyone else, i.e., voting and men marrying women. The problem gays faced was not unequal protection of the law, but a too-limited legal definition of marriage.

The remedy was not with the courts misusing the equal protection clause to create new rights. It is with the people, who can create new rights by amending the Constitution.

This story was originally published July 28, 2015 at 7:35 PM with the headline "Letters: Constitution doesn’t demand gay marriage."