Puritans believed in the democracy of New England town meetings. Liberals believe that unelected judges have an unlimited prerogative to create law, even when it is overwhelmingly opposed by the majority of citizens.
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As elaborated in Theocracy: the Origin of American Democracy, Congregational (Puritan) churches were the original towns of New England in the 17th century. And they were models of democratic government in which each church member had a direct voice in the governance of the church and the civil authority.
In sharp contrast, liberals today impose their minority views upon the majority through judicial fiat.
Groundwork for this anti-democratic hegemony was laid by later-to-be- Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., with his 1881 “The Common Law.” That work was an attack on tradition, holding that the ancient common law, originating under Henry II in 12th century England, was no longer sufficiently modern and should be largely scrapped to reflect the new doctrines of socialism.
Holmes was an advocate for the theory of “legal realism,” which holds that the law is no more than whatever a judge says it is in a given case at a given time. Never mind what the Constitution states, nor what the founding generations intended, the Constitution may be arbitrarily reinterpreted by judges to suit the latest social-justice fad of the liberals.
The ACLU, embodying the most militant of the liberal voices of World War I and the 1920s, found Holmes’s legal realism entirely congenial. Roger Baldwin, the early head of the ACLU, worked to give socialists and anarchists complete freedom to attack the Constitution in word and deed, including bombing and assassination. His tactic was to use Holmes’s legal realism to get courts to expand the definition of First Amendment free speech to include any action, no matter how destructive to established social standards of the great majority of the nation.
We see the result in the February, 2004, ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturning more than 5,000 years of bedrock social standards. By a split decision, 4-3, the court ordered the Massachusetts legislature to change the ancient laws of the state to legalize same-sex marriage.
Whatever your opinion about the desirability of legalizing same-sex marriage, it is indisputable that the overwhelming majority of citizens in every state vehemently oppose it.
Thus far have we come since the days of democratic town meetings in New England. From every person having a voice in public affairs to four liberals arbitrarily imposing their social-justice precepts upon the people. This is nothing less than judicial tyranny.
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