Justice Kennedy movingly writes:
It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. It is well worth remembering he would not have been there to write it had Democrats long ago not fought a Reagan nomination for the Supreme Court.It was 1987. Ronald Reagan nominated a well known conservative, Robert Bork, for the Supreme Court. From the moment he was nominated Civil Rights and womens group vowed to fight. The hearings over Bork's nomination, presided over by now VP Biden, were a firefight. They were a national sensation.
In the end EVERY Democrat voted against the nomination, and six Republicans did as well. It was enough to kill the nomination.
You hear the phrase all the time: we need to fight more. It must be said we didn't very effectively against Alito and Thomas. But nearly 30 years ago Democrats DID fight.
And long after the battle was fought, and in a way no one then could have predicted, liberty and justice benefited.
National Review makes the same argument:
t’s possible that that day marked America’s fundamental turn in the direction that culminated in the Supreme Court’s decision today. On October 23, 1987, the U.S. Senate rejected the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert Bork, by a vote of 58 to 42. I’m not saying merely that if Bork hadn’t been rejected, President Reagan wouldn’t have appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote today’s opinion: I think that if Bork had been on the Court, that platform would have given him an outsized opportunity to influence America’s cultural and constitutional discussion – and that America would have been significantly less likely to embrace the sort of the change the Court affirmed today. http://www.nationalreview.com/...