Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Legislating Civil Unions?

Here’s a sensible article on why libertarians should settle for now for the New Jersey court’s declaration of the right to civil unions, because it doesn’t preclude the judiciary declaring a right to same-sex marriage later. The only problem is that the article’s conclusion that it was all about "legislating civil unions" in New Jersey. The legislature of New Jersey didn’t do any legislating! Instead, the court actually ordered it to do some; court-ordered legislation is not legislation in the normal sense of the term. Our increasingly libertarian country may be creeping toward the acceptance of civil unions and perhaps even same-sex marriage, but we opponents of judicial activism should at least insist that the creep be regulated by the people through their elected representives, and not through an elitist, evolutionary, judicial proclamation of new rights.

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