Most people in Massachusetts don’'t seem to see a connection between permitting same-sex couples to marry and threatening heterosexual marriage. Emile Goguen does. His full letter seeking support for removing five Supreme Judicial Court justices appears here. The part iterating his motives is:
Several in my Party were concerned about my expression of my feeling. They understood that I am a team player and not a crusader. However, this attack on traditional marriage is a huge event for our state, our country and Western civilization. I knew this ruling from Marshall and her colleagues had hit the core values in my marriage, as it would in so many others.
I know many gay people. They know I bear no ill will to them, but they also know that my family is the key to my life, and I knew that I could not allow just one person to make this monumental change to our civilization that had been in place for thousands of years. Certainly it required more discussion than had been allowed by Judge Marshall.
As I learned more about the process that Margaret Marshall had used, I felt my decision even more strongly.
The other three judges on the court, Francis Spina, Martha Sosman and Robert Cordy said that Marshall broke our Massachusetts Constitution, because she did not have the power to do what she was doing. If this were to be done, it must be done by the legislature after long and careful debate. However, there is no doubt in my mind that it must be done only by the citizens after years of debate in the amendment process, but not the amendments we passed last spring, which were a farce. If the citizens do not have the ability to make a decision in this matter, then the whole principle of our government must be discarded.
I do not believe we are ready to jettison our democracy and choose a new form of government just because some are in a rush to proceed.
Have “we” given up on our citizens? And if so, exactly who is “we”?
I believe we must slow up what is happening and take a long, slow look at what has been serving us well since the founding of our country. As I learned more about the removal process that was put into our Massachusetts Constitution by the man who wrote it in 1780, John Adams, I realized this is what we must use in order to be sure we do not act hastily. It was put here just for an occasion such as this. If we remove Judges Marshall, John Greaney, Roderick Ireland and Judith Cowin, we do not do so in anger or to punish. We do so in order to take a long, hard look at what we are accomplishing, instead of rushing it through.
Part one of this series is here.
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