The National Organization for Marriage, one of the nation’s leading organizations against same-sex marriage rights, is not happy with the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of marriage equality.
Top anti-gay group cites Martin Luther King in opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision
In a blog post about the ruling, NOM invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court cases involving slavery and abortion — all in a call for lawmakers and the public to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday:
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King discussed the moral importance of disobeying unjust laws, which we submit applies equally to unjust Supreme Court decisions. Dr. King evoked the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas that an unjust law or decision is one that is “a human law that is not rooted in eternal law or natural law.” …
This is not the first time that the Supreme Court has issued an immoral and unjust ruling. In 1857, the Court ruled in the infamous Dred Scott v Sandford case that African Americans could not become citizens of the United States and determined that the government was powerless to reject slavery. In 1927 the Court effectively endorsed eugenics by ruling that people with mental illness and other “defectives” could be sterilized against their will, saying “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” And in Roe v Wade, the Court invented a constitutional right to abortion by claiming it was an integral element of the right to privacy. Over 55 million unborn babies have died as a result.
NOM is right that the Supreme Court has been horribly wrong before. But on this issue, surveys show US public opinion moving in a very clear direction: An April 2015 analysis from the Williams Institute, a think tank focused on LGBTQ issues, found support for same-sex marriage was rising in all 50 states and appeared to be rising more quickly in states that had legalized same-sex marriage.
Besides, King promoted civil disobedience for a cause that promoted equality and fought discrimination — and the Supreme Court was clear in its majority opinion that marriage is a fundamental right and it’s discriminatory to withhold that right from same-sex couples. And while we don’t know where King stood on LGBTQ rights, Coretta Scott King — King’s widow — was an advocate for marriage equality and would have likely been happy to see the Supreme Court’s decision if she were still alive today.
