Lost in a fog

"Celebrate this decision, if you will, but do not celebrate the Constitution, for the two have nothing to do with each other." - John Roberts, reading his dissent from the bench in the matter of the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage. Oh please. First, no one who was guilty of Roberts's craven dereliction of his duty as an impartial jurist in the Obamacare case yesterday has *any reason whatsoever* to complain about extra-constitutionality in this matter. Second, ironically, the gay marriage case was *more Constitutionally solid,* John, if you can get your head out of your black-robed backside and glimpse the light of day once more.

In the case of the Affordable Care Act, affordable care for all is, to be sure, a desirable societal goal (as even Ted Cruz implicitly admitted when he signed up for it himself), but the act *as written* limited the benefit to people purchasing exchanges created by the freakin' *states.* Roberts simply ignored that and acted as though vanilla really meant double-fudge all along.

But in the case of same-sex marriage, bizarre, exotic, and reprehensible as it may seem to some religious, there is *nothing*--as in N-O-T-H-I-N-G--in the Constitution that can be read as preferring, either implicitly or explicitly, opposite-sex over same-sex couples. Nothing, Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

There *is,* meanwhile, the "inconvenient truth" of the 14th Amendment, which *is* part of the Constitution, and which says, among other things, that no one shall be denied "equal protection of the law."

That means that unless you can establish an *intrinsic* disqualification for gays being married--as in, blind people cannot be airline pilots--then you have no Constitutional grounds to *deny* them marriage.

In short, Roberts was letting his thinking be clouded, as so many others were, with centuries of irrational prejudice and acting as if religious standards were, somehow, part of the Constitution.

Which they're not.

So sorry, John, but you got it exactly backwards.