Stephen M. Krason
for Crisis Magazine
In late May, Governor Tom Corbett of my home state of Pennsylvania decided to throw in the towel on same-sex “marriage” and not appeal a federal district judge’s decision to strike down the state’s law that permitted marriage licenses to be issued only to male-female couples.
While Corbett is to be commended for legally defending the statute in the first place after state attorney general Kathleen Kane refused to carry out her duty to do so, he said he would just accept the court’s decision and end Pennsylvania’s hold-out status as the only northeastern state not allowing same-sex “marriage.” Corbett claimed that an appeal couldn’t be successful. That was an odd conclusion, since various other states have undertaken appeals of similar lower federal court decisions around the country. There is also no certainty that the Supreme Court ultimately is going to enshrine same-sex “marriage” as a constitutional right under the equal protection clause. Its decisions last year were narrow: invalidating a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that forbade granting federal benefits for same-sex couples living in states that had legalized same-sex “marriage,” and upholding a lower court’s striking of California’s Proposition 8 on the procedural ground that only the appropriate public officials—who also refused their duty to do so in that case—had the standing to appeal.
Stephen M. Krason's "Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic" column appears monthly (sometimes bi-monthly) in Crisis Magazine. He is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville and co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. His is the author of several books including The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic(Transaction Publishers, 2012), and most recently an edited volume entitled, Child Abuse, Family Rights, and the Child Protective System (Scarecrow Press, 2013).
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