AUSTIN – The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s President and CEO Brooke Rollins, and its Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action, Thomas Lindsay, Ph.D., issued the following statements in reaction to the Supreme Court of the United States’s ruling in the Obergefell case this morning:
“With the Obergefell decision, we see the Supreme Court of the United States trespass against the principles that constitute the very foundation of United States: democratic self-governance, separation of powers, and the sovereignty of the states under the Tenth Amendment,” said Rollins. “The contention that the Fourteenth Amendment overturns the Tenth, and therefore validates a remote and imperious judiciary’s revision by fiat of the family law and social institutions of all the states, is contrary to the American system, destructive to liberty, and offensive to common sense.
"Whatever one thinks of the marriage question, this is a dangerous decision that only accelerates the accretion of power into the hands of an undemocratic elite."
“Regardless of one’s view of same-sex marriage, even a cursory examination of the 14th Amendment—which the Court relied on in this case—demonstrates that the Amendment’s sole focus was to complete the work begun by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,” said Lindsay. “The Court has failed in its fundamental obligation to the American people to interpret the Constitution honestly. It has failed to follow Lincoln’s counsel that freedom can survive only so long as we uphold ‘reverence for the Constitution.’ The Court’s reckless disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law will ultimately destroy its own authority—and with it, the system of checks and balances on which all our liberties depend.”
To schedule an interview with Dr. Lindsay please contact Caroline Espinosa at [email protected] or 512-472-2700.
Brooke L. Rollins is President and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Dr. Tom Lindsay is the Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action and the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin, Texas.