Just days after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the right of states to define marriage as one man and one woman, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court is being urged to affirm the decision, because if it doesn’t, states might not even be able to regulate the “species” of marriage partners.
“If ‘marriage’ means fulfilling one’s personal choices regarding intimacy, as the appellants insist, it is difficult to see how states could regulate marriage on any basis,” said a friend-of-the-court brief filed in a Louisiana case. “If personal autonomy is the essence of marriage, then not only gender, but also number, familial relationship, and even species are insupportable limits on that principal and they all will fall.
“This is not just a slippery slope on which the appellants wish to set us, it is a bottomless pit into which they desire to throw us. It is clearly within a state’s right to define...