[This is in response to the Supreme Court's decision to decline to hear five cases on same-sex marriage, allowing the rulings in favor of it to stand instead.]

The damage to marriage as an institution, to the family as the linchpin of our culture, to freedom itself, especially the religious freedom of dissenters from the redefinition of marriage - all this will be reckoned up over time as a consequence of today's refusal by the judges to take any of the cases that have so far come up to it. But the cert denials also evince a deep disrespect for the rule of law, for the Constitution, and for the people's right of self-government.

[...]

The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s with its first platform (in the 1856 presidential election) denouncing slavery and polygamy, both of which the party wanted the federal government to outlaw where it had power to do so, in the territories. These were the "twin relics of barbarism." One year later, after Dred Scott, the Republican Party added the defense of republican government against judicial tyranny to its portfolio of fundamental principles. The GOP was founded as a party standing for human liberty, the sanctity of the family, and a free self-governing people. As we re-enact a slow-motion Dred Scott for the twenty-first century, it remains to be seen whether any political party in America will continue to stand for those principles.