Albert Mohler has this post on his Blog. He discusses this recent editorial by the LA Times which welcomes the California’s Supreme Court’s recent opinion redefining marriage. Mohler writes:
The editors of the paper write as if the May 15, 2008 decision of the California Supreme Court is unassailable, unchangeable, and irreversible. None of these things is true. The court did declare same-sex marriage to be a fundamental right, but that decision is now, by definition, tentative and potentially temporary. California’s voters must keep this firmly in mind. The voters of California now have the opportunity to define and defend marriage and to return the state’s definition of marriage to where it stood just three months ago.
This entire controversy, illustrated by the paper’s editorial, is an illustration of the legal, cultural, and moral breakdown described by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon as “rights talk.” In her 1991 book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Glendon defined the problem as “our increasing tendency to speak of what is most important to us in terms of rights, and to frame nearly every social controversy as a clash of rights.”
