There is not much from the San Francisco chronicle that dons these pages, but I thought Debra Saunders’ response to California’s recent Supreme Court ruling legalizing homosexual marriage was a pretty honest take. I haven’t read the actual opinion, but from what I have read, it’s more of the same - a court doing what it thinks is right for the people rather than letting the people do it themselves.

But I have to agree with Justice Marvin Baxter’s dissenting opinion that the court “does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice.”

What next? Baxter wondered if in the future an “activist” court might look at this opinion and “conclude, on the basis of a perceived evolution in community values, that the laws prohibiting polygamous and incestuous marriages were no longer constitutionally justified.”

Baxter stipulated, “In no way do I equate same-sex unions with incestuous and polygamous relationships as a matter of social policy or social acceptance.” His point is that George and company opened “the door to similar treatment of other, less deserving, claims of a right to marry.”

You’ll find a similar rationale in the U.S. Supreme Court’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. The real question at this point is not how this decision impacts jurisprudence - the real question is whether or not this will allow the conservatives to shift the political focus from Iraq and economy in the Fall and remind its base of the moral issues at stake. With two SCOTUS justices likely stepping down during the next President’s term, it is not much of a red herring