Story highlights The Supreme Court rules that states cannot ban same-sex marriage

Ken Connelly: Outcome itself may not be surprising, what opinion lacks is

Ken Connelly is legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the marriage cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court foisted genderless marriage upon the country. Writing for a bare majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy found that the Constitution prohibits the states from defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, as they have done since the founding of the republic, and as the vast majority of societies and religions throughout the entire world have done for millennia.

The decision is reminiscent of the "penumbras, formed by emanations" reasoning employed by Justice William Douglas in Griswold v. Connecticut, which eventually made the constitutionally unprincipled ruling in Roe v. Wade possible. In similar fashion, the court in Obergefell v. Hodges ignored history, the text and meaning of the Constitution, and prior Supreme Court jurisprudence to justify its holding that the 14th Amendment mandates the recognition of same-sex marriage.

The decision becomes all the more difficult to explain when one considers that exactly two years ago, to the day, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the same court, assured us in United States v. Windsor that states rightly possess the "historic and essential authority to define the marital relation."

Obergefell represents the proverbial dropping of "the other shoe" that Justice Antonin Scalia promised would happen in the wake of Windsor. But while the outcome itself may not be surprising, what the opinion lacks is. Entirely absent is any reliance on national or international consensus on the matter, to which the Supreme Court has all too often resorted to justify profound legal shifts on issues of landmark importance.

In Lawrence v. Texas, for instance, the court, in striking down a state statute making homosexual sodomy a crime, cited recent national laws and traditions as indicative of "an emerging awareness" that such conduct was included in the liberty the Due Process Clause protects. The court in Lawrence also conspicuously relied upon a decision by the European Court of Human Rights interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights.

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