Shāntatā! Court Chālu Āhe

Where Abraham Lincoln emphatically proclaimed that "this nation shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" more than a hundred and fifty years ago, interesting questions are being raised while debating the exact role of the judiciary in a democracy in 2008. Understandably, dissenters against the recent Californian lift of the ban on gay and lesbian marriages see the decision as "symptomatic of judicial activism that thwarts the will of the people and their elected representatives". This, I guess definitely raises a higher question, one that is often repeated during the course of history - Should the state machinery enact decisions that are against popular public opinion but which, according to it, are morally expedient? Or should it let the public zeitgeist take its own course? Interestingly, even the supporters of gay and lesbian marriages have "questioned the wisdom of the court intervening when public opinion is shifting toward support of gay marriage in any case".

See this op-ed article in Washington post for some interesting bits of history on the legacy of court rulings in America where the entire nation awakens to an inquitous social institution remembering "the principles of the Declaration of Independence which are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment . . . that all human beings have equal rights . . . and that the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness is inalienable".

So is such judicial intervention a blessing or a curse to the positively evolving moral zeitgeist in a modern democracy? The author succintly concludes:

So was last week's ruling an impetus or impediment to that process? My hunch is that by basing the case for the right to intra-gender marriage so clearly and forcefully on the doctrine of equal rights, the court situated gay marriage not only in an established body of law but also within the essential definition of America. Opposition to gay marriage is most commonly rooted in tradition, religious tradition in particular. But the ideas that all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness are the traditions that define our nation, and by basing its decision on those premises the court did gay rights, and American ideals, a huge service.

As to what the vanguards of our judicial system have been upto, this CNN-IBN article makes some timely revelations :P