An absolutely astonishing letter to the Supreme Court from, among others, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham:
We stand together in defense of marriage and the family and society founded upon them….
Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they manufacture a right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage….
As citizens united together, we will not stand by while the destruction of the institution of marriage unfolds in this nation we love….
Experience and history have shown us that if the government redefines marriage to grant a legal equivalency to same-sex couples, that same government will then enforce such an action with the police power of the State…. We cannot and will not allow this to occur on our watch….
We will view any decision by the Supreme Court or any court the same way history views the Dred Scott and Buck v. Bell decisions. Our highest respect for the rule of law requires that we not respect an unjust law that directly conflicts with higher law…. We respectfully warn the Supreme Court not to cross this line….
The Supreme Court was wrong when it denied Dred Scott his rights and said, "blacks are inferior human beings." And the Court was wrong when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell, "three generations of imbeciles are enough."
What the Dred Scott case has to do with marriage equality escapes me — the former involved the denial of human rights; the latter, the conferment of rights — and even the signatories make no real attempt to tie the two together. But in citing Buck v. Bell of 1927, they at least got that last part mostly right. Six generations of imbeciles are enough.