Freshman Andrew Pazdon, a Hatchet columnist, describes why recognizing same sex marriage in Washington D.C. is constitutionally different from recognition in states.
A simple recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states and not in the District, has caused an aura of storm and stress within D.C. There’s a catch. At the present moment, Congress can’t do much about states like New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Iowa that have legalized same-sex marriage. But as I have fought to assert in the past, and whether people like it or not, Congress in this case can do as it pleases since it possesses legislative oversight for D.C.
In it’s present form, the (de facto) control exercised by Congress is illegitimate, since it is not based on consent of the governed. The present situation, based on despotic constitutionalism, “in all cases whatsoever”, cries out, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new form of government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shal seem most likely to effect their future safety and happiness.”
Those are the fundamental first principles of consent of the governed, the inalienable (innate, inherent intrinsic) concepts on which (the rest of?) this country is based.
Unconstitutional? How about unconscionable? The Constitution of the (fifty) United States? DC is not a state, it is occupied territory. DC is (and has been, for two centuries) the victim of collective punishment for an incident that happened in the 1780′s, where the then fragile central government decided to subjugate for all time, in all cases whatsoever, anyone (and their posterity) with the temerity to live near the seat of power.
DC has had no say in the Constitution of the (fifty) United States, nor its Amendments, since 1801 (that’d be Amendments 12-27). DC, despite having more citizens than Wyoming) has had no vote in the House nor voice in the Senate for over two centuries. Your Supreme Court is not ours in DC, we’ve had no say in its make-up for two centuries.
“Equal laws protecting equal rights are the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country.”
James Madison, 1820