A slam-dunk decision

Slam dunks, as any basketball fan will tell you, can be easily recognized for their speed, their certainty and their ability to leave, shall we say, a punctuation mark.

The Georgia Supreme Court made a slam dunk Thursday.

Over the span of just a few days, in a ruling spread across only six 8-by-11 pages double-spaced, and in unanimity, the state's high court said a Fulton County judge misapplied the law when she struck down the voter-approved constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The high court said the legality of the amendment was "apparent."

Apparent: Readily seen; visible. Readily understood; clear or obvious.

In other words, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Constance Russell either didn't see the obvious in the law, or chose to ignore it because she wanted a certain outcome in the case.

And she then tried to overturn the will of 76 percent of Georgia voters, who knowingly and willfully approved the amendment in November 2004.

Russell tried to say the amendment violated the law against having voters vote on two different things at once - i.e., gay marriages and "civil unions." What did she overlook, either intentionally or recklessly? Simply this nugget in case law: "To constitute plurality of subject matter, an Act must embrace two or more dissimilar and discordant subjects that by no fair intendment can be considered as having any logical connection with or relation to each other. ..." (Crews v. Cook).

Note the key words in the above caption: "dissimilar and discordant." In other words, you had to believe that gay marriage and gay civil unions are in no way alike, and in fact are contrary to each other in order to strike down the amendment.

Consider, too, the well-established legal principle that acts of legislatures are to be given a presumption of legality - a hurdle that must be overcome in order to strike a law down.

Talk about a judge going out of her way to have her way.

It was a slam dunk to reverse her.

And thank goodness for that. The governor was going to call a costly special session of the General Assembly to pass a new gay marriage amendment, had Judge Russell's ridiculous ruling stood.

The truth is, while we welcome the Georgia Supreme Court's common-sense reasoning, we don't think the people of Georgia or any other state should have to go through such gymnastics - having to bound over the heads of judges to amend our constitutions.

We therefore appreciate the restraint exhibited by the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled Thursday that that state's laws clearly and constitutionally limit marriage to a man and a woman. Judge Robert Smith said simply that any change to the law must come from the legislature.

"We do not predict what people will think generations from now," the judge wrote, "but we believe the present generation should have a chance to decide the issue through its elected representatives."

How sadly quaint a notion.

It's time for people who disagree with acts of legislatures - or with landslide votes by the people themselves - to stop running to the courts to get them overturned in their favor.

And it's long past time for activist judges to quit helping them.