Ineloquent.

This is a fantastic article.

My dad, a decided Moderate who calls himself a Conservative and occasionally displays more than a bit of his father's old school bigotry, would have nasty things to say about it. For sure, it's a Liberal-biased, mass media, opinion account of what's going on. But the news is an impossible concept anyway - nothing that's reported to us by humans is going to be bias free. No opinion issued by a judge of any level is going to be bias free. Nothing that any human has ever processed or thought about or passed on or written or read or participated in or...you get the idea...is going to be bias free. It's just not possible. The point is that there are more than two sides to everything and each person with their unique experiences and intelligence levels and all those other things that create our points of view will see them differently. And yet, we've simplified our political system into Us and Them. And that's how people are looking at these decisions - there are the voters in California (well, only a little over 50%, but that's all it takes) and then there's this activist judge who's overruling them. There's the legislature in Arizona whose job it is to pass laws and then there's this other activist judge who's overruling them.

Take a deep breath. Put down your pitchforks and your bullhorns. Drop your pointing fingers to your side. Come down from your soapboxes. Our system was always designed to have safeguards against the whims of the majority; to be slow and inefficient so that minority rights (which later turned out to often be civil rights) would be protected from the tyranny of the majority. It was designed with full acknowledgement that it simply governed too many diverse people to expect agreement and majority rule to be the best option 100% of the time (and this was back when it was still a small country and there were slaves...how have we become less progressive?). These judges may be activists like the article says. But what they're really doing is recognizing that fear and bigotry and lack of understanding have made it so that we're no longer free.