In the aftermath of George W. Bush appointee Judge Vaughn Walker's utterly predictable decree to overturn Proposition 8 in California, conservative judicial scholars are preparing to take the fight to the Supreme level.

They are no doubt combing over the wording in the 138-page decision with magnifying glass in hand, underlining and circling words and phrases, selecting where they think Walker's argument is most vulnerable to legal critique.

Meantime, as this showdown looms, most of politically-engaged Red State America continues to do what it does best: fret, fulminate angrily, write dour letters to newspapers about the impending end of marriage, and solemnly hold up homemade magic marker-scrawled signs at Tea Party rallies.

As a paleocon duly opposed to state-sanctioned homosexual so-called "marriage", I find all of this Sturm und Drang tiresome, headache-inducing, and, well ... totally gay.

While hailed by all the usual suspects as a "landmark" decision, the revocation of Prop 8 is in truth nothing new. It follows in a long line of similar cases of brazen judicial skullduggery, the most notorious being Roe v. Wade in 1973. It is yet another instance of the ruling class insuring that its "enlightened" ideology is enacted into law, with or without the consent of the governed.

Let's face it: America has long been ruled by judicial fiat. We are now neither a nation of laws, nor of men, but one of autocratic judges, who aren't in the least afraid to wield the sweeping powers to which they have arrogated themselves. These judges are in truth but the minions of the academic and cultural elites, the tenets of whose shared, enshrined ideology are held to be self-evidently true. Among these tenets are the following first principles:

1. Traditional sexual morality is bad and oppressive and must be combated wherever it is still practiced. Those who practice these "outmoded" ideas must be ostracized from polite society and shamed as "intolerant" or "bigoted."

2. Premarital sex should be encouraged, as a means towards eroding traditional sexual morality, which teaches that sex only belongs within the bonds of matrimony. 

3. Contraception is good, and needs to be made widely available to everyone, including middle-school aged children.

4. Abortion, being a last-ditch means of contraception, ought to be allowed and funded without limit.

5. Homosexuality is good and its practitioners should be mainstreamed as much as possible, in order to further to marginalize believers in traditional sexual morality.

Hence, we see judges weighing in consistently in favor of compelling the distribution of contraceptives (whether or not the distributor feels such compulsion to be a violation of his principles), in favor of forcing hospitals and medical facilities to practice abortion (whether or not individual doctors find the procedure morally repugnant), and in favor of removing all limits to unlimited, unbridled homosexuality (all popular referendums to the contrary be damned). Quite simply, the more condoms and birth control pills, the more dead fetuses; the more buggery, the better.

And bugger you if you don't wish to abide by their edicts! Bugger you if, in fact, you find buggery the slightest bit objectionable or aesthetically displeasing... Speak your mind on this matter or a similar one, and you'll soon find yourself under fire for practicing "hate speech." You'll likely lose your job, and find yourself forced to undergo "sensitivity training" and other unspeakable humiliations and torments.

The elites and their judicial minions have the power; they will get their way. It doesn't matter that their legal arguments are threadbare, that there it is no more ridiculous to suddenly "discover" that the Constitution mandates the recognition of gay marriage than it is to pull "abortion rights" out of some obscure privacy penumbra, as the Supreme Dictators did back in '73.

Pointing these things out makes no difference; they, not we, get to decide what the law is, and exactly what it can mean.

They are the rulers; we are the ruled. They are in control; we aren't.

In fact, they have shown themselves to be openly contemptuous of, even mocking towards, anyone with the audacity to try to stop them from achieving their goals. "Pass all the resolutions you want, suckers!" they sneer, "We'll just send our boys in black to knock 'em down and call 'em 'unconstitutional,' and it'll be back to square one for you bozos!"

Yes, they have the power, and they'll eventually get exactly what they want. So what can we do?

There are many gay-marriage activists who claim that they just want to live and let live. Once they are able to call themselves married in the eyes of the law, they're willing to leave things alone. If you don't agree with gay marriage, they'll say, that's perfectly fine with them. They don't want to harass you for holding firm to your convictions: if your beliefs are different from theirs, they can agree to disagree amicably.

And no doubt this is true for some of the current crop of activists.

However, it's naive in the extreme to deny that there aren't many more who see a gay-marriage victory as nothing but a first step, a means of gaining ground in a much larger theater of ideological war. They are salivating over the notion of suing the Catholic Church for discrimination for refusing to let men marry men or women marry women. They look forward to spying on your private email to see if you let loose with a forbidden slur sometime while joking around with a friend, so that they can find a pretext to take you down and destroy you, despicable "hater" that they know you are.

I suggest that conservatives remove themselves from the futile attempt to take over the apparatus of the state from the depraved elites who now call the shots. Let us encamp in the realm that is most important: our homes, families, institutions, places of worship and forums of intellectual exchange.

Let them have the state; let's keep them out of our hair. And from our private citadels, let's cultivate an aura of gleeful defiance. Let's resolutely decline to conform. Let's hurl hearty epithets into their teeth, shamelessly flaunt our rigidly reactionary counter-cultural customs, and laugh at their apoplectic responses to our insolent refusal to acknowledge their supremacy over us, or to be ashamed of ourselves and our beliefs.

Of course, our rulers will pretend to dismiss our activities as irrelevant, but inwardly we can be sure they will be seething. As C.S. Lewis quoted

Martin Luther in The Screwtape Letters: "The best way to drive out the Devil... is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."

I can dig it. Can you dig it?

David Boies is the kind of person who’s much celebrated and admired in our culture. He’s a politically connected Superlawyer who hasn’t produced anything of value for society (with the possible exception of his bestselling autobiography), but who is deft and skilled at manipulating people.

Boies has now became even more of a hero of the Left-liberal set after he teamed up with former Solicitor General Ted Olson (Boies’s Republican opposition in Bush vs. Gore) and successfully convinced a California judge to overturn Proposition 8, which had banned “gay marriage.”

In this video from earlier this summer, Boises explains how he was able turn all of Prop 8’s supporters into “gay marriage” advocates by asking them a series of “very simple questions.” These amounted to hokey, utilitarian First Principles like “Does marriage help children?” “Does it hurt people not to get married [economically and psychologically]?” etc.

Boies then proceeded to the knockout punch:

Isn’t America about equality? Don’t we want equality for all our citizens? These are questions it’s hard to answer “no” to.

American conservatives, of course, can’t answer “no” because they’ve bought into the Cold War liberal vision of their country as an egalitarian melting pot whose highest moral achievement was the Civil Rights Act.

Until conservatives can forthrightly reply “NO!,” they will continue to lose cultural wars like this one.  Moral and visceral disgust at the prospect of men “marrying” one another is not enough if you’ve already surrendered your mind to the Left’s logic and basic assumptions.

For the past half-century, “non-discrimination” has been a popular justification for enforcing the will of the ruling elite, and so it was today in U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s ruling that California’s Proposition 8 ban on “gay marriage” is “unconstitutional” because it “advance[s] the belief that opposite-sex couples are morally superior to same-sex couples.”

It is also a remarkably un-democratic decision, in that Walker explicitly acknowledges that the “majority of California voters supported the initiative” in a fair referendum. (This certainly won’t stop the Left from universally acclaiming the judgment as a victory for “the people.”)

But the most revealing line of all is Walker’s claim,“Tradition alone cannot support legislation.” (Walker actually means something much stronger, for it was because the law was based on tradition that it had to be thrown out.)

Many well-intentioned conservatives and Christians want to rely on the court system, lawyers, and politicians (who are lawyers) to “save marriage” from the cultural revolution. They should stop wasting their time. Instead, attempting to divorce marriage from the state altogether (Ron Paul’s position) -- that is, making it pure tradition, unconnected to legislation -- is the only way to protect this millennia-old folkway from the forces on “non-discrimination.”

The invaluable Daily Mail reports:

Although he had not long since had an affair with Madonna and had slept with an estimated 12,000 women -- everyone from Julie Christie to Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Janice Dickinson to Cher -- he said at the time that he was deeply fulfilled to be a father.

But it seems that Warren Beatty's first (legitimate) born daughter, Kathlyn, now 18, even though she's not obviously all that unattractive, and even though she's sexually attracted to men, has decided to become a "boy." She wants everybody to call her "Stephen," and is prepping for "gender reassignment surgery." So that she can sorta kinda pretend to be a gay man, I guess.

Hey -- it's the new black! Or the old new black! Or something like that. Anyway, she gets to play at being a "victim," instead of a pampered scion of zillionaires, for fifteen minutes or so.

One gathers that Kathlyn/Stephen's mother, Annette Bening, is "utterly thrilled" with this interesting development, but that father Warren is "glum...tense, grey, and old" -- even "crushed."

"Warren knows he can't stop her from following her dream, but it's breaking his heart."

Well. What what can one say, but this:

Warren -- dude! 12,000 women? That's a (different) woman every day, every week, every month, every year, for more than thirty years! Just think of the vast army of your bastards, now growing up! From a Darwinian point of view, you're competing in the same league with Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, and possibly even Bill Clinton!

So Kathlyn/Stephen won't be disseminating your genes any further.

Cry me a river.