It’s bad enough when judges legislate from the bench, but appealing to foreign courts for precedent to apply in our country is, in the minds of some, almost treasonous.  Yet an appeal to foreign courts – to share with a “wider civilization” – was part of the reasoning used by the United States Supreme Court in its majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas.

In Lawrence, the court announced a new, fabricated constitutional right to engage in sodomy.  Its arguments were so questionable that the majority in Lawrence had to refer not just to the legal alchemy of Griswold v. Connecticut and its construct of the right to privacy, but felt compelled to appeal to European courts to justify the desired conclusion.  The majority said that laws against sodomy “have been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights.”  It argued that “other nations have taken action” to favor homosexual behavior, and therefore the U.S. should too.   

The court said, in part, that because foreign countries approve of sodomy, our country should follow their lead.   What about the rights of Texans, Americans, and their legislatures to decide such matters? As the Supreme Court said, European elitists know better than Americans!

With such an appeal to European precedent, the court may have laid the groundwork for far more mischief down the road than most readers recognize.  What does this mean to the nation?  Who has the most to win, and who has the most to lose?  Would we have been so anxious to turn to European courts a few decades ago?  How about the German courts of the 1930s and 1940s?  How about Stalin’s courts in Eastern Europe during the same period?