Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

the court had done nothing more than acknowledge the rights of a group previously discriminated against for reasons of religion and tradition. The court was not creating new rights; it was applying liberal principles to circumstances the founders had not envisioned. The idea of gay marriage was almost unimaginable in the eighteenth century, just as women’s equality had also been unimaginable to the overwhelming majority of Americans. It took time for people to realize that the prohibitions against gay marriage violated the liberal principles of the Declaration just as the prohibitions on Black people’s full participation in American society did. The Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy grounded the majority’s decision in the natural-rights liberalism of the revolutionary era and the early republic.