The people's will has been trampled yet again by a federal judge.  The Commonwealth of Virginia, you see, has no right to a law banning homosexual marriage.  So decided Obama-appointed judge, the Honorable Arenda L. Wright Allen.  Judge Wright Allen's opinion is subject to appeal.

Judge Wright Allen serves on the bench in the federal district court out of Norfolk.  She's been on the job less than three years.  Her nomination won unanimous support in the Senate (that means Republican votes, too).  Her claim to fame is being the first black federal judge to serve in Virginia.  Why that means anything to anyone anymore is better explained by the mainstream media, which fancies that the nation still suffers in some pre-civil rights miasma.  Particularly in the South, where to the liberal mind, In the Heat Night plays out ad nauseam.    

The judge's ruling was as predictably "progressive" as it was banal, despite this bit of echo-chamber nonsense from two men with longtime federal law enforcement and court-related backgrounds.  Per the Washington Times: 

[Michael] Nachmanoff and [Chuck] Rosenberg agreed that trying to pigeonhole her [Wright Allen's] judicial philosophy would be a losing proposition.

"Her career path reflects that it would be a mistake to make assumptions about the perspective she brings [to the bench]," Nachmanoff said.

None of us would ever have suspected that a Holder-run Justice Department under leftist president Barack Obama would nominate a lawyer who was generally disposed to the president's worldview and whose notion of judicial restraint is skipping the filet mignon on job-related travel.  Nope.  We didn't see this one coming, Mike and Chuck.     

Make no mistake, Wright Allen's ruling injures.  It further aggrieves federalism.  It's high-handed, in that an unelected judge in a federal court is attempting to make law for over eight million Virginians.  It seeks to settle an issue through judicial fiat that hasn't been settled within the culture or society or the states. 

Shades of Roe v. Wade?  Well, of course, but that landmark decision was what federal judicial activism is all about: the remaking of society by an elite who knows better than cretin-citizens, those of us who pitifully cling to our guns and Bibles.  A citizenry whose mores don't comport to the elites' concept of a just society.   

Conceited?  After all these many decades of increasing judicial activism, that's a gross understatement.  In modern times, federal judicial overreach is a sustained philosophical attack on our system of government (as conceived rightly by the Founders) and a disregard to democratic process, that amounts to a threat to liberty itself (eroded as it is already).    

The upshot is that Wright Allen's opinion won't "settle" anything about homosexual marriage any more than Roe v. Wade settled the abortion debate.  If anything, legal abortion is as contentious today as it was in 1973.  That Supreme Court ruling on a woman's "right" to an abortion interloped in an effort to stymie debate and resolution in localities and states about abortion. 

Roe v. Wade was, as is Wright Allen's opinion about homosexual marriage, typical of progressivism's ruinous "top down" approach to societal issues that are far from resolved among Americans -- unresolved for significant moral, religious, cultural, biological, and practical reasons.  In such seminal questions before society, the federal courts have been unerring in promoting conflict and deepening divisions rather than quelling them with their "enlightened" judgments.

From the Washington Post's giddy report on the judge's opinion:

U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen issued a sweeping 41-page opinion that mentioned at length Virginia's past in denying interracial marriage and quoted Abraham Lincoln. She struck the constitutional amendment Virginia voters approved in 2006 that both bans same-sex marriage and forbids recognition of such unions performed elsewhere.

Observe how progressives weave the narrative on the judge's decision.  Yes, those unrepentant crackers in Virginia are doing to homosexuals what their ancestors did to blacks: keeping them in slavery -- this time the slavery of unrecognized unions.  Unions that lack the societal sanction that marriage confers.  Why, Old Abe himself would be righteously offended.  Homosexuals' right to marriage is of a piece with abolition.  There's precedent, after all, so don't tell progressives that they've invented this "right" to fit their own worldviews and biases.  Don't tell them that Wright Allen's argument is a stretch, an abridgement, and hackneyed.    

Though no one wants to be the turd in the punch bowl at the progressives' little victory celebration, one can point out that slavery was based on a superficiality: skin color.  A denial of rights and exclusions from the law's protections for blacks was, therefore, without merit.  Granting homosexuals the right to marriage is another matter. 

Marriage isn't an invention -- something dreamed up among Mesopotamian high priests; it's an evolved institution.  Marriage is an acknowledgement of the natural order.  Biology -- not whim or wishful thinking -- moved men and women into pairings.  From those natural pairings come children (or they should, when not aborted).  A man and woman, in union, have roles to play in the nurturing of children, in their practical care, in the inculcation of values and virtues, and in modeling -- that includes gender roles.  Marriage is society's way of acknowledging what nature decrees, of meeting its obligation to conform itself to the natural order.  Heterosexual marriage is such a conformity.

Prohibiting homosexual marriage isn't to deny "rights" to homosexuals; there are no rights to deny.  Exclusions from marriage don't deprive homosexuals other natural rights, nor should they.  Association is a right that homosexuals possess, as we all do.  Homosexuals are free to pair, but not with the imprimatur of marriage. 

Yet to the progressive mind, the natural order is an unwelcomed constraint, a tool of us antediluvians, and the bane of social engineering.  To progressives, human beings are malleable creatures.  Not much is fixed; even gender can be ignored nowadays.  If we wish to change marriage (including homosexuals today and, perhaps tomorrow, expanding marriage's definition to include bigamists and polygamists -- or men and their dogs), why not?  Progressives can rationalize and justify any "reform."

Just one man's perspective.  This is a debate that should occur among the people, not squashed and truncated by life-tenured activist judges with the blessings of their elitist allies. 

Conceit, folks -- quite a deadly sin.  Quite the undoing of men and their schemes throughout history.  We Americans and our experiment in liberty are blessed by God in many regards, but we are not immune from the consequences of our follies -- or the follies imposed on us by some...or that we permit to be imposed due to lax reasoning, failure to join the argument with vigor, courage, and vigilant opposition.

Progressivism continues to diminish our society -- actually, unraveling it by degrading it.  The Honorable Arenda L. Wright Allen's opinion is but the latest sorry manifestation of progressive destruction.