A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Urging the Supreme Court of the United States to establish marriage as between a man and a woman.

WHEREAS, the decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), is at odds with the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which the United States is established; and

WHEREAS, liberty has long been understood as individual freedom from governmental action, not as a right to a particular governmental entitlement; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell invokes a definition of "liberty" that the founders of the United States would not have recognized, rejecting the idea captured in the Declaration of Independence that human dignity is innate, and instead suggested that it comes from the government; and

WHEREAS, when the founders proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and are therefore of inherent worth; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell undermines this vision by declaring that citizens must seek dignity from the state; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell relies on the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States as a font of substantive rights, a doctrine that strays from the full meaning of the Constitution of the United States and exalts judges at the expense of the people from whom they derive their authority; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell inverts the original meaning of liberty and causes collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order that protect liberty, including religious liberty; and

WHEREAS, the Supreme Court recognized in United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013), that the definition of marriage is an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States, meaning that South Dakota, and not the Supreme Court, has the right to regulate marriage for its citizens; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell requires states to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages in complete contravention of their own state constitutions and the will of their voters, thus undermining the civil liberties of those states' residents and voters; and

WHEREAS, marriage as an institution has been recognized as the union of one man and one woman for more than two thousand years and within common law, the basis of the United States' Anglo-American legal tradition, for more than eight hundred years; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell arbitrarily and unjustly rejected this definition of marriage in favor of a novel, flawed interpretation of key clauses within the Constitution of the United States and our nation's legal and cultural precedents; and

WHEREAS, the ruling in Obergefell was illegitimate because two of the Supreme Court Justices in the majority ruling, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, had previously officiated same-sex weddings, and thus were not impartial triers of fact, and therefore should have recused themselves according to 28 U.S.C. § 455 (December 1, 1990); and

WHEREAS, case precedent in Obergefell is an overreach;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the One Hundredth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature protests the Obergefell decision; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Supreme Court of the United States be urged to reverse the ruling in Obergefell and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the South Dakota Legislature urges the Supreme Court to return to the long standing, traditional meaning of marriage recognized by the founders and our society.