"a clear constitutional logic"

People all over the place are screaming that the California Supreme Court shouldn't have interjected itself into the gay marriage debate. It's for the legislature, not the courts!, they shout. But in today's column, Harold Meyerson argues the opposite, and very much to the point. He points out that it was this same judicial body that, in 1948, struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriages. "For fully a decade thereafter, California stood alone in deeming such laws unconstitutional. In time, other state courts followed, and, in 1967, so did the U.S. Supreme Court in the memorable, and memorably named, Loving v. Virginia."

Then, after summarizing the complaints about "activist courts", he says:

Throughout American history, the relation between court decisions, popular movements and legislation in matters of advancing human rights has been complicated -- and often complementary. Brown v. Board of Education advanced the fundamental case for equal rights in America and helped speed the formation of the civil rights movement, even as it provoked a culture of massive resistance in the segregationist white South and prodded conservatives to begin their war against the liberal Warren court.

Moreover, there's a clear constitutional logic for courts intervening early on in such struggles. In our system, legislatures enact the majority's will and courts protect the minority's rights. At times, by forcefully upholding minority rights, the courts can affect the majority's will. Working in different parts of our constitutional arena, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson played leading and mutually reinforcing roles in the civil rights revolution of the mid-20th century. Their efforts helped produce, and in turn were pushed along by, the changing consciousness on race in the 1950s and '60s.

As someone who remembers both Brown and Loving, I agree with him. Read him and find out whether you do.