COMPLAINT

Parties

1. The plaintiff is a minister ordained in Massachusetts, a resident of Connecticut and a citizen of the United States.
   
   

2. The defendant is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, represented by the Attorney General.

Jurisdiction and Reason

1. The Court has jurisdiction over this matter pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §1331.
   
   

2. In view of the 2003 Goodridge decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, requiring, as it were, an acquiescent legislature and governor to legalize same-sex marriage, in violation of the separation of powers, and where no further redress is possible within the state courts due to such acquiescence; and
   
   

3. In view of federal issues concerning the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the plaintiff brings this complaint.

Allegations

1. Goodridge violates the nature of personhood as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment, where the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property are ascribed equally to all persons, as individual persons, and not due to membership in any given group, whether objectively or subjectively defined, whether fixed or malleable in declared nature.
   
   

2. To wit, and for its purposes, Goodridge seeks to obscure this problem. First, it asserts up front a distinction without a difference, namely, that the matter is not one of homosexuality versus heterosexuality, but that of same-sex couples versus opposite-sex couples.
   
   

3. And second, this serves to help Goodridge avoid looking into the question of whether “sexual orientation” constitutes a consistently definable civil rights class, a/k/a “suspect class.” Indeed, Goodridge explicitly refuses to consider the question of suspect class, which is to say, it prejudices the case by not addressing the prior and deeper question, which had it done, could have rendered moot the alleged basis to legalize same-sex marriage. Goodridge consciously avoids the clear need for same-sex couples, qua homosexual persons, to possess an objective and consistent identity suitable for assigned civil rights.
   
   

4. The putative class of homosexual persons is not rooted in objective criteria such as gender and race, nor is there any scientific basis for a supposed genetic or social determinism. Rather, homosexual persons constitute a malleable and subjective class, and hence, Goodridge holds the burden of proof to show otherwise.
   
   

5. In the putative class of homosexual persons, this malleability is evidenced in self-identified bisexuality; and same-sex couples also evidence this malleability of individual and class identity, for many have a history of heterosexual relationships, and many as well are divorcees of heterosexual marriages.
   
   

6. Same-sex couples are not parallel to opposite-sex couples, in that the former are extrinsic in nature, and the latter intrinsic, the former are a subjectively defined class, and the latter objectively defined.
   
   

7. Under current federal law (e.g. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), civil rights, congruent with the Fourteenth Amendment, cannot, nor ever have otherwise been assigned to a malleable identity, to subjective choice. Goodridge thus rewrites federal law, and without examining the issue. If such malleability and subjectivity were consistently applied in this context, there would be no boundaries in place to restrict the possibility of consanguineous, polygamous or group marriage. And beyond this context, if applied consistently, malleability of individual and group identity for the sake of perceived government benefit opens up a Pandora’s Box which Balkanizes civil rights.
   
   

8. Goodridge syntactically redefines and undermines the language and nature of “unalienable rights” in Articles I and II of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.
   
   

9. Accordingly, Goodridge necessarily and inextricably challenges historic unalienable rights as defined in the Declaration of Independence, upon which the Fourteenth Amendment depends in its delineation of due process in the protection of life, liberty and property, and upon which all civil rights ultimately depend.
   
   

10. Goodridge gives no original definition of unalienable rights, just making assertion with appeal to its language in the parallel context of alleged “basic” and “fundamental” rights.
    
    

11. Historically, unalienable rights are sourced uniquely in the Creator, implicitly in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, explicitly in the Declaration of Independence, and thus intrinsic to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Goodridge has effectively decoupled rights from their source, with the net effect that what it now regards as unalienable ends up making all rights alienable.
    
    

12. By definition, unalienable rights are those which a priori precede and transcend human government, set the table for representative government, and are not to be redefined or otherwise altered. They apply to all persons equally, as persons, and not in terms of any subsequent group identity. Yet Goodridge has crafted a de novo right out of contemporary human imagination, assigns it a status parallel to being unalienable, and the danger for the whole nation is great as it tampers with the very nature of our national existence.
    
    

13. Goodridge concomitantly threatens First Amendment liberties, beginning with religious liberty.
    
    

14. Principally, Goodridge sets up a conflict between two definitions of unalienable rights, one historic, the other novel. If a rabbi, priest or minister affirms the Creator who gives unalienable rights, and with it the definition of marriage being one man and one woman in mutual fidelity, what happens when a same-sex couple applies to be married by such a person, and is refused? Will the novel “unalienable right” of same-sex marriage trump the historic unalienable religious liberty of rabbis, priests or ministers et al., as agents of the state, to perform marriages as rooted in historic understanding? Does not the “equal protection” rationale of Goodridge thus require clergy, if they perform heterosexual weddings, to likewise offer the same to same-sex couples?
    
    

15. This is not just a theoretical concern, but a natural trajectory of many other losses of First Amendment liberties suffered by dissenters to a new homosexual political orthodoxy.
    
    

16. In Massachusetts already, same-sex marriage law forced Catholic Charities out of its adoption ministry, as they are no longer able to exercise their First Amendment liberties to dissent from the new law. Otherwise they would have been coerced into violating their religious convictions, obliged to place children for adoption with homosexual couples.

Relief

1. Wherefore, the plaintiff demands judgment against the defendant and such relief as the Court deems just.
   
   

2. The Court should rule that homosexual and/or same-sex couple identity do not qualify as an objective civil rights class under current federal law.
   
   

3. The Court should further rule that federal law needs to remove the idea of suspect class, of civil rights class or group identity, and return to a constitutional basis for rights, per the Fourteenth Amendment, where the proper subjects are defined simply by a common, universal and individual personhood.
   
   

4. The Court should rule that marriage is not an unalienable right in any capacity, nor is it basic or fundamental; rather it is a subcategory of ordered liberty which some people may be able to exercise, others not, according to intrinsic function and not subjective identity, as is true with a whole range of other liberty decisions.
   
   

5. The Court should overturn Goodridge, and with it, any laws passed by the Massachusetts Legislature in response to Goodridge, returning the issue to its proper place within a Republican form of government (i.e., Article IV:IV of the United States Constitution).

_____________________________