He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. This conjugal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman passes the neutrality test, and satisfies the emerging constitutional standard of rational basis review.The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America Contrary to the decisions of the lower courts, however, the definition of marriage in California’s Proposition 8 does pass the moral neutrality test just described. The lower courts here applied this test as an implicit part of their rational basis standard of constitutional review. 186, 216 (1986) (Stevens, J., dissenting)) (“he fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.”). Some courts have held that the law ought to pass a moral neutrality test based on Lawrence v. Laws that merely aim to promote controversial judgments about morality, especially when they limit freedom, fail to manifest a legitimate state interest. The ideal of moral neutrality does not purport to expunge the law of its moral content, for this ideal is itself a moral injunction: it is fairness-a moral concept-that requires no one, particular moral vision be privileged by the state. Rather, the law should aspire to neutrality between competing visions of how best to live. In other words, they argue that the law ought not to criminalize conduct based solely on judgments about what makes for or detracts from a valuable and morally worthy way of life. When the law implicates questions about momentous issues in human life-marriage, sexuality, conscience, religion, death, and so on-these scholars argue that the law must prescind from imposing any givencontroversial moral judgment upon a citizenry marked by ethical pluralism. Within the broad tradition of “liberal” political thought and constitutional scholarship, there is agreement that moral disapproval as such is an illegitimate ground for limiting liberty.
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