The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the role of the Constitution in safeguarding the rights of minorities from the will of the majority.
David Boies highlights the fundamental purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution: to ensure that the rights of minority groups are protected, even when faced with decisions made by the majority. This perspective stresses the importance of judicial oversight in upholding individual rights, particularly in matters such as marriage equality, where historical court decisions have reaffirmed that love should not be dictated by societal majorities.
In practice
During a speech advocating for marriage equality, this quote could underline the importance of protecting minority rights.
One of the things that the court held in Brown v. Board of Education is that government can't impose a badge of inferiority on some of its citizens. Yet that is exactly what Proposition 8 does with respect to gay and lesbian couples in California.
It's terribly important that we extend the promise of equality that the Supreme Court and that the district court articulated in the DOMA case and in the Perry case to all Americans in all 50 states.
We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost.
Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
There is a much more exact correspondence between the natural and moral world than we are apt to take notice of.
One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other.
The real problem is that through our scientific genius we’ve made of the world a neighborhood, but through our moral and spiritual genius we’ve failed to make of it a brotherhood.
The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
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