Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall has
criticized a federal appeals court's decision invalidating Virginia's
gay marriage ban.
In November of 2006, 57 percent of
Virginia voters approved the Marshall-Newman Amendment, named after
its authors Delegate Marshall and Senator Stephen Newman.
On Monday, the Fourth Circuit Court of
Appeals in Richmond said the ban was unconstitutional. The ruling
reverberated in North Carolina, where Attorney General Roy Cooper
responded by withdrawing
from defending North Carolina's ban in a separate case.
(Related: Appeals
court strikes down Virginia's gay marriage ban.)
“In the long run, advocates and
defenders of so-called same-sex marriage are their own best
undertakers for their hubris in attempting to deny and defy the laws
of nature and nature's god, by which nations and cultures around the
world have recognized for millennia that marriage is a relationship
between one man and one woman,” Marshall told the
Daily Press.
“If judicial elites impose a radical
and immoral marriage regime on American citizens in defiance of the
laws of nature and nature's god, the result would be to tear the
social fabric in ways that can scarcely be imagined, nor contained by
judicial arrogance,” added Marshall, a vociferous opponent of gay
rights.