Robert Bork is well known in legal and political circles for his hard-line conservative views on the law. He is also more widely known as being the would-be Supreme Court Justice who was denied approval in part because of those views. Well, he hasn't mellowed any with age.

The Stamford Advocate reports on Bork's criticisms of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling that legalized gay marriage:

"Many of our courts are guilty of that judicial sin, that is willingness, even eagerness, to reach results announcing principles that have no plausible relation to any constitution," Bork said. "If each person defines meaning for themselves, that means there are no allowable moral truths," said Bork, a former U.S. Appeals Court judge. "If decisions like those I've been discussing are the waves of the future, our culture will slide into chaos and self-government will be a shrunken remnant of what we once aspired to."

Bork doesn't seem to have any constitutional arguments against the ruling - if he had, I'm sure they would have come out clearly in the speech and then reported on. Instead, what we get is a half-baked argument about how terrible it is for people to "define meaning for themselves." Define the meaning of what? Well, the topic is marriage so it seems reasonable that this is what Bork was referring to.

Thus, it is "judicial sin" for justices to interpret a state constitution as not limiting marriage in a manner that fits Bork's prejudices. When they do that, it allows people of all sorts to define "marriage" in a manner that fits their circumstances, thus leading society down the road to chaos and ruin. It's a common conservative argument seen and heard in a wide variety of situations: don't let the rabble make decisions for themselves, otherwise they won't know their place anymore.

Read More:

• Gay Rights, Gay Marriage
• Religious Right
• Evangelical Christianity & Homosexuality