WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court issued its monumental ruling on same-sex “marriage” on Friday, declaring that all 50 states must and are “required ” to legalize “gay marriage” under the U.S. Constitution.

“The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 5-4 decision, with the majority being the liberal justices on the bench: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Steven Breyer and the aforementioned Justice Kennedy.

While the court recognized the longstanding definition of marriage as being “a union between two persons of the opposite sex,” the five justices opined that “the history of marriage is one of both continuity and change.”

“That institution—even as confined to opposite-sex relations—has evolved over time,” Kennedy said.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” the court concluded. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death.”

“It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves,” it said. “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with each writing their own opinions. Justice Scalia sharply denounced the ruling.

“Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before a fall,” he declared. “With each decision of ours that takes from the people a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly not based on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer of our impotence.”

Justice Roberts likewise opposed the majority conclusion, advising the American people: “[D]o not celebrate the Constitution” as supporting the decision.

“It had nothing to do with it,” he said.

The ruling now means that the remaining 14 states who have banned same-sex “marriage” in their Constitutions are required to recognize and allow the nuptials.

Homosexual advocates cheered outside of the court as the decision was distributed, but Christian organizations are already denouncing the ruling as an affront to the American people and the Most Supreme of all courts.

“The Supreme Court has stripped all Americans of our freedom to debate and decide marriage policy through the democratic process,” said Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Senior Legal Counsel Jim Campbell.

“The freedom to democratically address the most pressing social issues of the day is the heart of liberty. The court took that freedom from the people and overrode the considered judgment of tens of millions of Americans who recently reaffirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman,” he continued. “The court cast aside the understanding of marriage’s nature and purpose that diverse cultures and faiths across the globe have embraced for millennia.”

As previously reported, the ruling centered on the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, as well as several other cases that were on appeal after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals declared that states had a right to decline to recognize arrangements outside of the male-female marital union. Today’s ruling overturns the Sixth Circuit decision, declaring that states do not have the autonomous right to protect the definition of marriage within their borders.

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