What Sullivan doesn’t have a right to do, however, is willfully misrepresent, which is exactly what he is doing. Sullivan’s glowing language about the transformative power of ideas to win democracy is not in any way the journey that same-sex marriage has taken. The republican process–government by the people and for the people–was utterly subverted in gay marriage’s journey to legalization. This was not the victory of the people, it was the victory of the elites, the fruit of a generation’s worth of ideological monopology over education and mass media. Sullivan’s notion that same-sex marriage has won the minds and hearts of Americans may be true one day; it might be more true now than I believe. But it is absolutely not the reason that the Supreme Court rejected appeals from voter-elected legislatures.

The most important word in same-sex marriage’s legal narrative has not been “voter” or “public,” but “judge.” The transformation of the judiciary into a moral arbiter of the people started a long time ago, and gay marriage advocates were certainly not the first to benefit from it. I could write thousands of words about why such an alter-ego of district, circuit and Supreme Courts is politically disastrous, but that’s not my point. My point is that even if you applaud the imposition of moral values onto voters in places like South Dakota, Indiana, and Kentucky, you cannot then double back and call such legal triumphs “democracy.” Doing so is not an issue of worldview, it’s an issue of base dishonesty. There is nothing democratic about a piece of civic law that is passesd overwhelmingly by a state’s electorate only to be weighed in the balance and found wanting by an utterly remote, utterly unaccountable philosopher-king.