California on trial

It has been said that if elections actually had the power to change anything, they'd be illegal. 

Now, from the Ruth Institute:

Advocates of same sex marriage are so convinced of the rightness of their cause, they believe they only have to accept elections when they agree with the outcome of the elections.  This trial itself is not just a trial of Proposition 8. The voters of California themselves are on trial, for having the temerity to vote in favor of natural marriage.  When Ted Olson calls the campaign managers of Prop 8 to the witness stand, he is, in effect, calling the voters of California on to the stand. It is every person who voted yes on 8 who is on trial here. Make no mistake about that.  

Perhaps now you can see why I chose the quotation from Eric Voegelin for the opening of this column. Let me give you the full quotation, without the elipses, and note that Dr. Voegelin wrote this in 1938.

They (the theorists of German National Socialism and Italian Fascism, both drawing on the vocabulary of German Romanticism) reject the political determination of will by the people– again especially in the German theory, where the Fuhrer is the only carrier of the people's will. In the teaching on the plebiscite, the idea that the act of voting is an act of national will is decisively rejected.  The plebiscite is to express and enforce the concordance between the objective will of the people embodied in the Fuhrer and the subjective convictions of the people. The plebiscite is a declaration of loyalty to the Fuhrer, not an announcement of an individual's will. … The god speaks only to the Fuhrer, and the people are informed of his will through the mediation of the Fuhrer. (66-7)

Voting invalid unless it conforms to the "national will:" this is not the kind of political system we want to live under.