The recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans was an unfortunate and disturbing display of judicial activism by Justice Kennedy and his happy band of rights-creating legal eagles. David Frum's commentary on the Romer ruling was on point ("Suspect Jurisprudence," June 3). The majority's analysis is more befitting of a sociological thesis than a sound constitutional interpretation. However, even Frum's scathing indictment does not do justice to the preposterous reasoning of Justice Kennedy.
Frum states that laws subject to the rational-basis test, such as Colorado's Amendment 2, will be overturned only if the distinctions drawn by such laws are "entirely irrational." As correctly implied by Frum, a court applying the rational-basis test will examine legislative history to determine the purpose of enacting the law at issue and decide whether that purpose was rational.
However, judicial application of the rational-basis test has been even more lenient towards the government because the court has repeatedly defined the standard so as to authorize the judicial fabrication of a rational purpose even if such purpose cannot be reasonably gleaned from the legislative history.
The intellectually honest (but nevertheless indefensible) approach for Justice Kennedy would have been to read homosexual rights into the Constitution and strike down the Colorado law on the basis that it discriminates against a "suspect category" -- homosexuality -- without the extremely high level of justification required to meet the strict-scrutiny standard.
The fact that the court overturned the Colorado law upon application of the rational-basis standard indicates nothing more than that the justices did not look very hard for a rational purpose underlying the majoritarian will of Colorado voters.
The court's feeble search for a rational purpose is a striking deviation from the court's consistent application of the rational-basis test in a long line of other cases. More distressingly, however, it indicates that intellectual dishonesty has now infected a majority of the court.
RAY BEEMAN, SAN PEDRO, CA