The ABA convention here nearly got cancelled, and 350 of the 800 attendees (mostly attorneys) cancelled. Each cancellation represents a loss of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in revenue.
http://www.azfamily.com/outbound-fee...-93687474.html
Economic death from a thousand cuts.
Just because a poll says that most Americans support this bill doesn't make it right. At the end of the 19th century, a majority of Americans felt that women should not vote. A majority of Americans opposed desegregation in 1957, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
Brown v. The Board of Education that separate is NOT equal. That was a very unpopular decision at the time. In 1967, a majority of Americans supported laws that prevented blacks and whites from marrying, until again the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in
Loving v. Virginia that these anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. In 2003, a majority of Americans supported anti-sodomy laws, but once again the U.S. Supreme Court dragged a majority of ignorant knuckle-dragging Americans into the future by declaring in
Lawrence v. Texas that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, thus outlawing numerous other state's anti-sodomy laws. In fact, I suspect even to this day, a "majority" of Americans may not support the Lawrence decision.
In 1825, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States and commented on our great experiment with democracy. His biggest concern? He was concerned about a "tyranny of the majority," where minorities would be denied equal rights just because they were too few in number to sway the majority's opinions. Any time you have civil rights decided by a mass vote, you run the risk of having a tyranny of the majority. Especially in the area of civil rights, he was largely correct, and it has largely fallen the courts, not the executive or legislative branches, or the people, to secure these basic civil rights for all of us.
Always remember the lessons of the past. For example, the German people voted Hitler and the Nazi party into power. The rest, as they say, is history.
--don