Every summer, our community confronts the front lines of the modern culture wars. This month, as Cheyenne Pride Week kicks off, the state capital fills with vibrant banners.
Yet, underneath the festivities lies a quiet, undeniable anxiety shared by citizens across Wyoming: the foundational fabric of our society is fraying. We see it in the historic decline of our local marriage rates and the heartbreaking rise of fatherless homes.
If we want to protect the next generation, we must have the courage to diagnose this crisis honestly.
Regardless of your personal position on contraception, abortion, or same-sex relationships, the foundational question here is not theological—it is constitutional.
It is about how we decide things in this country. In a self-governing society, profound moral and social choices are meant to be hammered out through the democratic process. Instead, we have endured fifty years where the will of the judiciary has been systematically imposed upon the population.
History proves that when judges abandon written text to invent social policy, the consequences are catastrophic. Consider Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). There, an activist Supreme Court bypassed the clear equity of the Reconstruction Amendments to manufacture the doctrine of "separate but equal."
That single piece of judicial engineering legally authorized more than half a century of state-sanctioned discrimination against Black Americans in education and public life. It took decades for the law to finally crawl back to the truth of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous Plessy dissent: that our Constitution must be color-blind.
As the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the law serves as a powerful teacher in the United States, shaping the morals, habits, and expectations of the citizenry. But the law can be a teacher for good or for bad. When modern courts chose judicial decree over democratic consensus, they began teaching the public a series of sociologically destructive lessons.
This modern trajectory began by severing sex from procreation in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973).
While things like abortion and contraception were heavily disfavored by the vast majority of citizens at the time, the courts altered the legal landscape by fiat. Over generations, the public internalized the lesson. Millions of Americans grew up accepting these judicial precedents as a given, adapting their lives to a philosophy that legally uncoupled the marital act from its natural, biological purpose.
Once procreation was severed from sex, the next legal domino fell: the separation of child-rearing from marriage itself, culminating in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
In his scorching dissent, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia exposed the raw power at play, calling the decision a "judicial Putsch" that effectively erased biological complementarity—the fundamental truth that children have a natural right to both a mother and a father.
By rewriting marriage from a child-centric institution into an adult-centric certificate of emotional attachment, the courts taught the public that marriage is merely an optional lifestyle choice. The data reflects this total loss of institutional purpose.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the marriage rate has plummeted to the lowest levels in American history, resulting in an atomized society—a culture broken down into isolated, self-centered individuals who put personal gratification ahead of communal and familial duties.
We are now reaping the grim, tangible results of this 50-year judicial curriculum.
Our population is no longer replacing itself; the domestic birth rate has dropped well below replacement level.
To keep our economy from stalling due to this birth dearth, our nation has experienced massive, destabilizing population shifts driven by historic waves of illegal immigration.
We have lost the patriotic, generational will to put the continuity of our country first because our laws have spent decades teaching us to put ourselves first.
Lest we think Wyoming is immune to this judicial classroom, the recent Wyoming Supreme Court ruling in State v. Johnson (2026) is a textbook symptom of the exact same disease.
In that case, the court took Article 1, Section 38—a 2012 constitutional amendment explicitly passed by Wyoming citizens to protect patient choice against federal overreach under Obamacare—and twisted it to strike down the legislature’s statutory bans on abortion.
Worse, to achieve this preferred social outcome, the court’s majority imported "strict scrutiny"—a foreign legal standard manufactured by federal courts that appears nowhere in the text of Wyoming law.
By superimposing this artificial standard onto the amendment, the court completely overrode and neutralized Subsection (c) of that very same provision, which explicitly preserves the legislature's authority to place "reasonable and necessary restrictions" on health care decisions. Our state judiciary chose to silence the voice of Wyoming voters by erasing plain text.
This ongoing overreach forces us to confront a foundational question about our system of government. If courts are deciding what constitutes a fundamental right and entirely restructuring our society, is this country still a Republic?
Senator Bernie Sanders frequently warns that America has transformed into an oligarchy. Sanders is right about the diagnosis, but he has misidentified the oligarchs. The true oligarchy in modern America is the judiciary.
We cannot build a stable society on a broken constitutional foundation. We are reaping the cultural whirlwind of a judicially imposed education: a historic flight from the altar, a declining domestic population, and millions of children growing up in the wreckage of the traditional home.
Fred Harrison is an attorney in Cheyenne and served in the Wyoming Legislature from 1982 - 1992. He can be reached at: Fred.Harrison@fjhlawoffice.com
