In California, wedding bells are ringing once again for same-sex couples. But in the background, there is another sound – a tired and misguided lament that we have heard many times before.

Whenever some in society dislike a particular court ruling, they rail against judges for being “undemocratic.”

Not surprisingly, these complaints are loudest when the courts strike down measures that were approved by voters.

So it is with California’s Proposition 8.

Passed by voters in 2008, it banned same-sex marriage. Then, late last month, it was thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court, prompting its disappointed backers to launch into the now familiar refrain:

“Elitist judges…forcing their own attitudes on the community…overruling the expressed will of the majority…trampling on the rights of voters.”

The problem with this argument is that it shows no real understanding of constitutional democracy. It suggests any measure voters want, no matter what, is more important than the paramount law of the land.

Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. That’s what a federal court ruled and it’s what the government of California already believed. So the State accepted the court verdict without appeal.

An appeal was filed instead by groups with no stake in the issue other than their own disapproval of same-sex marriage. And now the Supreme Court has concluded that they have no standing -- telling them, in effect, to mind their own business.

But that part of the message was clearly lost on the Mormon Church, which leapt in with a hasty and particularly ill-conceived response.

"Many Californians,” it said, “will wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong when their government will not defend or protect a popular vote that reflects the views of a majority of their citizens.”

"The Church remains irrevocably committed to strengthening traditional marriage between a man and a woman,” it added.

To start with, it’s hard to know what Mormons consider “irrevocable.” After all, they first committed themselves to the idea of one man / one woman in 1835. That lasted for 17 years.

Then in 1852, there was an irrevocable commitment to one man / multiple women, which lasted half a century.

Finally, with the “Second Manifesto” of 1904, they made their current irrevocable commitment.

But if it’s irony for the Mormons to cast themselves as the champions of timeless tradition, it is ripe hypocrisy to jump on the three-wheeled bandwagon that says cases like this are a failure of democracy. If any institution should know better, it’s the Mormon Church.

Even democracies have dangers. A majority is capable of its own form of tyranny. That’s why certain rights must be guaranteed. The bedrock of a democratic society is that all its citizens have the opportunity to participate in its institutions. And those rights cannot be denied just because of the popular prejudices of the moment. Protection of minority rights is not just a nice feature of a democratic society. It’s a defining feature.

It’s all well and good to say that gay and lesbian minorities have no established right to marriage. But there is a well-established right to equality before the law. And that is not limited by the fashions of public opinion.

In 1968, a Gallup poll found that 72 per cent of Americans were opposed to interracial marriage. So bans on interracial marriage had overwhelming support from voters.

But they had been ruled unconstitutional the year before by the Supreme Court – not ‘imposing its own attitudes,’ as some might have said, but simply upholding the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

What the court did was not undemocratic. The laws it overturned were undemocratic, because they robbed people of rights that are essential to a democracy. The mere fact that racist laws were popular did not make them democratic.

This is an important distinction. A society that doesn’t understand the difference between what is popular and what is democratic wouldn’t be able to tell a lynch mob from a referendum.

People who are red-headed or left-handed are in the minority. If one imagines a climate of bigotry toward them, the majority could easily pass an initiative that – say – stripped them of their right to vote.

Evidently, some would consider this perfectly democratic. Never mind that it so obviously is not.

Ayn Rand summed it up: “Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities.”

Historically, of course, it would be hard to find groups more dependent on this principle than religious minorities. That’s why the Mormon Church, in particular, should understand that minority rights cannot be contingent on popular approval.

Not only were Mormons reviled and persecuted – back when they were a little less “irrevocable” about one man / one woman – but they were also held up as a case study in a landmark text on rights and freedoms: John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.”

In 1859, Mill wrote that the then-prevailing Mormon doctrine of polygamy “excites unquenchable animosity” among the majority. And he added “no one has a deeper disapprobation than I have of this Mormon institution.”

But he argued that even deep moral and religious disapproval by the majority could not outweigh the basic freedoms of the Mormon minority.

“It is difficult to see on what principles but those of tyranny they can be prevented from living (as) they please,” he wrote.

Of course, it is equally difficult today to see “what principles but those of tyranny” there are for prohibiting same-sex marriage. After all, the question in the U.S. is whether to allow it. Not whether to compel it. And to Mill, that would be a crucial difference.

Mill argued that those in the majority have no right to prohibit conduct by anyone unless that conduct interferes with their own legitimate freedoms. And merely offending their moral values, he said, is not a genuine injury and does not justify interference.

“There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed. But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it.”

Obviously, it is democratic for those in the majority to elect a government and direct the course of public policy in all matters where they, or the community as a whole, have a stake. But it is not democratic for them to force compliance with their own beliefs onto a minority, just because they would like society better that way.

So to those in the nineteenth century who campaigned for the outright eradication of the Mormon Church, Mill argued that – whether they were in the majority or not – they had no right to prohibit Mormonism merely for being “a scandal to persons… who have no part or concern in it.”

Today, those who oppose same-sex marriage have an absolute right not to marry anyone of the same sex. And that’s where their legitimate interest ends. Beyond that, they have “no part or concern in it.”

Even if they are in the majority, those who think their own personal or religious biases are more important than other people’s freedoms are in no position to call anyone else undemocratic. Protecting those freedoms is a truer measure of democracy than allowing an overreaching majority to violate them.

Ultimately, anyone who thinks a referendum alone is more democratic than the rights that make us a democracy is really asking us to live in a society that has no rights at all. Just privileges, given or taken away at the whim of popular opinion.

In that environment, no one’s interests are protected, because any of us could be outnumbered on one issue or another. This is worth remembering. Even if the Mormon Church has so quickly forgotten.