Elder Dallin H. Oaks: Constitution’s principles and freedoms must be protected

SALT LAKE CITY — Calling the United States Constitution this country's most important export, Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the LDS Church defined the Constitution's four great fundamentals and called on the American public to better understand and support it.

"After two centuries, every nation in the world except six have adopted written constitutions, and the United States Constitution was the model for all of them," said Elder Oaks in his keynote address at Friday night's Constitution Day Celebration at the Salt Lake Tabernacle. "Consequently, if we abandon or weaken its fundamental principle, we betray our own national ideals, and we also weaken our global neighbors."

A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Quorum of the Twelve Apostles since 1984, Elder Oaks previously was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, practiced law in Chicago, taught as a professor of law at the University of Chicago, spent nine years as Brigham Young University president and served nearly four years as a justice of the Utah Supreme Court.

His four great fundamental principles of the Constitution: popular sovereignty, division of powers in a federal system, the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers.

Of the first, he said people are the source of government power and sharing a measure of the burdens and responsibilities of governing.

"The government of the United States had to be ultimately responsible to the will of the sovereign people, but it also had to be stable," he said. "Without some government stability against an aroused majority, government could not give individuals or minorities protection against overreaching by the ruling majority."

Division of powers in a federal system divides government powers between the nation and state, limiting national powers and giving residuary powers to the state and local governments, which are most responsive to the people.

He cited the national Equal Rights Amendment proposed three decades ago and the possibility of federal courts decreeing that a state law on marriage is invalid under the U.S. Constitution as examples of having the potential to adversely affect the dominance of state law.

"Whatever the merits of current controversies over the laws of marriage and child adoption and the like, let us not forget that if the decisions of federal courts can override the actions of state lawmakers on this subject, we have suffered a significant constitutional reallocation of lawmaking power from the lawmaking branch to the judicial branch and from the states to the federal government."