In sum, the California Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to decide cases with regard just to the legal principles established by prior cases. In combination with a number of other State courts who have done so, it takes Justice Blackmun’s dictum about how a church could change its constitution and elevates that dictum into a rule of law that overrides even the Statute of Frauds.<\/p>\n
The Court then compounds this major misstep, as courts are wont to do, with a dictum of its own: it brushes aside any further inquiry into the validity of the Dennis Canon, saying that “this is one of those questions regarding ‘religious doctrine or polity’ . . . on which we must defer to the greater church\u2019s resolution” (op. at 29). To which I say: what “resolution”? When, or where, has General Convention ever “resolved” the issue of whether it properly passed the Dennis Canon? General Convention has said absolutely nothing about the Dennis Canon ever since 1979—and the Canon itself was not even referred to by the Church’s own news service for over twenty years after that. This, unfortunately, is all too typical of the way judges dispose of matters that might, if looked into, disturb the major result on which they have decided.<\/p>\n