Generally, the difference as I understand it is that fiction is completely made up and not intended to be treated as fact. A legend, on the other hand, has some kind of historical basis, but can’t be verified, and has plausible elements and other elements that are likely embellished. And the Gospels fit into that latter category.
It doesn’t mean the Gospels should be treated as historical fact, of course, except what bits might have reliable corroboration. (And I’m sure most history as we understand it is pieced together from legends anyway; we just have to go by the best of what we can gather from what sources we have.)
Strictly speaking, legends do not need to have some kind of historical basis. They can, and often do, but they can also be things that never happened and indeed could not happen. They are traditional narratives that are told as plausible.
TL, DR: On what basis could the Court overturn Obergefell v. Hodges other than “we really really don’t like it”? More broadly given that the Supreme Court is the end of the line for judicial appeal, and thus in a common law system like the US’s where stare decisis is an important principle, on what basis can any previous Court ruling be overturned? Different sources claim that S.C. decisions have been reversed or overturned (not just rendered moot by constitutional amendment like Dred Scott) between 140 and 230 times; what was the Court’s reasoning?
The same basis which was used to overturn Roe v. Wade, and which Clarence Thomas has already mentioned in regards to Obergefell: that previous rulings which were based on “substantive due process” incorrectly applied that principle.
Urgh, tried to read Wikipedia’s article on substantive due process and it made my head swim.
ETA: Apparently the whole issue is the struggle over “natural” rights and their conflict with the “police power” of the government– the general authority of government to regulate, restrict or prohibit via due process of law. Or in other words, how do you enumerate the unenumberated?
And the retort to that (not my own of course, some scholar) is that there are in fact a couple narrative sections that Matthew and Luke have in common but which are not found in Mark, so the idea of this hypothetical Q as a sayings gospel kind of goes out the window (because we must now account for these narrative commonalities as well).
Ultimately, I am just not convinced that there is enough reason to infer the existence of a written source that was both (a) so important to early Christians that it found its way into two gospels, and yet (b) not important enough to survive independently as a written source.
Q was invented when biblical scholars (who, to this day, are predominantly Christian, and thus liable to bias in favor of multiplying allegedly independent sources to lend weight to the veracity of the gospels as history) assumed that Matthew and Luke must have been written independently, and yet for some reason the hypothesis survives even now as we have reason to believe that Luke may have been written several years at least after Matthew (meaning the author of Luke could have had access to Matthew and massaged and rearranged things to suit his own message).
at it’s most simple, the prior decision got it wrong. Stare Decisis is indeed an important concept and guiding principle for the legal system, it is not an absolute rule that every prior decision is correct and can never be challenged again.
I don’t know how he can honestly believe that anymore, after the overturning of Roe and numerous rulings giving all kinds of unenumerated powers to the president, in defiance of the text of the Constitution and in opposition to what the framers intended. I’m pretty sure they did not mean the president was above the law, could re-appropriate money Congress had allocated for another purpose, could refuse to enforce laws he doesn’t like, etc. Their opinions do not state those things that baldly, but those are the effects.
He’s a doddering old man to whom memories and voices from decades ago are more present than the present moment itself. The older you get, the present gets fuzzier and the past gets sharper. Especially since he retired from the law biz.