“I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch,” thundered Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and presidential aspirant, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. “We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat.”

So that settles it. If government gendarmes try to force Huckabee to marry another man, he will grab the musket or flintlock. Unless by “acquiesce,” he means some other form of active resistance to same-sex marriage. Rip up an unlikely wedding invitation?

Such melodramatic declarations just reinforce a personal rule of thumb: Avoid people who can’t go a day without uttering “tyranny.”

We get it, Tyranny Man (always men). If you were born in the 1700s, you would’ve fought on the front lines against the Redcoats, arrived early to the Boston Tea Party and signed the Declaration of Independence with greater flare than John Hancock.

But you weren’t, so stop pretending every court decision or government act that doesn’t go your way is tantamount to King George III placing you in the stocks. It’s especially annoying when you overlook the fact that the freedoms provided by the Founding Fathers were only available to white males. If you were truly concerned with liberty, you would lament this oversight, rather than portraying yourself as a victim when someone else’s shackles are lifted.

Read up on real oppression – like slavery that was protected under the Confederate flag – rather than diminishing it with modern-day peeves that lack any sense of proportion. Letting two people who love each other marry is not tyranny. It’s an act of liberation that’s conceived in liberty.

Liberty lamented. Headline at the conservative National Review’s blog: “Supreme Court Forces States to Perform Gay Marriages, 5–4.”

The magazine, founded by William F. Buckley, was never a fan of the civil rights movement either. It was also nervous that dissolving apartheid in South Africa would hand the Communists another country, so it figured it was better for the oppressed to stick with the oppressors they knew.

If the magazine had a blog back then, it might have written headlines such as:

“Supreme Court Forces States To Open School Doors to Negroes.”

“Supreme Court Forces States To Perform Mixed-Race Marriages.”

Actually, at the time of the mixed-race ruling, 1967, the public was solidly in opposition to such weddings. Gay marriage, meanwhile, has the support of more than two-thirds of the public. It’s heartening to see Americans more fully embrace equal rights these days, even if it does ruffle a magazine that considers the word “progress” to be a pejorative.

Intents and purposes. It’s amusing to listen to Affordable Care Act opponents go on and on about the impenetrable complexity of the law’s 2,700 page bill while also declaring that its implementation can be distilled into a literal reading of a mere five words: “an exchange established by a state.”

That’s the phrase plaintiffs rode all the way to the Supreme Court, before Chief Justice John Roberts erected a permanent stop sign. He wrote that those five words shorn of context and intent made no sense if interpreted literally. In the hearing rooms of Congress and in the bill itself, it was clear that the subsidies designed to make insurance affordable were intended to go to all 50 states.

Or as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a dissent involving another ACA case, “the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended” without the subsidies. So even though he was aware of the law’s intent, Scalia still chose to write a scathing dissent in which he told justices in the majority to go soak their heads.

But not literally.