A consistent political pattern has emerged over the past four decades: The left wins in the courtroom, and the Democrats then lose at the ballot box.

The New Jersey Supreme Court, ordering action on equal rights for gay couples, provides the latest incident of judicial activism. And while the ideological left cheers such legislating from the bench, ordinary Democrats, trying to win elections, become wary. Because once again, a pro-conservative, pro-Republican backlash is being set in motion.

Last Wednesday the Garden State’s highest court ruled that denying homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual couples "bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose." No legitimate governmental purpose? A stern charge to make -- that the state government has failed to do its duty over the past 219 years.

It’s more accurate to say that a 4-3 majority on the court ordered the legislature to do its bidding. There’s a phrase for that: "judicial tyranny."

It must be said here that a solid argument can be made that committed same-sex couples deserve societal recognition. Many societies, across history, have made some sort of allowance for gay and lesbian relationships. Indeed, the idea that different people, in different places, might come up with different answers to the gay-relationship issue fits in with the nuanced worldview of Edmund Burke, patron saint of modern conservatism. In 1790, Burke wrote, "The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition of direction of power can be suitable." In other words, one-size-fits-all solutions aren’t advisable.

So with an appropriate Burkean perspective, conservatives shouldn’t get too riled up if local jurisdictions -- such as, say, the City of San Francisco -- decide to carve out space for gay and lesbian couples.

But that’s not what happened in New Jersey. In that state of nearly 9 million people, liberal-activist litigators went straight to the courts; they calculated, accurately, that they would get their way with elite judges. The irony of this case is that polls show that most New Jerseyans support civil unions, if not gay marriage. Which is to say, if gay leaders had been willing to work through the small-"d" democratic process, they might well have achieved at least some of their goals.

But instead, Lambda Legal went straight to the courts. And so the familiar pattern is likely to re-emerge: Liberals win with judges in the short term, then lose with voters in the long term. It’s happened before. In Vermont, for example, the State Legislature -- under pressure from the state Supreme Court -- enacted legislation providing for civil unions, which the Democratic governor then, Howard Dean, signed into law in 2000. Whereupon the backlash set in: That November, Republicans captured the governorship and one house of the legislature.

That’s the predictable pattern: Courts put gay marriage on the agenda, and then voters do their best to take it off. Over the past six years, 21 states have voted on the question of gay marriage, and the Republican-allied right has won all 21 of those referenda, even in such "liberal" states as California, Hawaii and Oregon.

At the same time, Democratic politicians have lost. In Ohio, a referendum banning gay marriage was on the ballot in November 2004; it passed by 1.2 million votes. That same day, in the Buckeye State’s presidential balloting, George W. Bush squeaked past John Kerry by just 120,000 votes. Anti-gay-marriage coattails almost surely carried Bush to victory in Ohio and thus back into the White House.

In fact, lefty litigation victories over the past 40 years -- most notably the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision -- have cheered liberals and divided Democrats. Which helps to explain why Republicans have won seven of the past 10 presidential elections. Many socially conservative Democrats have abandoned a party that clearly prefers liberal lawyers to citizens holding "reactionary" social views.

And now these ex-Democrats are being fired up, once again, by judges acting as legislators.