In a post yesterday this blog noted Justice Antonin Scalia's latest episode of verbal diarrhea in which he engaged in yet another diatribe against LGBT Americans. Increasingly, Scalia seems better suited to have sat on the Spanish Inquisition of old rather than the U. S. Supreme Court. While he claims no ill will towards gays, he words and past opinions reveal a far different story. His statements and writings about gays fairly drip with animus. It is a wonder that his knuckles are bloodied from dragging along the floor and sidewalk. As noted in yesterday's post his blatant bias should disqualify him from hearing either of the recently accepted gay marriage cases. An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at Scalia and his Medieval view of gays and the world. Here are excerpts:
The Supreme Court’s announcement Friday that it will take up gay marriage is more than a chance for the justices to recognize the emerging national consensus in support of gay rights. It is a chance for them to overrule the medieval views of Antonin Scalia.
As if in response to the court’s announcement, the acid-tongued justice visited Princeton University late Monday and reiterated his opinion, expressed in a 2003 dissent, that a law banning sodomy is on par with laws forbidding bestiality or murder.
The court’s decision to take up a pair of gay-marriage cases is almost certainly good news for gay rights and almost certainly bad news for Scalia’s defense of discrimination. Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t let his court stand in the way of immigration and Obamacare, and he surely doesn’t want to be responsible for a modern-day Plessy v. Ferguson that stands against the fast-emerging majority in support of gay rights.
A Post-ABC News poll last month found that while a slim overall majority favors legalizing gay marriage, those younger than 30 support it by 66 percent to 33 percent. Nine states and the District have now legalized gay marriage.
If Scalia is to honor his own principle, he’ll vote to strike down DOMA and give his blessing to those states that wish to legalize gay marriage. But don’t count on it. In writings and oral arguments of late, Scalia has sounded more like a conservative pundit than a jurist, railing against Obamacare and in support of immigration restrictions. He used his immigration dissent to criticize President Obama over a policy that didn’t figure in the case.
His 2003 dissent in the sodomy case was typical of his extra-legal logic. He accused his colleagues of signing on to “the so-called homosexual agenda” and taking “sides in the culture war” with a “massive disruption of the current social order.” . . . . A decade later, Scalia’s parade of horribles still hasn’t mustered, and support for gay marriage has spread by the very means — democratic change — that Scalia praised. If he weren’t so opposed to international experience, he’d know that gay marriage hasn’t been a major factor in places that legalized it earliest.
Scalia finds himself with a growing list of foes: public opinion, empirical evidence, his own writings and an increasing number of conservative legal thinkers. Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, a Republican appointee and a conservative, wrote in an opinion striking down DOMA that “the Constitution delegated no authority to the government of the United States on the subject of marriage.”
No comments:
Post a Comment