Justice Alito: 'The Idea That Romantic Love Is a Prerequisite to Marriage' is the Problem

If there's any doubt about the backward thinking of supposed "thinkers" and "intellectuals on the far right, one need look no further than Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's (Alito is pictured at left) recent dissent in United States v. Windsor in which this Neanderthal bemoans that the idea of romantic love should be a part of marriage began all the problems surrounding marriage and gay marriage in particular.  Alito seemingly longs for the days when women were bartered by their male relatives for livestock and other financial or political benefits with out a care as to whether the woman involved could even tolerate her often much older husband.  Alito's creepy views are certainly in keeping with the Christofascist agenda of subservient wives and sex being only for procreation (and male pleasure).  Huffington Post looks at Alito's batshitery.  Here are excerpts:

There's been lots of discussion about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's off-the-rails DOMA dissent, but if you really want a peek into the mind of someone living a couple of centuries in the past -- and using pseudo-academic rationales rather than pure emotion, like Scalia -- you've got to read Justice Samuel Alito's concurring dissent on DOMA.  In it we learn that the problem with the decline of marriage really began with "the ascendence of the idea that romantic love is a prerequisite to marriage."

This makes me think that a) Justice Alito purchased his wife at an auction, or from her parents in exchange for a plot of land and a couple of mules, or b) she kicked him out of the house the moment he walked in the door after she read his dissent.

Is this what conservatives really think, that the real problem is that we're marrying for love?

The family is an ancient and universal human institution. Family structure reflects the characteristics of a civilization, and changes in family structure and in the popular understanding of marriage and the family can have profound effects. Past changes in the understanding of marriage -- for example, the gradual ascendance of the idea that romantic love is a prerequisite to marriage -- have had far-reaching consequences.... We can expect something similar to take place if same-sex marriage becomes widely accepted. The long-term consequences of this change are not now known and are unlikely to be ascertainable for some time to come.

I can't imagine that Alito really believes we should go back to arranged marriages. But the man who stated during oral arguments on DOMA that gay unions are "newer than cellphones and the Internet" does appear to believe that the shift to "romantic love" was a dramatic change that caused such a jolt to the institution of marriage

"At present, no one -- including social scientists, philosophers, and historians -- can predict with any certainty what the long-term ramifications of widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage will be," Alito warns. And for that reason Alito believes the court should have upheld DOMA. The logical conclusion of this reasoning is that if the government could have enforced arranged marriage with a federal law, it should have, since no one could predict the outcome of these newfangled romantic-love marriages, which altered the institution of marriage forever.

The descent of the far right into utter insanity continues and it is frightening that someone as out of touch with normal reality is on the Supreme Court.