Is Scalia in Denial About His Own Homophobia?

As even casual readers have likely figure out, I do not like Justice Antonin Scalia and believe it is time for him to either retire or be removed from the United States Supreme Court.  The man doesn't even attempt to appear impartial before hearing cases and he makes a mockery of the federal judiciary supposedly staying out of partisan activities.  And on issues of gay rights, one has lost the case before the first pleading is filed.  A piece in Slate looks at Scalia's inability to recognize his own anti-gay bigotry,  Here are highlights:

New York magazine’s expansive new interview with Supreme Court Justice (and lecture-circuit troll) Antonin Scalia contains a number of delightful revelations—he thinks the soup Nazi is hilarious! he doesn’t want ladies to use the F-word!—but the real fun lies in his tortured justification for his gay rights jurisprudence. When Jennifer Senior asks the justice about his attitudes toward homosexuality, Scalia spins out this specious yarn:

I’m not a hater of homosexuals at all. ... I still think it’s Catholic teaching that it’s wrong. Okay? But I don’t hate the people that engage in it. In my legal opinions, all I’ve said is that I don’t think the Constitution requires the people to adopt one view or the other. ... [I’m] not saying I personally think it’s destructive. Americans have a right to feel that way. They have a democratic right to do that, and if it is to change, it should change democratically, and not at the ukase of a Supreme Court.

This, to quote Scalia himself, is argle-bargle. The justice wants us to believe that his personal views on homosexuality have absolutely no bearing on his jurisprudence and that his legal opinions on gay rights are simply cerebral exercises in judicial reasoning. 

Scalia’s writings on gay rights explode any notion of judicial remove, rocketing beyond casual homophobia into the repugnant realm of virulently anti-gay invective. Scalia has compared homosexuality to murder, polygamy, and animal abuse. He’s analogized gay people to drug addicts and prostitutes and likened gay sex to incest, adultery, and bestiality. He’s echoed his son in questioning whether gay people even exist, suggesting that homosexuality is actually aberrant, depraved conduct rather than a true identity. And he’s derided the “homosexual agenda” for “eliminating the moral opprobrium” against “a lifestyle [many Americans] believe to be immoral and destructive.”

 Scalia wants to spout this censure while also insisting—as he does in the opinion quoted above—that “I have nothing against homosexuals.”

[L]et’s be clear here: Whatever he says in this interview, Antonin Scalia really, really hates gay people. He thinks they’re wicked and twisted and deviant; he suspects they’re insidiously indoctrinating America with perverted values; he thinks homophobes are merely “protecting themselves and their families” from homosexuality’s corrupting immorality.

None of this, moreover, is conjecture: It is all taken straight from the justice’s own writings and copious public comments. These comments aren’t one-off gaffes; they’re an endless barrage, which, taken together, form a consistent philosophy of unrelenting homophobia. If Scalia feels constantly compelled to air his grievances about gay rights, so be it. But it’s intellectually dishonest for him to simultaneously maintain that these beliefs have no bearing on his jurisprudence.

There's more, but you get the idea!