Justice Scalia (I cringe every time I see/hear those two words together) let his ignorance and theocracy shine in his scathing dissent in today's announcement from the Supreme Court that discrimination against homosexual marriage is wrong.
From ThinkProgress "19 Hysterical Passages From Supreme Court Same-Sex Marriage Dissenters"
http://thinkprogress.org/...
Scalia: The majority think they are smarter than everyone else; and 'I am not a bigot'
Although I am anything but a constitutional scholar, I've long wondered about the Court's habitually narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. But one would think a self-proclaimed 'originalist' like Scalia would take the amendment at its most obvious reading. After all, it was such a reasoning on four little words in the Affordable Care Act that led him to decide against the majority in yesterday's decision release. (But maybe his pretense at 'originalism' is so strict he doesn't extend the founders' intent to those pesky amendments.)
"They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds — minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly — could not....
These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, 21 cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.
Justices Roberts and Thomas also thought the issue was not addressed by anything in the U.S. Constitution. Now I'll have to do a word search to see if 'civil rights' is a phrase used in that document. If I don't find it... well, religionists deny Jefferson's 'wall of separation' between church and state just because neither the phrase nor the word 'separation' are in the First Amendment ...
In honor of Gay Pride Week and the wonderful present from 6 Supreme Justices, I repost from my seldom-used blog CivilLibertyRocks, originally published 11/20/13: