Supremes to pope: you lose


The New York Times:

In a long-sought victory for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Courtruled on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in the 5 to 4 decision. He was joined by the court’s four more liberal justices.

As Eddie Tabash likes to say, it’s Justice Kennedy’s world and we all live in it. This time it worked out.

Scalia of course had to poop on the party.

In a second dissent, Justice Scalia mocked Justice Kennedy’s soaring language.

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Justice Scalia wrote of his colleague’s work. “Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

He’s just jealous.

Comments

  1. karmacat says

    The projection is strong with Scalia. As Barney Frank said and I am paraphrasing, “they are just angry that they didn’t have this option when they got married.”

  2. says

    Ah, Scalia. Nice of you to join us. I wonder if you could help me out with something I’ve been wondering about…

    Is it actually dusty in the dustbin of history?

  3. moarscienceplz says

    It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and
    the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.

    -Scalia

    That’s it. Scalia has officially lost his last few remaining functioning brain cells. Since when is adding a new freedom to people “ruling” over them? The SCOTUS was specifically charged with providing a check against an overreaching Executive or Legislative branch, and the majority has rightly determined that SSM restrictions enacted by an ever-shrinking rump of states served no worthwhile purpose.

    Justice Scalia, once again you are tarring yourself as a dinosaur and a laughingstock. You are doomed to be lumped in with such other SCOTUS “luminaries” as the Dred Scott court, and the “Separate But Equal” court as perpetual objects of scorn for generations of American students. Enjoy your legacy, sir.

  4. says

    A little less in the key of schadenfreude:

    I’ve been in the US since the beginning of the week (Cambridge, MA), will be next, through past the fourth.

    Honestly, I’m not normally much for anyone’s national flags and fireworks thing. I’m missing my own nation’s next week, and I’m not gonna claim I’m exactly broken hearted. Tends to blur into the same huge drunken/stoned mob of tourists, after a while (I live in Ottawa, and it’s where the big party is, for this, and there are a lot of those)…

    But America, it may actually be kinda nice to be here for yours, this year, seems to me.

  5. Scr... Archivist says

    …as pretentious as its content is egotistic . . . showy profundities …

    Is Scalia trying to say that the majority opinion is flamboyant?

  6. iknklast says

    The court system is often the only body available to protect the minority against the tyranny of the majority. In recent years, they haven’t done so well. Today, though? Good job.

    And I think Scalia needs to go back and re-read the decision. It doesn’t appear the court decided that every human being in the country has to accept gay marriage, only that the government does. It leaves individuals as free to frown and shake their finger as ever.

  7. PatrickG says

    Cross-posting from Pharyngula (more or less)… Everyone’s focusing on Scalia, I haven’t seen Thomas get quite as much attention. After defining “dignity” as something that derives from God, he has the unmitigated gall, the sheer evilness, to write this (from page 17 of his dissent):

    The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity), because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away

    Emphasis mine. I have no words, only horror.

  8. Al Dente says

    PatrickG @7

    Clarence Thomas did not lose whatever shreds of dignity he has just because he’s on the losing side of same-sex marriage.

  9. luzclara says

    Thomas’s dissent is so stupid and so wrong. And so mortifying.

    Scalia on the other hand is simply nasty-ass and loony. And if memory serves, I think that I and my 320 million fellow citizens had to be “ruled” by Geo Bush and Dick Cheney, thanks to a ruling by that majority of justices.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *