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.
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.”
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?
-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.
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.
Is Scalia trying to say that the majority opinion is flamboyant?
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.
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):
Emphasis mine. I have no words, only horror.
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.
Maybe by his definition….
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.
As I said over at Pharyngula, at least Scalia provides some unintentional comic relief. To wit, Scalia’s dissent led to the creation of the Antonin Scalia Insult Generator