Justice Scalia Is a Homophobe - By Barney Frank
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people won two victories in the Supreme Court today. We expected the big one: the fourth in a series of opinions by Justice Anthony Kennedy—one of the last sitting Reagan appointees—vindicating our right to legal equality. The unexpected one was smaller in public impact but also significant: Justice Antonin Scalia’s disclaimer that he is not personally troubled by the fact that we can marry each other. After a series of opinions, speeches and public comments expressing his strong disapproval of us, vigorously defending society’s right to express this attitude in discriminatory public policies, Scalia begins his characteristically vitriolic dissent by protesting that “the substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me.”
Yeah, right. This strikes me as the least sincere disavowal of homophobia I have encountered since former Majority Leader Dick Armey tried to argue that his reference to me as “Barney Fag” was just a mispronunciation of my last name. What we have here instead marks a tactical shift.
Apparently, Justice Scalia has come to realize that since public opinion in America has moved away from anti-LGBT prejudice, heavily salting his writings with a personal distaste for the idea that we should enjoy the same rights as our heterosexual brothers and sisters weakens the appeal of his legal reasoning. (Compare his angry screed in the sodomy case, essentially justifying the criminalization of private sexual conduct between consenting adults, with Justice Clarence Thomas’s terse statement that while he would have voted against the “silly” Texas statute in question, he believed it was a deeply flawed judgment that the Legislature was constitutionally permitted to make.) So in an unexplained abandonment of his vigorously anti-LGBT prior stance, Justice Scalia asks that his pronouncement that the Court’s opinion calls our democracy into question be judged not on the substantive issue, but as an expression of his view that “allow[ing] the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”
The inconsistency between this dissent and several of Scalia’s prior opinions deepens my skepticism about his newfound tolerant stance. Even before reaching this, there is the question of how many people Scalia thinks were on the Court when it ordered a much further-reaching social transformation in its decisions on race—including, of course, on who could marry whom.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/justice-scalia-gay-marriage-ruling-119480.html#ixzz3eIyjfBlG
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