When the landmark marriage equality ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act was handed down in June of 2013, Justice Anton Scalia penned such a scathing dissent I was worried for his health. It was a rant worthy of song. As I read, I could actually feel the veins popping out on my own forehead, so shitty was his mood and so sympathetic a reader am I.
When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with ‘whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter,’” he wrote. “Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it ‘demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,’ ante, at 23 — with an accompanying citation of Lawrence.
“It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here — when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will ‘confine’ the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with.”
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