In his dissent to Friday’s monumental Supreme Court ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia accused the five-justice majority of “constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine.”
“So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me,” Scalia wrote. “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.”
Calling the Supreme Court a “strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval,” he decried the fact that all nine justices were all Harvard or Yale educated, mostly from the East Coast, and lacking in a Evangelical Christian or Protestant.
“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, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.” he said, “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.”
He went on to call Justice Anthony’s Kennedy’s majority opinion, “couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”
The “showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent,” he said.
In a footnote, Scalia suggested that if he signed on an opinion that began as Kennedy’s did, he “would hide my head in a bag.”
“The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” he said.
