National Review Writer Compares Gay Marriage To Dred Scott

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A writer for the conservative National Review on Tuesday compared the Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the issue of gay marriage to the landmark Dred Scott decision, which justified slavery in the South and helped pave the way for the Civil War.

Reacting to Monday’s news that the Supreme Court had cleared the way for same-sex marriage across much of the country, writer Matthew J. Franck called the Court’s acquiescence “a slow-motion Dred Scott for the twenty-first century.”

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court ruled that blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” rejecting Scott’s appeal for freedom and destroying the Missouri Compromise.

After Think Progress writer Ian Millhiser called him out, Franck wrote another post laying out his argument in more detail:

In Dred Scott it was the false idea that some human beings can own other human beings, and that a democratic people cannot say otherwise. In the same-sex marriage rulings it is the false idea that men can marry men, and women can marry women, and that democratic peoples cannot say otherwise.

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