Supreme Court Justice: Why do we protect gay people but not child molesters?
Ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has compared LGBT rights to protections for child molesters.
Ater the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right earlier this year, the justice penning a scathing and often bizarre dissent attacking the decision and his colleagues.
Scalia wrote that he would rather “hide my head in a bag” than support the opinion, comparing it to “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie”.
Speaking to law students at Georgetown University on Monday, he confessed his eccentric and verbose dissenting opinions were often written to be ‘fun’.
According to the New York Times, he told the students: “I write the dissents for you guys… I write my dissents and try to make them not only clear but interesting and even fun.”
Speaking about same-sex marriage, he questioned where the Constitution draws the line – asking why protections for gay people were included but not child molesters.
He said: “What minorities deserve protection? What, it’s up to me to identify deserving minorities?
“What about pederasts? What about child abusers?”
He joked: “This is a deserving minority… Nobody loves them!”
In his ‘super-fun’ (for law students anyway) same-sex marriage dissent, Justice Scalia labelled the ruling a “judicial Putsch”.
He wrote: “The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the Court to do so.”
He added: “The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me.It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. 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. Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best.
“But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law.
“Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its ‘reasoned judgment,’ thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.”
