Friday, June 26, 2015

Supremes Ruling on Gay Marriage: Justice Scalia's Dissent

Justice Scalia, writing for the minority in the Gay Marriage issue before the Supreme Court, skewered the majority justices for their frivolous, anti-constitutional decision.  Powerline has some salient quotes from that dissent, such as:
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. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
Scalia discusses the superficiality of the decision thus:
If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I 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.
Scalia's right.  Thanks to progressivism, leftism, and political correctness, we have lost our ability to govern ourselves.  Thanks to the increasinlgy superficiality of our culture, we have lost the ability to care.

Read Powerline's extracts of the dissent here.