Since this doesn't seem to have been picked up by anyone else here, I thought that I would talk about this article from The Atlantic titled "The Twilight of Antonin Scalia".
Garrett Epps adapted
his book American Justice 2014 Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court for a great piece in the magazine. Court watchers, Scalia haters and especially gay rights advocates would do very well to read it.
The article spends more than a few words detailing Scalia's garrulous insoucience and the author certainly enjoys laying out the Justice's weaknesses. They do not detract from this very interesting point though.
Antonin Scalia may have authored the very legal opinion that will ring the death knell for laws that restrict same sex marriage. The subtitle of the article is "The conservative hero's fiery 2012 dissent on same-sex marriage could be his most influential opinion—but not in the way he intended."
Epps points to Scalia's dissent in United States v. Windsor from 2013. The Court, in Windsor, struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Section 3 kept the federal government from recognizing same sex marriages that were legal under state law.
The real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “‘bare ... desire to harm’” couples in same-sex marriages. How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.
I will lift a paragraph directly from Epps:
With stunning swiftness, federal district judges have heard and decided challenges to state same-sex marriage bans, and by May 2014, a dozen judges had struck them down—first in Utah; then in rapid succession, Ohio, Illinois, Virginia, Kentucky, and even Texas.
Judges young and old, male and female, gay and straight, Republican and Democrat, read Windsor and saw in it a logic that doomed state efforts to confine marriage to its “traditional” function as a union of man and woman. And some of what they read was not in the majority opinion but in Scalia’s dissent. In fact, about half of the opinions explicitly cited Scalia’s words.
One decision that Epps points to is Ohio district Judge Timothy Black in
Obergfell v. Wymslo
And now it is just as Justice Scalia predicted—the lower courts are applying the Supreme Court's decision, as they must, and the question is presented whether a state can do what the federal government cannot—i.e., discriminate against same-sex couples ... simply because the majority of the voters don't like homosexuality (or at least didn't in 2004). Under the Constitution of the United States, the answer is no ....
What a hell of a result for the man who once wrote, in
Lawrence v. Texas:
“Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”
Since I really should add something of my own for copyright reasons and POSNAD attackers, I say this: Serves him right!
I will end this with a bit from another legal scholar: