One of the best parts of any Supreme Court decision that doesn't go the absolute farthest-right way is reading Justice Antonin Scalia's increasingly unhinged dissenting opinions. He does not disappoint here, beginning by calling the decision a "threat to American democracy" and continuing on to offer up the important legal opinion that the stupid Supreme Court is made up of stupid Harvard and Yale graduates who aren't from the heartland and don't understand real Americans because they're so
stupid and radical and not-Protestant and such.
[This court] consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers[18] who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count).
Antonin Scalia, Master of Compasses, has spoken.
Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans[19]), or even a Protestant of any denomination. [...]
And that's why we need affirmative action, Antonin Scalia decided for the first time in any context. Because me and my fellow Ivy-League mostly-Catholic highbrow lawyerin' justices, to use the technical legal term for these things, suck.
[T]o allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
While I am sure Antonin Scalia honestly believes these things, just as I am sure he will no doubt believe an entirely different set of contradicting things tomorrow, I think Scalia undoes his own premise here. His notion that the court is made up of patrician Ivy League elitists is tested mightily when he offers up legal opinions that sound like they have been culled from newspaper website comment threads. Thank you for your thoughts, SCOTUSSTUD1982, and your opinions on California are so noted.
