by John Galt » Fri Jun 26, 2015 8:36 am
Scalia, dissenting
I join THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion in full. I write separately
to call attention to this Court’s threat to American
democracy.
The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal
importance to me. The law can recognize as marriage
whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements
it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil
consequences, from tax treatment to rights of inheritance.
Those civil consequences—and the public approval that
conferring the name of marriage evidences—can perhaps
have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the
effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of
special importance to me what the law says about marriage.
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. 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.
Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience. -- Theodore Roosevelt
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.