By Jeffrey Page

Well, of course Antonin Scalia dissented in The Decision this week as the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and basically informed gay men and women that this really is one nation after all. Anyone who was surprised by Scalia’s vote was fooling himself.

For me, it was another Scalia moment that came to mind, the case in 2003 when the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law that had been on the books for years and practically never enforced. The court essentially ruled that what happens in a bedroom between consenting adults is nobody’s business but their own.

At the time of the Texas case, the dissenting Scalia expressed great fear for the nation. He said, “The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.”

What agenda did Scalia have in mind? Was it the one in which gay people vow they will not tolerate the crucifixion of young gay men on frontier fences in Wyoming, the tortured end of Matthew Shepard in 1998?

Was it the one in which gay men and women say they will no longer accept being treated as semi-citizens?

Or was it the agenda in which they demand the right to marry their person of choice – just as Scalia did when he wed Maureen McCarthy in 1960.

Could it have been the agenda that notes the presence of gay people in the military and their objection to being kicked out because of sexual orientation?

Or was it the agenda that has as its basis a demand for strict interpretation of the 14th amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” It goes on to declare that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Equal protection; I could have sworn every judge from the Supremes down to traffic court knew the meaning of that.

Anything wrong with these agendas?

When we speak of Scalia, we speak of a judge who coined an ear-catching phrase a decade or so ago – “homosexual sodomy” – and has been riding it ever since. This is a judge who said that outlawing “homosexual sodomy” is “a no-brainer” when he must know somewhere in his soul that outlawing sex between men, women or a combination isn’t possible. Scalia may be unhappy that he has no control over this but it doesn’t matter. Government cannot outlaw that which nature has sanctioned.

“For 200 years, ‘homosexual sodomy’ was criminal in every state,” Scalia said last year as if to suggest that made the criminalization acceptable.

He forgot to mention that slavery became illegal 78 years after the Constitution was ratified. Did that make America’s 78 years of slavery acceptable?

But enough of Scalia. Let good people throughout the land raise a toast to the members of the court who did the right thing.

Tags: Antonin Scalia, Jeffrey Page

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 27th, 2013 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Jeffrey Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.