WASHINGTON – The legal world may have become inured to wildly rhetorical opinions by Justice Antonin Scalia, but his dissent in the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision Friday reached new heights for its utter contempt for the majority of his colleagues.
In the course of just nine pages, Scalia called the opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy, with whom he has served on the court for 28 years, "pretentious," "egotistic," "silly," and filled with "straining-to-be-memorable passages."
"This is a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government," Scalia wrote.
He mocked Kennedy's opening sentence.
"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," Scalia wrote. "The Supreme Court of the United States has descended … to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."
In arguing that the court had usurped the right of states and citizens to decide the matter themselves, Scalia said the decision eroded democracy.
"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."
Scalia derided the court's makeup by way of saying they have no right to make social decisions for the nation.
