Scalia: SCOTUS Majority is A 'Threat to American Democracy'
Newsmax Wires
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion of the Supreme Court's decision and called the majority on the high court a "threat to American democracy."
The ruling "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," Scalia said.
Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Samuel Alito, Scalia and Clarence Thomas all dissented in separate opinions.
There are currently 13 state bans in place, while another state, Alabama, has contested a court ruling that lifted the ban there.
Scalia's dissent was among the strongest:
"The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me," he wrote. "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. Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best."
"But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law," Scalia argued. "Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its 'reasoned judgment,' thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect."
Scalia took the harshest tones against the majority:
"The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic," he writes. "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. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.
"And to 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," he argued. "But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch."