Scalia in all his glory, via Wikimedia Commons
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
As usual, the bombast kind of blurs the substance, but Scalia sounds like he might thinks this ruling will be ignored. Otherwise, it's unclear how the Supreme Court will become impotent.Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion was less entertaining, but it was the one stapled to the majority decision. It included a section about the constitution:With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly not based on law, but on the "reasoned judgment" of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.
Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.
He's not really hiding what he's saying: polygamy might be next. Maybe he's right. Who knows?But easily the most disquieting dissent was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. He took issue with the primacy of dignity in Kennedy's opinion, and gave us a deep dive into dignity's role in civil rights struggles, and his views seem far from universal:Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective 'two' in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not.
The Whitney Houston-esque idea that a government can't take away dignity is comforting. Thomas apparently imagines all the oppressed people throughout American history—the ones getting run off their land, denied rights, whipped, subjugated, beaten, separated from their families, imprisoned, starved to death, and massacred—were never once, through all of it, denied dignity by the government that was doing those things. That's touching, but counterintuitive.Anyway, the upshot is that you have the right to go to a county clerk and get a marriage license for yourself and your same-sex partner in any jurisdiction in America now, but four Supreme Court Justices really think you shouldn't. But what they think doesn't matter any more than what they think of how you have sex.Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.