Perhaps one of the most egregious examples of the current trend of gratuitously defaming people based on the suspected rationale for their positions is the majority opinion in the recent Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Here we find justices of the Supreme Court asserting that they are able to read the minds, hearts and souls of people, including Congress and the President of the United States, and have determined that the supporters of DOMA acted with malice, with the “purpose…to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples. The same majority opinion goes on to claim some sort of superhuman power to read men’s and women’s hearts, allowing the court now to announce that the motivation for DOMA was “to demean,” to brand as unworthy and to humiliate.You can read the whole post here.
I also highly recommend you read Justice Scalia's dissent in the DOMA case. Here are a couple of excerpts:
This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this Court to pronounce the law. Today’s opinion aggrandizes the latter, with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former. We have no power to decide this case. And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.
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The majority concludes that the only motive for this Act was the “bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” Ante, at 20. Bear in mind that the object of this condemnation is not the legislature of some onceConfederate Southern state (familiar objects of the Court’s scorn, see, e.g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578 (1987)), but our respected coordinate branches, the Congress and Presidency of the United States. Laying such a charge against them should require the most extraordinary evidence, and I would have thought that every attempt would be made to indulge a more anodyne explanation for the statute. The majority does the opposite—affirmatively concealing from the reader the arguments that exist in justification. It makes only a passing mention of the “arguments put forward” by the Act’s defenders, and does not even trouble to paraphrase or describe them. See ante, at 21. I imagine that this is because it is harder to maintain the illusion of the Act’s supporters as unhinged members of a wild-eyed lynch mob when one first describes their views as they see them.
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To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act. But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” ”injure,” “degrade,” ”demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.
Justice Scalia's dissent will go down as one of the greatest dissenting opinions written by the Supreme Court. The majority opinion will go down as one of the worst, not even worthy of being published in the Supreme Court Reporters.
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