WASHINGTON – The most dramatic moment in a historic case before the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage Tuesday morning came after the first attorney had wrapped up her argument.
“Gay marriage is an abomination in the eyes of God,” suddenly screamed a protester in the courtroom.
After continuing his protest, the man was escorted from the court room.
Justice Antonin Scalia quipped, “That was refreshing, actually,” causing loud laughter to ripple through the courtroom.
Scalia’s approval of ancient wisdom echoed his previous referral to the ancient Greeks and Romans to make an argument against government sanctioning of same-sex marriage.
The justice noted the Greeks and Romans had no moral disapproval of homosexual relations, yet neither culture ever considered approving same-sex marriage. The implication was that those cultures must have found it would cause some sort of harm to society.
Scalia used the same example to indicate that modern state laws defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman were not motivated by dislike of, or discrimination against, gays.
He asked attorney Mary Bonauto, who argued in favor of same-sex marriage, if it were true that same-sex relationships but not marriages were sanctioned by those cultures.
When she said yes, Scalia continued, “So their exclusion of same-sex marriage was not due to prejudice, right?” Adding, unless she considered Plato prejudiced.
Bonauto replied she could not speak for ancient philosophers but was immediately cut off by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who, perhaps surprisingly, picked up the conservative Scalia’s line of argument.
Breyer noted heterosexual marriage has been the law everywhere for thousands of years, and suddenly Bonauto was asking immediate change.
“Why can’t these states wait and see” if the other states’ experiments in gay marriage leads to harm?
Bonauto answered that under the 14th Amendment equal protection clause, the gay couple she represented should not have to wait. Furthermore, she claimed, changes to previous marriage laws, such as eliminating prohibitions to inter-racial marriage, had been greatly unsettling to many people, but it was still the right thing to do.
Scalia countered that he understood, but if her side prevailed, it would effectively end the debate.
“People will feel disenfranchised” if they don’t get a chance to vote on such an important question, he said.
There were two important questions before the court:
- Can states define marriage as only between a man and a woman?
- And, can one state refuse to recognize the legality of a gay marriage performed in another state?
The key issues before the court were:
- Should the legality of gay marriage be decided by the people or the courts?
- Do laws preserving traditional marriage target gays? Or do those laws ignore them while protecting traditional marriage?
- Does federalism protect states’ rights to define marriage? Or do state laws protecting traditional marriage violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment?
- That is, does the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause trump the Constitution’s full faith and credit clause in Article 4 guaranteeing states’ rights to make their own laws?
- Does the “United States v. Windsor” decision that invalidated parts of the the Defense of Marriage Act, by resting on the federalist principle that states may decide such issues, mean that same principle should uphold states’ traditional marriage laws?
- Do gays deserve a special protected status? Or is it not the equivalent of, say, racial discrimination because neither gender is targeted or discriminated against?
Developing story…
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/scalia-why-no-ancient-greek-gay-marriages-2/
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