Last week, Justice Anthony Kennedy thundered like Jove to make us think that his opinion was the result of some exhaustive process of ratiocination beyond the ken of mere mortals. But his ruling is not only absurd, it is obscene.
First, let us consider marriages, specifically California marriages. The people of California twice voted to maintain marriage as the union of one man and one woman. To Tony Kennedy, a Californian himself, that did not matter. He gave no more regard to the opinions of the people of California than he might give to the people of Kamchatka.
He was wholly prepared to overturn the votes of millions of California citizens. He was happy to do so because he thought that the only reason one could offer for opposing same-sex couplings being accorded marital rights is bigotry. In order to support true marriage, you must be a bigot, he thinks.
That’s the absurd part. Here, secondly, is the obscene part. Tony Kennedy was married fifty years ago. When he was married, not the priest who officiated at the Mass, not his bride, not the Father-of-the Bride, not Tony himself, not Tony’s Best Man, not her Maid of Honor, not the guests, not even the band that played at their wedding reception thought men should be allowed to marry men, and women marry women.
In order to maintain his opinion as true, Tony Kennedy must believe that his own family and all their closest friends were bigots, consumed by animus toward homosexuals. He likened such people to bigots, tarring them with the same brush as the KKK. He renounced his own wedding party as a Klavern meeting. That’s absurd and obscene.
Doubtless he will say he has evolved. He wouldn’t be the first Supreme Court Justice to grow out of his youthful bigotry. Alabama’s Hugo Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth. This was all known when President Roosevelt nominated him to the high court. To his credit, Black overcame his racial prejudice. But he never quite got over his antagonism toward Catholics when he exchanged white robes for a black one.
As a result, we live with his unhistorical and illogical distortions of the Constitution to this day.
This Tony Kennedy twenty-one years ago signed onto the widely lampooned “Mystery Passage” in the infamous case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Read that passage and you will at once understand why President Obama remanded Osama bin Laden to the SEALS and not to the federal courts. If Osama had been afforded a pro-bono lawyer, a member of what Andrew McCarthy calls the al Qaeda bar, how could he have been convicted of anything? He was simply defining his own concept of existence.
If we were to apply the Mystery Passage to marriage, how could any such rule of law be a rule at all? Why restrict marriage to two? What if defining your own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life impels you to enter into plural marriage?
By what principle can this co-author of the Mystery Passage and many other non-sequiturs refuse to recognize any group of adults seeking custody of any number of children? To deny them is to exhibit one’s animus. And none of us wants to be labeled a bigot, or a hater by the Supreme Court.
Why fear? Do we seriously contend that this eminent tribunal merits our awe? Some conservatives warned in advance that the Court would lose all legitimacy if it overturned the Defense of Marriage Act.
But this is the Court that overturned all fifty state homicide laws in Roe v. Wade (1973) as they applied to the killing of unborn children. This Court has never been required to provide evidence to prove that these unborn children are not human beings. What scientific advance convinced the Supreme Court of that day that homicide was not homicide?
President Reagan treated the Court with respect even as he challenged their central holding. If we are unsure that the unborn child is a human life, as the Supreme Court pretended, isn’t the rule of reason not to kill?
The Court’s pretense in Roe was a falsehood, just as its rulings on marriage are a falsity. Injustice Tony Kennedy claims to tell us what Law is. Charles Dickens’s character Mr. Bumble shows a common sense that overrules our Injustice:
“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, … “the law is a ass—a idiot.”