Antonin Scalia Quotes
Because values change, legislatures abolish the death penalty, permit same-sex marriage if they want, abolish laws against homosexual conduct. That's how the change in a society occurs. Society doesn't change through a Constitution.
Scalia, Antonin. Interview by Piers Morgan. Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN, 18 July 2012.
There was a national debate ongoing regarding whether two members of the same sex might marry. The Constitutions of several states prohibited discrimination against anyone including gays so that the courts in some cases were called upon to rule on the constitutionality of prohibitions against gay marriage. While nationally, the majority of the people were then opposed to gay marriage, in some states (including Kansas), the majority was vehemently opposed. The American Constitutional system and tradition, almost uniquely protects the rights of minorities from the “tyranny of the majority.” When the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be racially integrated, the majority of the country might have preferred a certain degree of racial discrimination. Brownback on this issue called for the will of the majority to prevail over the minority rights of teh Constitution, but on a woman’s right to abortion which was favored by the majority of Americans, he opposed the tyranny of the majority. The issue politically almost always comes down to "whose ox is gored." A decade later, with a generational shift, the vast majority of Americans suported same sex marriage and the majority of the states legalized and Browbak then claimed the right of the minority (States like Kansas) to not be forced the recognize the marriages that the will of the majority had allowed.
This quotation illustrates the brilliance of Scalia. He was in the minority of the Justices when he opposed gay marriage. However, instead of just writing a caustic dissent—which he did—he posed this question to one of the most brilliant attorneys in the country who was arguing the case for gay marriage. Clearly, gay marriage was not considered unconstitutional when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution. It is almost certain that no one in those times even considered such a prospect. However, by 2013 a number of states had allowed gay marriage, and the majority of Americans favored it. The best Olsen could answer was “There us no specific data in time. This is an evolutionary cycle”. Despite his oratory tour de force, Scalia was again in the minority and his view did not prevail. Public opinion had clearly changed, and most judges believed that the interpretation of the Constitution most also change and there is no more a specific time to say exactly when that change took place than there is to say exactly when America concluded that the nation should have Prohibition or any other social norm.
At the time he and the Obama administration had favored legal domestic partnerships for gays but opposed same sex marriage. However, he and the President were having moral and legal doubts and there seemed to be an acceptance of homosexuality emerging in society. The administration then changed their position and within just a few years, same sex marriage had become legal in over 10 states and was being politically debated in many others. In many parts of the country, Biden’s prediction came true in much of America, and the change in political and public opinion was occurring in more and more places.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
