Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has been widely criticized for referring in a recent interview to "that homophobe Antonin Scalia," an injudicious exercise in name-calling that obscures Frank's larger and more valid point: that the opinions of the tart-tongued Supreme Court justice leave little doubt of his utter lack of sympathy for gays and lesbians. ...

In the Colorado case, for instance, Scalia would have allowed the state to prohibit laws according gays and lesbians "protected status or [any] claim of discrimination." He called the anti-gay measure "a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws." Responding to the idea that the Colorado amendment reflected an "animus" toward gays, Scalia wrote: "I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible -- murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals -- and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct."

In 2003, the court struck down a Texas law criminalizing same-sex sodomy. In his dissent, Scalia noted that the court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct."

How Scalia feels about gays and lesbians is not just an academic question. The courts are increasingly emerging as the arbiters of the gay-marriage dispute, and we suspect it won't be too long before the issue reaches the high court. With passages like these in the law books, Frank has reason to be concerned, and he didn't need to call Scalia a homophobe to make his point.

Labels: Lawrence v. Texas, Romer v. Evans

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Today, the legal organization GLAD (Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) filed a lawsuit challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which, in pertinent part, denies same-sex married couples every single Federal benefit related to marriage. The suit, brought on behalf of eight married couples and three widowers, is the first concerted, multi-plaintiff to Section 3 of the Act, which denies spousal protections in Social Security, federal income tax, federal employees’ and retirees’ benefits, and the issuance of passports. It is also the first suit in which plaintiffs who were married in their state of residence applied for federal benefits and were denied them.

The plaintiffs’ claim is a powerful one, and it’s hard to imagine how one could write an intellectually honest opinion rejecting it.

The complaint (PDF) in the suit claims that the statute “is motivated by disapproval of gay men and lesbians and their relationships, an illegitimate state interest.” It’s clear from the language that the attorneys are relying principally on two Supreme Court precedents, Department of Agriculture v. Moreno (1973) and Romer v. Evans (1996). Those cases, together, show that DOMA can’t withstand constitutional scrutiny. (Two Federal Court of Appeals judges have recently arrived at a similar analysis.)

Labels: DOMA, Romer v. Evans

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