Scalia’s gay nightmare arrives: How an Ohio ruling is driving haters crazy

With gay marriage bans "tumbling down" across the U.S., expert tells Salon SCOTUS could tackle issue again in 2015

JOSH EIDELSON



Antonin Scalia’s dire warnings and frenzied nightmares about gay marriage, from more than a decade ago, are coming true.

In a ferocious 2003 dissent defending Texas’ right to ban “sodomy,” the right-wing justice warned that “If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct … what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘[t]he liberty protected by the constitution?”

Now, after five of his colleagues overturned the federal Defense of Marriage Act, Scalia issued another warning:

As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe. By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition. Henceforth those challengers will lead with this Court’s declaration that there is ‘no legitimate purpose’ served by such a law, and will claim that the traditional definition has ‘the purpose and effect to disparage and injure’ the ‘personhood and dignity’ of same-sex couples…

Scalia’s nightmare – moving from legalized gay sex, to federal recognition of some states’ legalized gay marriages, to the fall of gay marriage bans elsewhere – came another step closer this week, as federal Judge Timothy Black ruled that the state of Ohio must recognize same-sex couples who’ve gotten married in other states. To discuss the past year’s cascade of such decisions, the place of courts and marriage in the LGBT movement, and where the marriage fight goes next, Salon called up attorney Susan Sommer of Lambda Legal, co-counsel in the Ohio case. A condensed version of our conversation follows.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/04/16/scalias_gay_nightmare_arrives_how_an_ohio_ruling_is_driving_haters_crazy/