RUSH: Now, I know we’ve got these Supreme Court decisions today, and they represent the visible fracturing by the judiciary of American culture and American tradition.
The Prop 8 decision was really not on the merits. That was simply the court saying that the people… What happened in California Prop 8 is the original supporters of Prop 8 backed out of it during the appeal process out there and a substitute group (I forget their name) took it up. They handled the appeal at the Ninth Circus level, the Ninth Circus made their ruling on whatever it was. The Supreme Court took the case and the decision was whether or not this substitute group defending Prop 8 was legitimate.
The court ruled today they’re not. They didn’t have standing. They don’t have standing to appeal, they don’t have standing to go forward, and so the case is sent back and remanded at its last decision, which was the Ninth Circus saying Prop 8 is unconstitutional. So same-sex marriage can continue in California. Once again in California, the will of the people is overturned by the judges, and now it’s happening at the US Supreme Court.
Scalia’s dissent today in the Defense of Marriage Act decision, I’m gonna read portions of it to you. It is unlike any dissent by any justice I’ve ever read about any case. And that’s because Scalia says that the majority in the DOMA ruling was unlike any majority that this court has ever produced, that it was filled with venom and rage. If Scalia’s dissent is right, what it means is that the common, ordinary fisticuff arguments between left and right in this country have now taken over the Supreme Court. And the law and judicial restraint, temperament and all that has evaporated. And the court is no different than a barroom now. Whoever has the largest number on one side, the loudest voices and the most insulting voices wins.
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RUSH: With all of today’s Supreme Court decisions on all of the gay issues, all the fatwas — we had DOMA; we had Proposition 8 — now all the gay issues are behind us. Ahem. So the Republicans don’t have anything to worry about now, right? I mean, the Republican Party is told, “You guys gotta get with it! You need to cave on gay marriage. You need to understand we’re talking about basic civil rights here.
“You guys are gonna have to get with it! You Republicans, the gays don’t like you, the Hispanics don’t like you, and women don’t like you because of abortion. You’re gonna have to change.” So gay marriage in California can continue. DOMA grants federal benefits to gay married people in 11 states and the District of Columbia. So the issue’s off the table. The issue’s off the table. So the gays are free to turn out and support Republicans now.
Well, this is what we’re told about how this works.
The New York Times is celebrating the Supreme Court’s gay rulings today. Rightly so. The New York Times has been the major proponents for gay rights. Here’s their headline: “News Analysis — With Gay Marriage, a Tide of Public Opinion That Swept Past the Court.” There was a phone caller to C-SPAN today. It was one of the proudest days of my life today.
Something happened today on C-SPAN that I can’t tell you how proud I am about. I didn’t even know about it ’til Cookie sent me the audio sound bite roster. It was C-SPAN, and they were doing their Washington Journal show. The host, Greta Brawner, was taking viewer calls on the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating parts of the Voting Rights Act and the host said, “David in Madison Heights, Michigan. Democrat caller line. What’s your thoughts on this?”
C-SPAN CALLER: I’m outraged as an American. I was born an American first, not under a party. So we’re all Americans first. The crooked Supreme Court — and, by the way, Scalia sounds exactly like Rush Limbaugh when he talks. It’s a perfect match. They couldn’t win under Citizens United. So they’re gonna take the next step, and that’s to take away the voting rights of Americans. Not a certain party, but Americans.
RUSH: So there you have it! This is not about the gay rulings. I thought it was. It was about the Voting Rights Act yesterday. That’s not the point. The point is that the caller said Scalia sounds just like me. I mean, I can’t get a better compliment. I have said over the years that if I didn’t have my brain, I’d like to have Scalia’s. So now here’s a caller to C-SPAN saying Scalia sounds exactly like me when he talks, a perfect match!
From my perspective, you can’t get a bigger compliment than that.
Speaking of Scalia, his dissent today in the Defense of Marriage Act ruling is breathtaking. In his view, what’s happened here is the Supreme Court has now demonized proponents and supporters of traditional marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years. The Supreme Court majority, in its ruling, actually uses language that insults and demonizes the people who support marriage as it’s been since the beginning of time.
Now, if you ever had any doubt that the left is intolerant and fully invested in the low art of personal destruction through smear tactics, just read Scalia’s dissent in United States v. Wade. In this dissent he quotes the majority and illustrates how they smear — in a Supreme Court ruling, smear — supporters of traditional marriage as a means of justifying their opinion. What Scalia says is that the majority in the DOMA case, in order to arrive at their decision, actually says that the supporters of traditional marriage…
Well, they name-call. There’s no legal reasoning here, or very little. Scalia says the majority has arrived at its point of view because the opponents of homosexual marriage are reprobates and bigots. It’s disgusting. It demeans the Supreme Court, and it’s turned the Supreme Court into nothing different from any venue in this country where people argue. It proves that we are up against people who don’t give a damn about the rule of law or about basic decency or about decorum.
I have often said that what animates people on the left — what motivates them, what informs them — is defeating us. No matter how, no matter what, no matter what it means. Their hatred for us overwhelms anything else. No matter the result, victory that includes impugning and demeaning and insulting us is what they seek. It’s what makes them happy. Now, the left politicizes everything, and in this case, hardball politics became the name of the game.
Hardball politics, bare knuckles, rather than learned judicial reasoning.
So now it’s not just schools or doctor’s offices or where you vote, the military, the NFL or football games. Now it’s even the Supreme Court that has been turned into an advocacy unit of the Obama administration. Not even hiding it. The majority decision in DOMA makes it plain that the majority of the Supreme Court is nothing more than any other aspect of the team advancing the Obama agenda. The Scalia dissent is extraordinary, and the court’s majority opinion in this case has poisoned any opportunity for reasoned civil debate going forward.
It really is striking.
I’ll share with you excerpts from Scalia’s dissent when we get back.
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RUSH: Mr. Snerdley, a quick question for you, sir. Do you think in either of these cases — Proposition 8 remanded and sent back or DOMA found to be unconstitutional — has gay marriage, as of today, because of either or both or any of these decisions, now been found to be constitutional? (interruption) Right. (interruption) All right. Both of these are… (interruption) Well, I’m talking about both of them.
As a result of these two decisions, has gay marriage now been said to be constitutional by the court? (interruption) It hasn’t. Not yet. It isn’t. They didn’t rule on that. So the supporters or the celebrants in these two cases might be getting a little bit ahead of things here because the constitutionality of gay marriage was not proclaimed here today by the US Supreme Court. Here’s a little of Scalia’s dissent: “The majority concludes that the only motive for this Act was the ‘bare … desire to harm a politically unpopular group.'”
Now, stop and think of that. Scalia in his dissent says that the majority, Anthony Kennedy and the four libs, in their ruling, said “the only reason” that the Defense of Marriage Act was passed was because supporters of it want to “harm a politically unpopular group.” Just that, just that allegation has nothing to do with the law. This has nothing to do with adjudication of cases.
This is Antonin Scalia saying the majority attacks the supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act as having as their sole motivation, the only motive was to harm homosexuals. They proceed from there in declaring it unconstitutional. The majority said that it’s unconstitutional because the people who wrote it… By the way, it was Bill Clinton, a Democrat Congress, and a Democrat president who made this law possible — and they were pandering.
The Democrats back then were pandering to a majority opinion in this country which wanted to maintain the definition of marriage as that between a man and a woman, and Clinton is running for reelection. It was Clinton who signed DOMA. The majority in the Supreme Court has just raked Clinton over the coals as a bigot, and the Democrat Congress over the coals, accusing them of having as their only motivation the wish to harm homosexuals.
Scalia continues, “Bear in mind that the object of this condemnation is not the legislature of some once-Confederate Southern state … but our respected coordinate branches, the Congress and Presidency of the United States,” and in this case the presidency was held by Bill Clinton. So Scalia’s pointing out that the majority in this case was accusing Clinton and the Democrat Congress of passing DOMA because they only wanted to hurt gay people.
“Laying such a charge,” Scalia writes, “against them should require the most extraordinary evidence, and I would have thought that every attempt would be made to indulge a more anodyne explanation for the statute. The majority does the opposite — affirmatively concealing from the reader the arguments that exist in justification” for DOMA. So it gets worse. Not only does the majority decision today accuse the people who supported DOMA of doing it only to hurt gay people…
He then accuses the majority of concealing the just arguments for the statute. He says the majority “makes only a passing mention of the ‘arguments put forward’ by the Act’s defenders, and does not even trouble to paraphrase or describe them.’ I imagine that this is because it is harder to maintain the illusion of the Act’s supporters as unhinged members of a wild-eyed lynch mob when one first describes their views as they see them. … The court mentions none of this.
“Instead, it accuses the Congress that enacted this law and the president who signed it of something much worse than, for example, having acted in excess of enumerated federal powers– or even having drawn distinctions that prove to be irrational. Those legal errors may be made in good faith, errors though they are. But the majority says that the supporters of [DOMA] acted with malice — with the ‘purpose’ (ante, at 25) ‘to disparage and to injure’ same-sex couples.
“It says that the motivation for DOMA was to ‘demean,’ ibid.; to ‘impose inequality,’ ante, at 22; to ‘impose … a stigma,’ ante, at 21; to deny people ‘equal dignity,’ ibid.; to brand gay people as ‘unworthy,’ ante, at 23; and to ‘humiliat[e]’ their children, ibid.” This is in the majority opinion! Scalia is pointing it out and saying it’s reprehensible. The majority is citing these assumed motivations. You won’t find anywhere in the record of DOMA what I just read to you being the reasons people wanted it to become law.
This is what the libs assume people who support traditional marriage believe. So you have a bunch of hacks disguised as judges on the Supreme Court today, impugning the motives (with no evidence) of the supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act. Scalia is beside himself. He thinks this is the last area that any court should be going to. Impugning the motives which are unstated and cannot be known, while ignoring the record, which has testimony in hearings and all sorts of other data that was made available in support of the Act.
“I am sure,” Scalia writes, “these accusations are quite untrue. To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act. But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement.
“To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to ‘disparage,’ ‘injure,’ ‘degrade,’ ‘demean,’ and ‘humiliate’ our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence — indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history.”
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RUSH: Okay, so here’s basically what happens. Everything’s going along just fine, everything’s cool, and then all of a sudden homosexuals say, “You know what? We want to be married,” and the people who don’t think that marriage is anything other than a man and a woman said, “No, no, no, no. Marriage is strictly between a man and a woman. That’s what it means; it’s what it’s always meant.” So the people who want the change then attack the defenders of the status quo as being hateful bigots, and the Supreme Court took up that argument and made their decision on that basis.