The Supreme Court giveth, the Supreme Court taketh away. Just a day after a landmark ruling that rolled the civil rights movement back several decades on race, two more rulings were handed down by that most august of bodies today that roll it several decades forward on gender. One, by denying the right to appeal of a group of supporters of California’s Proposition 8, effectively legalised gay marriage in the US’s most populous state.
The other, a much more direct – and therefore important – ruling, found a central clause of the hated Defence Of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denied gay couples equal protection under the law, unconstitutional. So while the day before was a bad day for black Americans, yesterday was a great day for gay Americans.
The one anchovy in the trifle was Justice Antonin Scalia, whose enraged dissenting opinion laid into Justice Kennedy’s striking-down of DOMA, and who hinted that, while the Court had chosen not to directly address the national constitutionality of a ban on gay marriage in any state – dismissing the Proposition 8 case and sending it back to the 9th Circuit court of California’s decision instead – it is inevitable now that one day the Court will take a similar case on merit at some point in the future. He went on grumpily to say that Kennedy was acting with “real cheek” by saying that the constitutionality of gay marriage wasn’t up in front of the court yet.
This kind of judicial activism infuriated Scalia. “We have no power to decide this case,” he raged. “And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.” This was pretty ironic, actually; just the previous day, Scalia had no such qualms about judicial activism when the court was addressing a conservative issue: he voted enthusiastically to gut the Voting Rights Act – which had been reaffirmed in Congress in 2006 by a huge majority.
It would be wrong to say that hypocrisy about juducial activism is unique to the conservatives on the bench. Justice Ginsberg’s anguished dissenting opinion on striking down the Voting Rights Act is in contrast to her full-throated support of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion on DOMA; though she, along with Scalia, voted to send Proposition 8 back to California rather than address its merits there and then it is probably that had they debated the issue she and Scalia would be on different sides. Justice Kennedy is, as usual, the tipping-point between conservatives and liberals on the court – he joined Justice Roberts in voting to strike down the VRA. He is therefore probably the most important Justice.
But Scalia’s prediction is probably also correct. The majority opinion by Kennedy on DOMA contains language that will allow for plenty of challenges to the constitutionality of marriage inequality down the line. He said, for example, that DOMA constituted nothing less than a “deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment, and also that it “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples,” and bases an argument around giving “dignity” to same-sex families. All of these give immediate legal precedent for challenges to state gay-marriage bans. So while this wasn’t a day of final victory on marriage equality, it was decisive nonetheless. Sometimes an activist court isn’t so bad.
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