4 Super-Snarky Moments In Scalia's Dissent

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is on a roll this week. He dissented started with Thursday's Obamacare screed, in which he coined the terms "SCOTUScare" and "jiggery-pokery." But Scalia delivered another colorful dissent on Friday's same-sex marriage ruling, in which he determines that the "threat to American democracy" is...uh...the Supreme Court. So that's awkward!

"I join the Chief Justice’s opinion in full," he began. "I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy." Scalia contends that he isn't mad about gay marriages or receptions or anything else that the rest of the conservatives are going to cry about for the coming months. No, really! Traditional marriage isn't the problem. It's the power of the Supreme Court.

He continued in the dissent: "Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court."

So Supreme Ruler Scalia is pissed at the left side of the bench for what he considers the usurping of state's rights. OK. But how does that look, exactly? I'll let Scalia speak (er, write) his piece for himself in a few lines from his at times terrifying dissent.

- On the left-wing of the Court's gay poisoning:

The world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational popphilosophy; it demands them in the law. The stuff contained in today’s opinion has to diminish this Court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.

- On being a really terrible patriot:

To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

- On dirty hippies:

'The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.' (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

- On the mysticism of fortune cookies:

The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

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