Justice Antonin Scalia compares homosexuality to murder

Presumably, Scalia will not be one of the justices voting to uphold the constitutionality of same-sex marriage

"If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?"
(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

If Kanye West were to take a stab at Supreme Court editorializing, it might go something like this: Antonin Scalia does not care about gay people. Indeed, at a Princeton University seminar on Monday, the conservative justice compared homosexuality to murder when asked by a gay student about a 2003 opinion in which Scalia compared homosexuality to bestiality and incest. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?" the justice asked rhetorically. "Can we have it against other things?"

The point, in Scalia's view, is that the government has the right to base laws on moral objections, even if he did acknowledge that murder and gay sex are "moral crimes" of a different magnitude. It is a view that he put forth, with characteristic acerbity, in his dissent to the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court for the first time outlawed state anti-sodomy laws. It's hard to believe that less than 10 years ago a gay man could literally go to jail for having sex, and Scalia's dissent has aged about as well as one would expect. In his opinion, he warned that the majority's "homosexual agenda" could invalidate a whole host of laws based on moral traditions:

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Ryu Spaeth

Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.