Hat tip to my friend Audrey Bilger, who collected some of Scalia’s more outlandish pronouncements about gay people for the Ms. Blog. Scalia thinks it’s perfectly Constitutional to ban not only gay marriage, but gay sex, on the basis of “morality.” Quoth Scalia:
“I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible–murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals–and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct.”
Let’s just stop right there. It’s well past time we decoupled the concept of “morality” from sexuality. There’s nothing immoral about sex between two consenting adults (setting aside matters of cheating while in a committed relationship). Scalia is still steeped in an archaic “Moral Values” conception of the universe — not that this comes as a surprise to anyone. Hey, I have moral values too, and they tell me that treating gays and lesbians like second-class citizens is wrong.