1996—By a vote of 7 to 1 (with Justice Thomas recused), the Supreme Court rules that Virginia’s maintenance of the Virginia Military Institute as an all-male institution violates the Equal Protection Clause. Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion (for six justices) invents a new standard for assessing the constitutionality of sex-based classifications: Only classifications that have an “exceedingly persuasive justification”—whatever that might mean—will survive.
But not even Ginsburg, the supposed champion of gender equality, can remain entirely faithful to her feminist ideology. Although she rejects VMI’s position that its “adversative” training is “inherently unsuitable” to women, she concedes in a footnote that admitting women to VMI would “undoubtedly” require that VMI “adjust aspects of the physical training programs.”
2002—A Ninth Circuit panel (in Newdow v. US Congress) rules that the recitation in public schools of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Establishment Clause.
2003—“Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific”—and spelled out a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy. Such is the quality of insight and analysis offered by Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Further, in overturning the Court’s 17-year-old precedent in Bowers v. Hardwick, Justice Kennedy blithely abandons the stare decisis principles that he helped cook up in Planned Parenthood v. Casey as a pretense for not overturning the then 19-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade.
2013—The federal Defense of Marriage Act, enacted in 1996, merely reaffirmed and made crystal clear what Congress had always meant by the term “marriage” in provisions of federal law: a male-female union. It respected and implemented federalism by exercising the federal government’s authority in the realm of federal law.
Unable to muster any coherent attack on DOMA, Justice Kennedy baselessly charges, in his majority opinion in United States v. Windsor, that DOMA was motivated by a bare desire to harm same-sex couples. Never mind that the 342 members of the House of Representatives and the 85 senators who voted for DOMA included lots of strong supporters of gay rights and that President Clinton signed it into law. As Chief Justice Roberts puts it in his dissent, by “tar[ring] the political branches with the brush of bigotry,” Kennedy gives short shrift to the “[i]nterests in uniformity and stability [that] amply justified” DOMA.
2015—“Just who do we think we are?” That is Chief Justice Roberts’s plaintive query in dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, as five of his colleagues—Justice Kennedy, joined by the Court’s four liberals—impose on the American people a radical redefinition of marriage that, as Roberts observes, “has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”
It’s farfetched to believe that Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan actually agree with Kennedy’s rambling reasoning (which will earn substantial criticism from the Left), but they demonstrate once again that they will happily sign their names to anything that delivers the bottom-line result they want. Embarrassed for his colleagues, Justice Scalia states that he “would hide his head in a bag” before he ever joined an opinion with such “silly extravagances” and “profoundly incoherent” “showy profundities.”