7 Nasty Things Justice Antonin Scalia Has Said About Gay People

Each week, Queerty picks one blowhard, hypocrite, airhead, sanctimonious prick or other enemy of all that is queer to be the Douche of the Week. 

Have a nominee for DOTW? E-mail it to us at [email protected].

Sometimes picking the Douche of the Week is a tough call—either there’s not enough candidates, or too many.

This week, though, one person rose to the top like a bloated corpse.

We speak, of course, of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who recently defended comparisons he’s made between laws against sodomy and those banning bestiality and murder.

Of course, it’s hardly the first time Scalia has insulted the LGBT community.

Right Wing Watch counted down some of his most egregious comments:

Scalia compared bans on homosexuality to bans on murder: Kicking off this whole hatefest, on Monday Justice Scalia responded to Princeton student Duncan Hosie’s challenge by saying, “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

He’s also equated anti-gay laws to bans on polygamy and animal cruelty: In a dissenting opinion in Romer v. Evans, which overturned Colorado’s ban on LGBT-discrimination laws, Scalia wrote, “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. Surely that is the only sort of ‘animus’ at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, the same sort of moral disapproval that produced the centuries-old criminal laws that we held constitutional in Bowers.”

Scalia defended employment and housing discrimination against gay people. In his dissent to Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned criminal sodomy laws, Scalia wrote that, “many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”

He‘s also said laws against “homosexual sodomy” are justified by America’s long history of discrimination: In a talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Scalia said hisdecisions on the death penalty, abortion and sodomy were “easy.” “The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion,” he said. “Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.”

Scalia said same-sex couples are basically roommates:  In his Romer dissent, Scalia defended bans on domestic-partner benefits: “[The law] would prevent the State or any municipality from making death benefit payments to the ‘life partner’ of a homosexual when it does not make such payments to the longtime roommate of a non-homosexual employee.”

He said only the “elite” care about gay rights: In the same opinion, Scalia insisted the Supreme Court ” has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the Members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality is evil.”

And he denounced the “homosexual agenda” that’s seeking to normalize gays and lesbians: Scalia said the Court’s decision to lift sodomy bans in Lawrence v. Texas, was “the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

All together now: What a douche!