The Supreme Court is gearing up to hear two huge gay marriage cases in 2013, and gay rights advocates fear Justice Antonin Scalia might be too anti-gay to rule fairly.
The high court last ruled on gay rights back in 2003, when it overturned Texas' sodomy law. Scalia wrote an impassioned dissent arguing that gays should promote their "agenda" through "Democratic means."
That was not the first time Scalia alluded to a gay agenda.
The high court ruled on gay rights for the first time in Romer v. Evans back in 1996, overturning a Colorado law that prohibited the state's cities and towns from enacting laws to protect gay people against discrimination.
Colorado passed the anti-gay law after Aspen, Denver, and Boulder passed ordinances to protect gays against discrimination in areas like housing, employment, and education.
Scalia wrote an impassioned dissent in that case too, saying Coloradans had a right to consider "certain conduct" like homosexuality to be reprehensible.
He also indicated that gays were a powerful class of people:
The problem (a problem, that is, for those who wish to retain social disapprobation of homosexuality) is that, because those who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities ... have high disposable income ... and of course care about homosexual rights issues much more ardently than the public at large, they possess political power much greater than their numbers, both locally and statewide. Quite understandably, they devote this political power to achieving not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality.
Scalia is still defending laws banning sodomy 16 years later, while gays do indeed seem to be gaining more and more social acceptance. Scalia may have been on to something.
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