A Stitch in Haste

Only someone like Justice Antonin Scalia could equate the suffrage movement with criminalizing gay sex:

Scalia railed against the era of the "judge-moralist," saying judges are no better qualified than "Joe Sixpack" to decide moral questions such as abortion and gay marriage.
...
The 70-year-old justice said the public, through elected legislatures -- not the courts -- should decide watershed questions such as the legality of abortion.

Scalia decried his own court's recent overturning of a state anti-sodomy law...

He pointed to the granting of voting rights to women in 1920 through a constitutional amendment as the proper way for a democracy to fundamentally change its laws.

"Judicial hegemony" has replaced the public's right to decide important moral questions, he said.

Of course, the true alternative, namely having no one -- not judges, not politicians, not voters -- use and abuse the law to impose morality at all, never comes up. Go figure.

It seems to me best way to prevent "judicial hegemony" (whatever that means) would be to limit the law to its only legitimate function -- the protection of individual rights -- and not to impose the morality of some, even a majority, on everyone else. But that concept is apparently totally alien to Scalia.

And there's a certain perversity in having the man who wrote the most vicious, mean-spirited Supreme Court opinion of modern times lamenting "judge-made morality." "Moral superiority for me but not for thee" is hardly a robust jurisprudential approach.

Sitting back and allowing legislatures, or electorates, to quash the rights of insular minorities and trample basic human dignities is not "judicial restraint." It's judicial cowardice. And analogizing it to the woman's suffrage movement makes Scalia -- to use his preferred term -- an idiot.