Highlights of Justice Scalia's dissenting rant against yesterday's 5-4 DOMA ruling

You can see more excerpts and a link to his entire screed at Mother Jones here, but we found this gem most appalling and revealing of Scalia's hostility toward the legitimate aspirations of gay Americans:

[T]o defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.

Really? Socking an elderly woman with a $300,000+ tax bill who was legally married to the spouse she had been with for decades doesn't demean that woman and her relationship? Scalia, who Rachel Maddow once labeled (with cause) a "weird troll" proved once again what an injudicious jerk he really is.

The subtext version of SCOTUS Prop 8 oral arguments

Sample:

Justice Scalia: Tell me, Counsel. Gay marriage: Bad for children, or the worst for children?

Cooper: We really don’t know. Gay marriage is so new. We have no evidence. It could be that gay marriage will cause aliens to descend on this planet and eat the flesh of all children under the age of sixteen. Or maybe not. We just don’t know. We have to think of the children.

Justice Kennedy: This is extremely persuasive to me.

(Source)

Rachel Maddow: Antonin Scalia is a 'weird troll'

From AKSARBENT's seat-of-the-pants partial transcription:

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Rachel Maddow: 10 months of debate, 21 hearings, 15,000 pages of evidence, and in the senate they voted 98 to nothing, "yeah, we still need that."
     He[Scalia] said, "Yeah, but that vote, really, what does that vote mean?" ...It's a "racial entitlement" now... voting is something that you are entitled to on the basis of your race!  You know how that sounds?
     I think he does know how that sounds... That's the neat thing about being there in person. You can see — oh actually he's a troll. He's saying this for effect. He knows it's offensive. And he knows he's going to get a gasp from the courtroom — which he got — and he loves it! He's like the guy in your blog comment thread: he's using the n-word! "Oh it made you mad? How 'bout if I say this? Did it make you mad? Did it make you mad? Did it make you mad? ...He's that kind of guy. 

Jon Stewart: Wow

Rachel Maddow: When we're all shocked that he said something so blatantly racially offensive — we're talking about the cornerstone of the federal civil rights act, he's thinking "Oh yeah!" So that's neat to see. It's also neat to see Sonya Sotameyer from way down at the "I'm new here" end of the bench, sort of lean around the bench and give him what for. All of the questions are technically to the lawyers, but she is TALKING to Antonin Scalia all the time, and it's like a brawl between them...

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a 'flat out, unreconstructed bigot' — Barney Frank

Barney Frank got straight to the point on Michael Signorelli's show, articulating his satisfaction that Antonin Scalia is no longer a closet bigot for whom excuses can be offered to deflection accusations of homophobia.

“I was glad that he made clear what’s been obvious, that he’s just a flat out bigot,” Frank said. “I’d previously said he was a homophobe. And Fox and the rightwing said, ‘Oh just because he’s not for same-sex marriage? And I said, ‘No, let me be very clear. That’s not it. This is a man who has said you should go to prison for having sex.’ It was an extraordinarily abusive sentiment and it was dead wrong. And, by the way, for a guy who is supposed to be so smart -- quite stupid.This young man said to him, ‘Why do you compare sodomy to murder?’ And he said, ‘Well because I have a right to say if I think something is immoral.’ Well the question wasn’t about his right. The question was, By what morality is expressing your love for someone in a physical way equivalent to killing that person? It makes it clear that the man is an unreconstructed bigot, and given that you have a bigot on the Supreme Court like that, it is useful to know.”

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: political partisan, Justice Antonin Scalia, has stepped off the curb, should resign

In his June 27th Washington Post column, E.J. Dionne, Jr. said that Scalia has lost the ability to even fake judicial impartiality and that it is time for the 76-year-old juror, who has spent 1/3 of his life on the Supreme Court, to kick rocks.

So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did last month, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.

     Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioning President Barack Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.