The congressman from Massachusetts has doubled down on his earlier asininity, demonstrating only his egregious dishonesty or his abysmal inability to read for comprehension:

Frank cited Scalia’s dissent in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas in support of his point. Scalia “makes it very clear that he’s angry, frankly, about the existence of gay people,” Frank told WBZ, according to accounts in the Boston Globe and On Top magazine. “If you read his opinion, he thinks it’s a good idea for two consenting adults who happen to be gay to be locked up because he is so disapproving of gay people.”

I quoted the relevant portion of Scalia’s dissent in my post yesterday.  An extended version can be found at Ann Althouse’s site.  Professor Althouse, no Bible-thumper, puts it perfectly bluntly: “There is nothing — absolutely nothing — to support the proposition that Scalia thinks it’s a good idea to lock up gay people. It’s the usual notion that judges shouldn’t be basing their decisions on whether they think a statute is a good idea or not.”

Augmenting the hilarity is Mr. Frank’s approbation of Justice Thomas:

Frank said it is possible to oppose gay rights without being homophobic, the Globe story says. He said Justice Clarence Thomas also dissented in the sodomy case, but expressed reasonable opposition.

“While I support same-sex marriage, I don’t think if you’re against it you’re homophobic,” Frank said. “I don’t think Clarence Thomas is homophobic.”

Okay.  Here’s Justice Thomas’s separate dissent from the decision in its entirety:

I join Justice SCALIA’s dissenting opinion. I write separately to note that the law before the Court today “is … uncommonly silly.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 527, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965) (Stewart, J., dissenting). If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.

Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a Member of this Court I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated. My duty, rather, is to “decide cases ‘agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States.’ ” Id., at 530, 85 S.Ct. 1678. And, just like Justice Stewart, I “can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,” ibid., or as the Court terms it today, the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions,” ante, at 2475.

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 605-606 (2003) (Thomas, J., dissenting).  Thomas is making precisely the same point as Scalia: inane laws are not ipso facto unconstitutional laws, and it is not the judiciary’s role to substitute its judgment about the wisdom of laws for the judgment of state legislatures, accountable to democratic processes.  And yet according to Frank, Scalia’s dissent is the product of bigotry while Thomas’ dissent is “reasonable opposition”.

In a recent interview with the GLBT news website 365gay.com, Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) referred to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as a “homophobe”:

“I wouldn’t want [a court challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act] to go to the United States Supreme Court now because that homophobe Antonin Scalia has too many votes on this current court,” said Frank.

Let’s be clear about a couple things.  One, there are anti-gay bigots in the world.  Two, there are ample reasons other than anti-gay bigotry that a federal judge might vote to uphold DOMA — or, to put it another way, a vote to uphold DOMA is not per se bigotry.

Justice Scalia’s position on social issues (including but not limited to gay marriage) is clear.  He regards these as matters on which the Constitution is silent, and believes that the proper role of the judiciary in such cases is to defer to the decision-making of the political branches of government.  For example, in the context of abortion, Scalia has stated that he neither interprets the Constitution to require states to permit abortion, nor interprets it to require states to prohibit abortion; it’s simply a question that is outside the portfolio of the judiciary.  A similar principle animates his writings on other social issues:

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best. That homosexuals have achieved some success in that enterprise is attested to by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts-or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them-than I would forbid it to do so. 

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 603 (2003) (Scalia, J., dissenting).  Scalia’s real sin, in other words, is that he practices a modicum of judicial restraint, which may lead to policy outcomes of which Mr. Frank disapproves.  For that, Mr. Frank attacks Justice Scalia as a homophobe.  This is disgraceful, and unworthy of a congressman.

“The greater outrage isn’t corporate malfeasors walking away with millions they didn’t earn but the feds dumping trillions that we’ll never see again into a bailout sinkhole and then burning AIG in effigy to keep the heat off themselves. With measures that are, lest we forget, at least arguably unconstitutional.”

Jim Treacher nicely summarizes the kabuki theater surrounding the AIG bonuses.

By my lights the most surreal aspect of the two-minute hate directed toward AIG (over its payment of lavish bonuses to employees despite being on the taxpayer dole) is that we’re evidently supposed to get worked up over a couple hundred million dollars out of the nearly $2 trillion that government has shovelled out the door since last fall (the $700 billion TARP bailout plus the $800 billion “stimulus” bill plus the $410 billion 2009 budget that Congress is putting the final touches on).  We’re talking about a difference of four orders of magnitude.  We should be so lucky that just 1/100 of 1% of what we’re spending gets squandered or pocketed.

I take a backseat to no one in my contempt for the Wall Street miscreants whose foolish financial gambles helped create this fiasco, but I am absolutely gobsmacked by the lack of any dollars-and-cents perspective, here.

Back during the presidential campaign I was warning people that Barack Obama was cut from the same hoplophobic mold as Bill Clinton, and while he might go about it with greater sensitivity to the politics, he wouldn’t miss a chance to corrupt federal policy to his demonstrably uncritical anti-gun ideology.

No, no, Obama’s supporters replied.  Obama’s a constitutional law scholar who understands what the Second Amendment actually means, and who will thus respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners.  Besides, if nothing else he remembers how Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, in significant part by overreaching on the issue of gun control.  If any federal policy changes vis-a-vis guns roll down the pike, they’ll be reality-based and modest in scope.

This argument was entirely faith-based.  There has never been so much as a shred of evidence suggesting that Mr. Obama understands the Second Amendment to be a robust constraint on the authority of the federal government.  Nor is there a single data point indicating that he has anything other than unmitigated contempt for the whole idea of civilian firearms ownership.  And yet the “Obama is safe on guns” meme was so powerful that even the ordinarily-sensible FactCheck.org got in on the act, suggesting that the NRA was distorting Obama’s position on gun control by committing the unpardonable sin of focusing on his record rather than his campaign speeches.

Well, now the early results are starting to roll in, and they’re not encouraging.

Last week the Obama DoD announced that it would no longer recycle used shell casings onto the civilian market as shell casings, and would instead be destroying the shell casings and selling them only as scrap metal.  In other words, ammunition manufacturers will no longer be able to purchase used military shell casings, reload them, and sell the remanufactured ammunition to civilians; they’ll have to either find other sources of used brass, or buy new brass, to make ammo.  This will significantly reduce the supply of ammunition available to civilians, and will, in turn, raise prices.  And there is simply no sound fiscal justification for it, from the government’s perspective: because of the civilian demand for ammunition components, scrap brass has only about 20% of the value of used shell casings.  So, to sum: in a time where the government is swimming in deficits, the Obama administration is willing to take an 80% bath on the sale of certain military surplus in order to put the screws to the civilian ammunition market.

But that’s not all.  After the September 11th attacks, the Bush administration authorized a program under which airline pilots who completed federal training would be permitted to carry handguns aboard planes — the idea being that pilots would no longer be defenseless if would-be hijackers or terrorists managed to breach the cockpit doors.  The program has run without problems for years, now, a qualified success by any measure… and yet, today, the Washington Times reports that Mr. Obama is quietly defunding it.

UPDATE, 3/18:  It appears that the spent brass issue has been resolved — DoD has informed the NRA that fired military small arms cases are again eligible for sale, and need not be mutilated and sold as scrap.  Kudos to Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and John Tester (D-MT), who pressed DoD on this.

Today the California Supreme Court heard oral arguments for consolidated cases challenging the legitimacy of the state constitutional amendment enacted by Proposition 8 last November.  For those unaware, Proposition 8 effectively overturned a decision of the state Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriage in California.

My own view on this issue is fairly simple: I don’t think governments ought to be in the business of privileging certain types of human relationships in the first place — whether or not you’re married ought to be between you, your spouse, your God, and perhaps your minister; and the disposition of property accumulated by couples over the course of their relationships can be handled by private contract — but that so long as government is going to do this sort of thing, it should not be permitted to discriminate among couples on the basis of gender or sexual orientation.  That said, I also think that efforts to achieve marital equality for same-sex couples through litigation are oftentimes counterproductive, and that money and activism could be more effectively spent demonstrating to the public that GLBT couples are entirely normal, upstanding members of the community.  Winning hearts and minds is a longer and less glamorous slog, and I definitely grasp the extent to which GLBT folks have reached a, “I don’t give a crap what people think about me anymore, just give me my rights,” point… but it’s important to remember that once you reach a public consensus that same-sex marriage is No Big Deal™ the rest will take care of itself.  As an added benefit, social change achieved through persuasion rather than litigation tends to be a lot more enduring (witness how there’s still a simmering culture war over abortion some 35 years after Roe v. Wade was decided, while on the other hand the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s that eventually gave rise to the Civil Rights Act and Brown v. Board of Education achieved gains for racial equality that, nowadays, are pretty uncontroversial).

Unfortunately my views are hardly ever embraced in legislative or judicial enactments, and so we have the current mess: having failed to defeat Proposition 8 at the polls, its opponents have come back to the courtroom to try to convince the California courts to overturn it.  The petitioners (those asking the state Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8) are advancing essentially two arguments, which are actually illustrative of the difference between what lawyers call substantive due process and procedural due process.

The procedural due process argument against Proposition 8, as made by the pro-gay-marriage activist groups, is grounded in the legal rules of the road.  An amendment to the California state constitution can be enacted by a ballot measure that wins a simple majority of the vote, but a revision of the state constitution requires, additionally, a 2/3 majority vote of the state legislature.  The petitioners argue that Proposition 8 is a change of such significance that it should be regarded as a revision rather than an amendment, and that since there was never any 2/3 vote of the state legislature, Proposition 8 cannot stand.

The substantive due process argument against Proposition 8, as argued by state Attorney General Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, is grounded in more abstract notions of fairness.  Here, the petitioners concede that Proposition 8 is an amendment, but argue that the amendment process may not be used to eliminate fundamental rights.  Since same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under the state Supreme Court’s previous caselaw, Proposition 8 cannot stand.

I think that the San Francisco Chronicle has the right of things when it characterizes these arguments as longshots, and having watched some of the oral argument I suspect the lawsuits are likely to crash and burn, badly.  The substantive due process argument is susceptible to the easy rebuttal that there’s nothing in the state constitution to suggest that it cannot be amended to reflect the electorate’s (rather than the legislature’s or the judiciary’s) conception of fundamental rights: the federal Constitution represents the “floor” of liberty in the United States, and while states may grant greater freedoms than the federal government does, they are not required to do so.  The procedural due process argument is a little thornier, since there’s not very much caselaw on point, but the suggestion that Proposition 8 represented such a structural alteration of the state constitution as to be a revision rather than amendment strikes me as fairly unpersuasive.  In short: I think it’s pretty unlikely the state Supreme Court will overturn Proposition 8, and I think that — unfortunately and sadly — is probably the right outcome under the law.

One other thing I wanted to mention, here.  One may detest Kenneth Starr for his role in the Clinton impeachment scandal.  One may think that he’s representing contemptible bigots, and that the arguments he made on behalf of his clients are reprehensible.  But arguing in defense of Proposition 8, his was as professional and effective a job of oral advocacy before an appellate court as one will see, especially when measured against the clownish performance of Christopher Kreuger (the lawyer arguing on behalf of AG Jerry Brown).

This is low sport, but:

“Over the next several months the President will propose a series of legislative and enforcement measures to reduce such U.S. tax evasion and avoidance.”

The speaker?  Tax cheat and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Of course, there’s an important distinction to be made, here.  Geithner, by failing to pay his taxes, broke the law.  The taxpayers he wants to crack down on are simply minimizing their tax liabilities in compliance with the law.  Geithner, not his targets, is guilty of criminal tax evasion; his targets are simply engaged in rational — and perfectly legal — tax avoidance.