Scalia, again:
“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”
Such a gift to comedy. So, why am I crying? Perhaps because Scalia gets away with it, time and time again, and media still lauds him as a genius.
As one commenter on TPM has noted:
By Scalia's reckoning, the 2nd Amendment would be limited to blunderbusses since more modern weapons had occurred to no one.The 14th Amendment provides:
Basically, Scalia is saying (according to originalist doctrine), women may not be considered "persons" within the meaning of the constitution because this was not the "plain meaning" of the term at the time of drafting of the 14th amendment, which was adopted in 1868.
Another TPM commenter:
New Jersey allowed women to vote from 1790 until 1807. The Washington Territory proposed granting women the vote in 1854; it failed in the territorial legislature by only one vote. The Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and the Utah Territory did the same in 1870, though Congress killed that in 1887 with the Edmunds-Tucker Act. Colorado granted women the right to vote in 1897.Scalia is the worst kind of clown: a clown with lifetime tenure.
. . . I find it ludicrous to say that nobody had any inkling of expanded rights for women in 1868. It was a hot topic. The 14th amendment specifically mentions only men in Section 2, but it makes no such specific exclusion of women in the rest of the amendment. Why doesn't it? Why should the only "proper" reading be that any group not specifically mentioned (except white men, of course) were intended to be excluded?
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