Speaking to students at Georgetown, Scalia asked, “What minorities deserve protection?” He suggested that the same logic used to defend gay rights could be applied to protect child abusers. “What about pederasts?” Scalia queried. “What about child abusers? ... This is a deserving minority. Nobody loves them.” Apparently you can be a Supreme Court justice without being able to understand the elementary distinction between consensual relationships between adults and heinous acts that by definition are coercive.
Scalia’s remarks are so breathtaking in their bigotry that it’s worth asking the question: When was the last time a Supreme Court justice was willing to express such crude contempt for an entire class of people? The one example that comes to mind is James Clark McReynolds, who, on the appointment of Benjamin Cardozo to the court in 1932, said, “The only way you can get on the Supreme Court these days is to be either the son of a criminal or a Jew, or both.”