On Friday, CNN celebrated the Supreme Court’s lawless decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act by asking whether opinion-writing Justice Anthony Kennedy was “the first gay justice.” In a puff piece designed to designate Kennedy one of America’s greatest moral leaders, CNN’s Bill Mears wrote,
Justice Anthony Kennedy was among the first of his colleagues to arrive Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court. His chambers lit up several hours before the last-day release of monumental rulings on same-sex marriage.
There was little doubt that later that morning, this quietly powerful justice would be having a major say in the legal, political, and social path of gay rights moving forward.
And at precisely 10 a.m., Kennedy kicked off the public session with his eloquent majority ruling …. It was vintage Kennedy — a mix of sweeping rhetoric mixed with practical legal and social considerations.
No one quite knows what the legal considerations were in the case – Kennedy’s wild opinion swung from federalism to the Fifth Amendment to the Fourteenth Amendment seemingly at random, and never truly explained why Kennedy hadn’t just voted to nationalize same-sex marriage. But suffice it to say that CNN was thrilled anyway, since legal considerations play no role in their elevation of liberal Supreme Court justices. After all, if Kennedy is the first “gay” justice, who cares what the Constitution has to say about it?
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).