The Constitution does not outlaw sex discrimination, Justice Scalia recently stated. (He also reiterated his long opposition to Roe v. Wade, calling the right of privacy a “total absurdity.”) The good news is that he said these things in the context of an interview with a law professor, rather than in a Supreme Court opinion. The bad news is that as a Supreme Court Justice, his opinion regarding the meaning of the Constitution is currently one of the nine in the world that matter most.
Justice Scalia’s reading of the Constitution is not only inconsistent with decades of precedent joined by both conservative and liberal justices finding that the Constitution prohibits governments from discriminating against women; it is also difficult to reconcile with the text of the Equal Protection Clause itself, which provides that “no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But perhaps he does not understand women to be persons.
Justice Scalia explained that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not intend to prohibit discrimination against women, and thus the Equal Protection Clause has nothing to say about it. Of course, the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers also did not understand themselves to be prohibiting racially segregated schools: if the Constitution’s meaning is measured purely by the understandings of its framers, Brown v. Board of Education was wrongly decided.
via www.nwlc.org
