Barney Frank on Justice Scalia's 'Rancid Hatred' of Gays

LOS ANGELES—It's probably safe to say that AVN has had a less-than-love affair with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for some time—most recently in an October article written after Scalia had expressed his views on homosexual sodomy at the American Enterprise Institute, and before that in many articles by Senior Editor Mark Kernes—but leave it to Rep. Barney Frank (pictured), whose 32-year career in the House comes to a close this January, to encapsulate so succinctly why Scalia is such an odious fellow. We, for instance, have been barking for years that the justice's storied intelligence is one of Washington's most notorious fictions; Frank dispenses with the subject in one fell swoop. The comments are taken from a recent radio interview with Michelangelo Signorile, which can be listened to here. When asked about Scalia, and specifically his latest remarks at Princeton and whether the justice should recuse himself [from same-sex marriage cases before the court], Frank replied, “There's no chance he will recuse himself. I was glad that he made clear what’s been obvious, that he’s just a flat out bigot. I’d previously said he was a homophobe. And Fox and the right wing said, ‘Oh just because he’s not for same-sex marriage?’ And I said, ‘No, let me be very clear. That’s not it. This is a man who thinks we should go to prison for having sex.’ It was an extraordinarily abusive sentiment, first of all, and it was dead wrong. And, by the way, for a guy who is supposed to be so smart—quite stupid. When this young man said to him, ‘Why do you compare sodomy to murder,’ he said, ‘Well, because I have a right to say if I think something is immoral.’ That wasn't the question. We're not talking about his right. The question was, by what morality is expressing your love for someone in a physical way equivalent to killing that person? It makes it clear that the man is an unreconstructed bigot, and if it's a given that you have a bigot on the Supreme Court like that, it is useful to know. "And by the way, even Clarence Thomas feels the need to disassociate himself from that. When the sodomy case was decided—Lawrence v Texas—Scalia wrote this outragous bigoted rant about how terrible we are. Clarence Thomas, who concurred with him, said, 'Look, if I were in the legislature I'd vote against this law, because I think it's a stupid idea, but I don't think it's unconstitutional.’ So the one good thing is that he's just alone in he degree of his rancid hatred of us." Indeed.