John Roberts’ Decisions Make Him an Ayatollah

In the matter of the so-called Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court ruled that the law must not say what it in fact does say because it would be better if it were not to say what it says and were to say something else instead.

In the matter of same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court rules that the law must say what it does not say because it would be better if it were to say what it does not say instead of what it says.

Which is to say, the Supreme Court has firmly established that it does not matter what the law says or does not say — what matters is what they want.

That texts may be imaginatively interpreted to any end is not news — “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” as William Shakespeare observed in The Merchant of Venice.

The legendary constitutional scholar Barack Obama failed to notice, until the day before yesterday, that the Constitution mandates the legalization of homosexual marriage from sea to shining sea, but, to be fair, that is an easy provision to overlook, even for a mind as keen as Barack Obama’s, since the Constitution does not say one word about marriage, much less about the state-level codification of homosexual couplings being a fundamental federal right.

But scriptural interpretation is a funny business. I grew up on the edges of some wildly entertaining fundamentalist circles in West Texas, and I very much enjoyed hearing mail-order theologians explain how, sometime between turning water into wine at that famous wedding and pouring out a round for the guys at the Last Supper, Jesus very subtly declared alcohol verboten.

Put any given text on the rack, and you can prove Ronald Coase’s dictum: