"x x x.
According to several news accounts, Duncan Hosie, a student who identified himself as gay, said he found it extraordinarily offensive that Scalia had linked homosexual conduct to bestiality and murder when he dissented in previous gay rights cases.
"I don't think it's necessary [to the argument], but it think it's effective," Scalia responded. "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded."
In 1996, Scalia dissented when the court struck down an anti-gay initiative from Colorado. There, he made a reference to murder: "The court's opinion contains grim, disapproving hints that Coloradans have been guilty of 'animus' or 'animosity' toward homosexuality, as though that has been established as un-American. Of course it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings. But I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible — murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals — and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of 'animus' at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct."
Scalia dissented again in 2003 when the court struck down a Texas law that made sex between gays a crime. The opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy overturned a 1986 ruling in Bowers vs. Hardwick that had upheld state sodomy laws.
x x x."
