The Strategy of the Subpoenas

Newt Gingrich and Vince Haley suggest that the subpoena of sermons and other communications from Houston pastors is an attempt to exploit Justice Kennedy’s arguments in Windsor:

“there is now an established and successful political and constitutional strategy to paint the protection of traditional moral values – and opposition to newly-invented sexual and gender identity rights – as motivated by malice. In the 2013 Supreme Court decision (United States v. Windsor) that invalidated Congress’ enacted definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that the only purpose of those who supported this traditional definition of marriage was to ‘disparage,’ ‘injure,’ ‘degrade,’ ‘demean,’ and ‘humiliate’ certain groups of fellow citizens.

“In a word, hate is all that Justice Kennedy sees when he encounters someone who supports a traditional definition of marriage. Under this newly-invented constitutional standard, if the Court feels today that a particular law is hateful, then the Court will simply invalidate the law, no further justification needed. And it will do so whether or not a vast majority of the public believes reasonable people can disagree about the definition of marriage in particular and about sexual ethics more generally.

“We can be confident that Mayor Parker has taken note of Justice Kennedy’s insidious two-part strategy of (1) making skeptics of the left’s sexual and gender identity agenda into ‘enemies of humanity.’ to paraphrase Justice Scalia, and (2) thereby ending political debate over these newly-invented sexual rights by declaring them constitutional rights beyond public debate. Mayor Parker’s attention-grabbing subpoenas of five Christian pastors seems intended to do just that – to persuade the public that ‘these are the hateful haters who oppose my agenda to conjure up new constitutional rights.’”