IT AIN'T BEANBAG:

What's Your Sign?: A Supreme Court case that puts Scalia and gay rights advocates on the same side. (Dahlia Lithwick, April 28, 2010, Slate)

Today's oral argument confirms that in 2010, your constitutional worldview has less to do with the color of your skin than the thickness of it. In a case about whether one's signature on a ballot petition can be kept secret, the Supreme Court splits quickly and sharply into the justices who recognize that politics is a contact sport and those who wish it could be more like an aromatherapy massage. Justice Antonin Scalia, whose hide is tougher than a rhino's, speaks for the blood-sport faction when he says that "running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage."

Perhaps the most profound confusion about any civil right is the modern notion that speech ought not to have any consequences.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 29, 2010 5:27 AM