The Supreme Court last week upheld the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, and made same-sex marriage legal nationwide. Those were interesting rulings, but even more interesting perhaps were the conniptions they caused in some quarters.

Though Obamacare survived by a 6-3 margin, there was at least an argument to be made that the law as written did not permit the federal insurance exchange to stand-in for state exchanges in certain circumstances. Six million citizens could have lost their insurance overnight. It was common knowledge that a drafting error by some clerk in the bowels of the Capitol was to blame. The clear intent of Congress was what the court affirmed.

But the brand of originalist, textualist jurisprudence promoted by Justice Scalia says all that matters is the words on paper, even if several hundred lawmakers who were present at the creation of the ACA were prepared to attest that the law was intended to mean something other than what the hapless scribe wrote in four little words.

When Chief Justice Roberts and five other justices took the intention of Congress into account, Scalia all but burst a blood vessel, saying that “words no longer have meaning,” that “normal rules of interpretation” had been abandoned, and that the Chief’s opinion was guilty of “jiggery-pokery” and was sheer “applesauce.”

The case had been brought by Republican dead-enders seeking any way to kill Obamacare after six years and many previous court rulings in its favor. Their response to the decision was muted, in part because they knew this last ditch objection was a bit of a long shot and because the decision was written by the Republican Chief Justice and joined by another Republican, Justice Kennedy.

The 5-4 decision on the same-sex marriage case allowed for more vituperation and hysteria because it was close, and because opponents weren’t just arguing against Equal Protection for people they didn’t like but were terrified of bogeymen, believing that allowing gays to marry spelled the end to religion, morality, truth, justice and the American Way. The Bible told them so.

It is noteworthy that, in a court composed of six Catholics and three Jews, two Catholic Justices – Sotomayor and Kennedy – joined the majority. Indeed, Kennedy has penned many of the court’s decisions affirming gay rights, always on equal protection grounds. Presumably Conservatives need to devise a strategy to put more Evangelical Protestants on the court.

In fact, the most recent polling shows the following percentages favor the right to marry for same sex couples. Democrats 75%, Independents 65%, Women 67%, Men 58%, people aged 18-34: 72%, 35-54: 64%. Even 60 % of Catholics, 48 % of those over 65 and 42% of Republicans are in favor. The hold-outs are white evangelicals. Only 23 % of them favor the right to marry for same sex couples. Thus, increasingly, the opposition is confined to old, white, Republican men, especially evangelicals.
Republican candidates for president were quick to try to appeal to the party’s evangelical and senior citizen base by damning the decision. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush said they opposed the ruling and felt the issue should have been left to the states. Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee viewed it as an affront to religion, at least their religion, and morality. Scott Walker embraced the familiar rallying cry that five unelected judges shouldn’t be able to “threaten the millennia-old institution of marriage.” Though how giving more people the right to marriage threatens marriage isn’t clear unless you regard it as a zero sum game.

Bobby Jindl said it might be time to get rid of the Supreme Court altogether since “Christian individuals businesses, pastors and churches” will now have to take part in offensive ceremonies. Carly Fiorina pronounce democracy dead as a result of the decision, and Ted Cruz proposed making Supreme Court Justices run for periodic reelection.

What are these people smoking? First, the ruling will make no one participate in ceremonies they object to. Indeed, more than half the states still have laws on the books permitting people like these candidates and their fans to discriminate against gay people, including firing them, for the offense of not being heterosexual.

You would think the four dissenting Catholics on the court, the African-American dissenter, Clarence Thomas, the two Italian-American dissenters, Scalia and Alito, would have a certain sympathy for the idea of Equal Protection since historically Italians, Catholics, blacks, Jews, Irish, Hispanics and many other minorities have faced discrimination from the majority.

Yet Scalia, once again howling in dissent, called the ruling a “judicial putsch,” likening granting of equal Protection to LGBT people to an attempted Nazi coup. He bemoaned the “undemocratic” idea of an “unrepresentative” panel of nine forcing same-sex marriage on the nation, though the majority now supports it. Yet he has had no trouble with a panel of nine unelected judges undemocratically deciding an election in Bush v. Gore or gutting a Voting Rights Act overwhelmingly approved by Congress.

Judge-made law is only objectionable when he’s not the judge making it, which is most of the time. Scalia may be the sorest loser ever to sit on the Supreme Court. Abandoning legal argument he launched an ad hominem attack on Kennedy’s majority opinion calling it egotistic, pretentious and incoherent mummery. His alter ego, Justice Alito, predicted darkly that, thanks to the ruling, opponents of gay marriage “will now be discriminated against.” That is, they will be scorned for holding an increasingly unpopular view. That’s free speech for you.

Their argument that there’s nothing to permit gay marriage in the Constitution is narrowly literal. David Boies, who won several landmark cases upholding same-sex marriage, addressed the argument that same-sex marriage should be left to the states and the political process. No, said Boies, there is a reason free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from search and seizure and the like are deliberately included in the Constitution.

Some issues are too important and foundational to be left to the shifting tides of majority opinion. They aren’t subjects to be debated or changed or curbed. They are essential rights granted to all citizens and beyond the right of the state or politicians to abridge or eliminate. In case after case, over many years the court has affirmed the Equal Protection guarantee applies to marriage, have ruled that marriage is a fundamental right.

Felons in prison were once denied the right to marry, people with differently pigmented skin were denied the right to marry. The courts found that wrong. And now, those of the same sex seeking the same right have been found to have it. Not by a rogue court, but under the terms of the Constitution. It took a long time for many of these rights to be acknowledged.

Those who now see the end of democracy and justice in the decision are, like the base of the Republican Party, old, set in their ways, angry at change, fearful of being left behind, ambitious to make public policy and law on the basis of their theology. Thus, they are wedded to states’ rights, supporters of rights for some but not for all, convinced that this decision undermines the Republic and perverts the Constitution.

In fact, it extends Constitutional protections to yet another class of Americans who have been denied full citizenship. If those protections apply to some, it is hard to argue they should not apply to all. That realization is what accounts for the growing acceptance of same sex marriage and for the court’s decision. It is not, as the foes would have it, the end of democracy, but the expansion of justice.