Justice Scalia: Women Not Constitutionally Protected By The 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause

Yahoo News reports that "Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a recently published interview that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment does not prohibit discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation."

"Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex," Scalia told California Lawyer. "The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws."

The equal protection clause states: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The dissent of Justice William Rehnquist in Craig v. Boren (1976) can be read for some background on the seminal case of gender equal protection being read into the Constitution, and the flaws of that decision: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0429_0190_ZD1.html. Tweet