Excerpt:
With zero irony and heaps of hypocrisy, Alito wrote, “She makes her own decisions, and I have always respected her right to do so.”
While he has control over every woman’s baby-making uterus, he does not have control over his wife’s flag-lowering arms. So he threw up his own. In the meantime, the signs of a troubled Alito marriage are mounting:
• She ignored his advice.
• She embarrassed him at work.
• Worst of all, they are on completely different pages when it comes to oblong pieces of cloth. “My wife is fond of flying flags,” Alito writes. “I am not.”
Reading between the lines of the letter reveals more marital tension. In both the letters, Alito refers to the woman he shares two homes with only as “my wife”—just like Borat.
Can their marriage survive this strain? Was his inability to say her name an upside-down red flag signaling that the Alitos are on the rocks?
Probably not given Alito’s interpretation of coupling. In his dissent in United States v Windsor —which paved the way for federal recognition of gay marriage—Alito describes two competing visions.
The first view is called “conjugal” and defines holy matrimony as “an intrinsically opposite-sex institution” based on “biological kinship.” This kind of marriage, Alito wrote, is “the solemnizing of a comprehensive, exclusive, permanent union that is intrinsically ordered to producing new life, even if it does not always do so.”
But there’s a newer less holy view of marriage that Alito calls, “consent-based marriage.” This type of union between two people is “marked by strong emotional attachment and sexual attraction.” This, Alito argues, is the definition that has allowed proponents of same-sex marriage “to argue that because gender differentiation is not relevant to this vision, the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of marriage is rank discrimination.”
Alito just doesn’t buy this new-fangled “consent-based” relationship and adds that although the Constitution does not codify either of these views of marriage, he suspects the Founding Fathers would have taken “the traditional view for granted.”
As an originalist, Alito must accept this view, too. He and his wife share a biological kinship—two grown children—as well as a vacation home. Although as Alito quickly points out, that vacation home was purchased with money that his wife inherited from her parents and the title is in her name—so don’t even think about pinning that Christian nationalist flag on him. (Perhaps he didn’t notice it because justice is blind and he simply never looked out the window.)
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