DENVER – Asked how conservatives should respond to the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage, Mike Huckabee made an awkward reference to the notorious Dred Scott ruling.
“They can do the same thing Abraham Lincoln did about the Dred Scott decision of 1857,” Huckabee said on Saturday at the Western Conservative Summit, when asked by the Washington Examiner‘s Byron York what conservatives could do in the wake of Friday’s Supreme Court ruling. “The Dred Scott decision said that African-Americans were not fully human, that they wouldn’t be treated as fully human.”
He continued, “[Lincoln] simply ignored the ruling and said, ‘That’s not correct.’ And while that may sound like, ‘Oh, that’s an extreme position.’ Actually, it’s a constitutional position. And here’s why: If we acquiesce immediately without review, without the other branches of government, it goes back to my point, that this is judicial tyranny.”
Huckabee is not the only conservative to invoke the Dred Scott decision in the wake of the ruling. Rick Santorum, in a statement following the Friday decision, noted that, “The Court is one of three co-equal branches of government and, just as they have in cases from Dred Scott to Plessy, the Court has an imperfect track record.”
This strikes me as incredibly tone deaf. Granted, it’s fair to argue that the Supreme Court makes mistakes, Dred Scott being the most notorious example. But a general rule is that nothing should be likened to the Dred Scott decision, in which the Court treated blacks as property and said they weren’t citizens.
Any time Dred Scott is referenced in modern debates over the Supreme Court, it does one of two things. It either communicates that the speaker insufficiently understands the awfulness of the Dred Scott decision, or, it means that the speaker understands the awfulness of the Dred Scott decision, and is grossly exaggerating the how bad the current decision is.
Republicans who oppose gay marriage are already facing an uphill battle explaining their position to the majority of Americans – especially younger voters — who disagree with them. And they also face ongoing problems winning over minority voters.
Invoking Dred Scott to describe the gay marriage ruling is a double whammy. It reinforces the idea that conservatives are intolerant, and it suggests they are insufficiently sympathetic to the history of racism in this country.
Furthermore, Huckabee’s radical suggestion that the president can simply ignore the Supreme Court would put the nation on a dangerous path and is completely incompatible with conservative arguments against expanded executive power.
If social conservatives want to criticize the same-sex marriage decision, they should do so on the merits and leave Dred Scott out of it.
