When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement to the Supreme Court in June, he divided the country. Liberals were aghast, with many going so far as to accuse him of having betrayed his profession and his country. What nonsense. The Washington Free Beacon is among those periodicals that wish him a long and merry retirement in which he will be free to pursue his decades-long interests in "international law" and pro-crime activism.
Unlike the feckless progressives at other publications, we honor Kennedy's numerous contributions to the field of constitutional law and his service to this great country and her people. Few students of the law have ever demonstrated such profound respect for human rights. Without Kennedy we would not even be aware that many of the rights we now cherish exist at all. Among the many treasures this deep-sea diver managed to recover from the Java Trench of the U.S. Constitution are the right of communists to burn the flag, the right of government bureaucrats to confiscate your property for their absurd schemes, the right of terrorists to escape detention and return to their violent calling in their native countries, the right of employers to poison their workers with asbestos, the right of mining companies to put toxic waste in Alaskan waters, the right of murderers to escape the ultimate punishment for their disgusting crimes, the right of pedophiles to enjoy "virtual" kiddie porn, and the rights of women to put their children to death under sanitary medical conditions.
He is also what in legal circles is known as a "bitchin' writer." Don't believe us? This is a man who managed to sneak half the lyrics to a bad-ass '80s power ballad into a freaking Supreme Court opinion. Consider the following paragraph from his majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, where he discovered that the Fourteenth Amendment had guaranteed the rights of cowboys to marry their partners on the old dusty trail all the way back in 1868:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions.
If your eyes were not welling up with hot tears as you tap your foot and hold your lighter above your denim jacket, you are either illiterate or Rick Santorum.
For his jurisprudential wizardry, his prowess in the composition of highly erotic prose poems, and his decision to vacate in order to make room for Squee and Tobin's tubular bud P.J. on the Supreme Court, the Washington Free Beacon names Anthony Kennedy a 2018 Man of the Year.
