The Hawk Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Mike Sweet column

June 28--In two separate and surprising examples of judicial clarity and human compassion, the Supreme Court delivered legal victories to Americans who believe that access to health insurance and marriage are not entitlements but fundamental rights.

To those who don't believe in either proposition -- a group that includes the court's dissenting members -- the rulings not only forced them all to eat crow, it poured Tabasco on their ulcers.

The first surprise came as two of the court's five conservatives jumped ship and joined the four reliable liberals in trampling yet another lame right wing attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act.

Like adolescent children repeating a bad locker room joke, its sniveling opponents have ceaselessly mocked the ACA as "Obamacare." After 60 failed attempts by the Republican Congress to repeal it and several unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn the law, hysterical right-wingers are still losing. They may finally be getting a sense of unintended irony as their myopic negativism gradually succumbs to positive energy as the American public begins to see the big picture. That would be the one every other industrialized country with a conscience and health care for all has seen for decades.

Much credit for upholding the ACA goes to Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Anthony Kennedy. As conservatives they crossed the ideological divide to agree with the court's liberals that Congress' clear intent was to subsidize the poor who can't afford premiums, not to punish them.

The majority of six ruled that Congress' obvious goal to help tens of millions of Americans get health insurance trumped the "inartful" phrasing of a four-word clause in a 1,000-page document that opponents wrongly inferred as being ambiguous on the subject of subsidies.

Not so, the court ruled.

Had the court's conservative Scrooges prevailed, 6 million recipients of federal subsidies would be cast immediately into medical limbo. They live in the 34 conservative states (like Iowa) whose political and religious misanthropes oppose Obamacare but offer no alternative. Other than to fill up their potter's fields.

Some Republicans vow to keep alive their sick crusade to overturn a law that seeks to provide basic health care for all.

They draw hope and energy from Justice Antonin Scalia the court's Lord of Snark.

Alternately fancying himself as Dr. Seuss and Darth Vader, Scalia accused the court's liberals and conservative defectors Roberts and Kennedy of rewriting the ACA to suit their vision, not the founders'. Who, incidentally, lived when leeches were considered sophisticated medicine.

Scalia not quite facetiously declared the law should now be called SCOTUScare (the acronym for supreme court.

Scalia also referred to the logic of the majority view as "jiggery-pokery" and "pure applesauce."

He went on and on with his vitriol. His appetite for criticizing common decency is insatiable. He and Ayn Rand may yet pontificate in hell together.

Watching Scalia squirm when he doesn't get his way is pure pleasure.

He was still fussing and fuming over Obamacare when the second decision to gall him came down from on high.

On an even narrower 5-4 ruling on a subject conservatives despise even more than health care for everyone, the court ruled that gay marriage is constitutional throughout the land.

It was only acknowledging what fair- minded Americans already accepted not only as right but inevitable.

Marriage between gay and lesbian couples already was legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia. That was the result of state and federal courts overturning state bans on same sex marriage. Iowa's supreme court bravely and unanimously contributed to that trend by ruling the state's ban unconstitutional several years ago.

It was a noble decision which the religious and political right punished by impeaching three of the justices up for retention that year. Those evil perpetrators of willful bigotry and vindictiveness against honest judges have now been vilified by five reasonable members of the highest court in the land. May they sulk in perpetuity.

The 14 states holding out for discrimination will now have to issue licenses for gays and lesbians to marry. Those who refuse -- one homophobic clerk in Texas vowed to stand in the courthouse door -- may find bigotry unaffordable.

Besides, homophobes can still practice bigotry in the sanctity of their churches. Acknowledging the separation of church and state, the court's decision doesn't require religion to abandon discrimination. But government must. Equality demands it.

Supporting that concept, the normally conservative Anthony Kennedy said that refusing to allow gays and lesbians to marry "would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood.

"The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just," he wrote, "but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.

"With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter."

Justice Scalia's dissent was a personal attack. He declared Kennedy's writing to be "as pretentious as its content is egotistic." It was a bizarre criticism from a jurist who epitomizes ego and pretense.

In his rejection of an absolute right to marry, Justice Roberts was compelled to object to "the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs."

"Just who do we think we are?" to change that, he asked.

The answer is we are a democratic society in the 21st century, where equality under the law has to mean something. Or mean nothing.

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