This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

You may remember that a handful or two of Utah university types, Utah Valley University President Matthew Holland the most prominent among them, caught a little heat a few months ago when they signed onto an amicus brief in the same-sex marriage case then before the U.S. Supreme Court.

[— Anti-equality Utahns not giving up without a fight — George Pyle | The Salt Lake Tribune]

That was the argument that tried to convince the Supremes that gay marriage was not only not a constitutional right, but also an empirical wrong. That state recognition of marriage equality would damage "traditional marriage." That it would lead to a flood of pregnancies among women abandoned by men who, seeing gay people getting hitched, would disdain it for themselves. Some of those women would go on to become single mothers and many — upwards of 900,000 over a generation — would have an abortion.

[— Brief of Amici Curiae 100 Scholars of Marriage — Gene Schaerr]

It's good that nothing really came of the controversy, that none of the supporting profs suffered any more than a momentary flurry of criticism and some disapproving petitions.

[— Holland hurts UVU core values with marriage brief — Salt Lake Tribune Letter of the Week]

Because, in the end, the arguments raised by the ad hoc outfit styled "100 Scholars of Marriage" sank without a trace.

Even the four dissenters, writing four separate opinions, utterly ignored the Scholars and their reasoning.

The brief caused a momentary ripple in the national media, mostly ridicule, as commentators bored by waiting for a ruling seized upon the brief by Gene Schaerr — the lawyer who collected a big fee from Utah taxpayers to lose our state's case at the appeals court level — as an example of just how silly and backward same-sex marriage opponents were and how few real arguments they had. The argument that nations and states where same-sex marriage was already allowed had seen declines in marriage rates was dismissed as a fib, as marriage rates are down throughout the developed world.

In the much-quoted majority opinion from Justice Anthony Kennedy, the idea that straight couples who are or may be married are put at any risk from the marriage equality movement is dismissed with a quote from the appeals court ruling in which Utah's same-sex marriage ban, Amendment 3, was crushed: "[I]t is wholly illogical to believe that state recognition of the love and commitment between same-sex couples will alter the most intimate and personal decisions of opposite-sex couples."

[— Obergefell v. Hodges — Supreme Court of the United States]

Even Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom Schaerr once labored as a clerk, went nowhere near any argument as to whether gay marriage is a good or a bad thing. He, like Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservatives Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, stuck to the question that is the true focus of most big Supreme Court cases: Not what is right and what is wrong, but who decides.

The majority said it is a choice that belongs to individuals. The minority insisted it belongs to states, and argued that it was too bad that the popular groundswell toward marriage equality had been halted.

Even Scalia declined to take up Schaerr's proffered weapon. It's not like Scalia was censoring himself. His dissent was a model of "You dirty hippies get off my lawn!" bluster and frustration. Kind of like Harry Potter's Uncle Vernon when circumstances got the better of him, except funnier.

The institution of marriage didn't get all that much respect from Scalia, either, as he channeled a bit of the disdain of another fictional character, the barrister Horace Rumpole, who referred to his own wife as, "She who must be obeyed."

"Expression, sure enough, is a freedom," Scalia wrote, "but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say."

Holland and the other 99 Scholars of Marriage may still be smarting over the previous suggestions that they had exceeded the bounds of what they could prudently say. The good news for them, at least politically, is that their argument drew absolutely no respect from Supreme Court justices on either side of the issue.

As I predicted: No harm, no foul.