Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, widely viewed as the leader of the court’s dominant conservative bloc, told law students at Santa Clara University on Wednesday that he’s actually a dissident on a liberal court, one whose prevailing view threatens “the destruction of our democratic system.”

After dissenting from two of the most important rulings in the 2014-15 term — one legalizing same-sex marriage, the other upholding federal insurance subsidies under the national health care law — Scalia said Wednesday the court has long had a majority of justices who disregard the Constitution’s text and original meaning if it conflicts with their views.

“The whole time I have been on my court, it has been a liberal court,” said the 79-year-old justice, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and part of a majority of Republican appointees throughout his tenure.

Scalia said the court’s promotion of what he derisively called the “living Constitution” began in the 1920s, when justices interpreted the guarantee of due process of law to protect fundamental rights not mentioned in the constitutional text.

The rulings started with relatively non-controversial rights, like the right to educate one’s children, but soon headed down a “slippery slope,” Scalia said. “At the bottom of that slope, I can’t imagine how you can go any further, is the right to same-sex marriage.”

“Do you think the American people would ever have ratified” the Constitution if they had been told “the meaning of this document shall be whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it is?” Scalia asked. Referring to the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion and the 1992 decision that barred states from placing an: “undue burden” on abortion rights, he said, “They vote on the basis of what they feel.”

“It’s the destruction of our democratic system,” Scalia said. “I cannot imagine the system can continue with more and more of the basic rules made by the Supreme Court.”

On other topics, Scalia said:

—Painful executions, like recent lethal injections in which inmates appeared to be gasping and wheezing in agony, do not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment because they cause less pain than the hangings that were legal when the Constitution was ratified.

—Bush vs. Gore, the ruling that decided the 2000 presidential election and put George W. Bush in the White House, was not a close case or an example of judicial overreaching. “We didn’t inject ourselves into that election,” Scalia said. “It was Al Gore who wanted judges to decide” that the official tally by Florida’s Republican election officials was invalid.

—He would support television coverage of the court’s hearings “if I thought the American people or even a substantial number would watch our proceedings gavel to gavel.” But most people, Scalia said, would watch brief, oversimplified “takeouts on the nightly news.”