Cato’s Michael Cannon accused the Supreme Court of playing Calvinball in its decision upholding ObamaCare.

In the old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip the characters played Calvinball, a game in which the rules were constantly changing to suit a player’s advantage.

You might conclude the court was playing Calvinball in three cases in two days.

In King v. Burwell on Thursday, the court said the words “established by the state” also mean established by a federal agency, when it comes of doling out subsidies.

Also on Thursday in Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., the court ruled that discrimination can be proven by mere disparate outcomes rather than actual evidence.

In Obergefell v. Hodges, today the court ruled, in its customary 5-4 split, that there is a right to gay marriage in every state, no matter how the citizens of any given state may have voted.

In the ruling today, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in dissent a sentiment probably held by many libertarians:

Those civil consequences — and the public approval that conferring the name of marriage evidences — can perhaps have adverse social effects, but no more adverse than the effects of many other controversial laws. So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact — and the furthest extension one can even imagine — of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

Justice John Roberts, back from his sojourn in Humpty Dumpty land in the ObamaCare ruling, opined:

Petitioners make strong arguments rooted in social policy and considerations of fairness. They contend that same-sex couples should be allowed to affirm their love and commitment through marriage, just like opposite-sex couples. That position has undeniable appeal; over the past six years, voters and legislators in eleven States and the District of Columbia have revised their laws to allow marriage between two people of the same sex. But this Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be. The people who ratified the Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will but merely judgment.” The Federalist No. 78 …

Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent took apart the Due Process argument of the majority:

The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits. The Framers created our Constitution to preserve that understanding of liberty. Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea — captured in our Declaration of Independence — that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic. I cannot agree with it.

How many other rights will now be found in the penumbra of the Constitution now that we have a right to health insurance subsidies no matter what the law actually says, a right to claim discrimination based on statistics (lies, damned lies and statistics) and a right to the benefits of marriage no matter what the law or constitution of a state may say.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote today’s gay marriage ruling, also wrote the opinion striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, signed by Bill Clinton.

In the that earlier ruling, Kennedy wrote:

The State’s power in defining the marital relation is of central relevance in this case quite apart from principles of federalism. Here the State’s decision to give this class of persons the right to marry conferred upon them a dignity and status of immense import. When the State used its historic and essential authority to define the marital relation in this way, its role and its power in making the decision enhanced the recognition, dignity, and protection of the class in their own community. DOMA, because of its reach and extent, departs from this history and tradition of reliance on state law to define marriage.

That was then, this is now in the game of Calvinball.

Polygamy must be a right, too. It is in the Bible. If Kennedy can cite Cicero and Confucius, why not the Bible?

In fact, Roberts asked that very question: “If not having the opportunity to marry ‘serves to disrespect and subordinate’ gay and lesbian couples, why wouldn’t the same ‘imposition of this disability,’ … serve to disrespect and subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships?”