Kagan had perhaps been especially miffed about the ruling, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick speculated, because Samuel Alito had previously dismissed her concern for members of minority religions was “really quite niggling.”

The vitriol can be petty; it can also be grand. Justice Kennedy’s defense of marriage in the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges claimed, essentially, that to be against same-sex marriage was to be not just on the wrong side of history, but the wrong side of morality. “No union is more profound than marriage,” Kennedy wrote, “for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.” He invoked “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

This—a claim not just of legality over illegality, but of right in every sense of the word—may have been Scalia’s version of “really quite niggling.” Scalia remarked of Kennedy’s writing, in his dissent:

The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic. It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the court to do so. Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.

Eeesh. This is not the stuff of respectful, even rancorously respectful, disagreement. This is instead the stuff of seething angers (“pretentious,” “egotistic”) and sweeping animosities (“showy profundities” that are “often profoundly incoherent”). It is the stuff of washed hands and burnt bridges.

As Sonia Sotomayor put it in a talk to young lawyers last month, “If you read some of our decisions, you know that we can be nasty to each other.”

Which is, on the one hand, unsurprising. The Court is composed, like any government body, of humans, and is therefore subject to humanity’s attendant faults and frailties. And the justices are appointed—Roberts’ sweeping aspirations toward extra-partisanship aside—not despite their politics, but because of their views. As Ezra Klein pointed out, reacting to the Obergefell ruling, the high stakes of the Court’s makeup, and the fact that so much can hinge on a death or illness of a Justice, have “led to perverse incentives within the political process”:

Political parties are terrified of appointing a justice who later betrays them—either through ideology or simply through mortality—and so they vet candidates harder for political fit, and constrict their selection to younger candidates who are likely to hold their seat for many decades.

Still, though. Political differences need not be political divisions. Just as ideological differences need not be the cause, or the result, of personal acrimony. (cf. Scalia and Kagan, duck-hunting duo.) That opinions and dissents are now operating at the heights of moral messaging and the depths of ad-hominem attack is a relatively recent phenomenon—one that has a metaphor, if not a full analogue, in the bitter divides that have become so familiar in other branches of government. SCOTUS is acting like Congress.