The vaporous slogan posing as a standard is the spoon full of sugar that helps the Court’s enlightened medicine go down. The handiwork that results is not a reflection of our evolved values; it is five lawyers dragging the benighted masses kicking and screaming toward its Utopia — where brutalized eight-year-old girls, like murdered innocents and terrorized cities, are not flesh-and-blood but the props by which we measure how “maturely” we indulge their tormentors.

And now, it turns out, so brazen was Kennedy’s power grab that the usual veneer — cloaking judicial tyranny in a self-celebration of societal “progress” — couldn’t even make it through two weeks.

The evolving standards Justice Kennedy purported to find stemmed from what he took to be a national “consensus” against capital punishment for child rape. The furious public outcry after the ruling was a pretty good sign that something was amiss in the majority’s survey. Nevertheless, the Court observed that of the 36 states t