Andrew C. McCarthy points out an undeniable fact concerning the way the Supreme Court does or does not follow precedent.
When it comes to the pieties of liberal elites and civil-liberties extremists, the current Supreme Court cares nothing for precedent. In our culture wars, precedent counts mainly as a rationalization for not reversing Roe v. Wade. To the contrary, when bourgeois sensibilities are at issue, the Supreme Court regularly hews to contemporary political correctness. So, for example, when it ruled in favor of special rights for homosexuals in Romer v. Evans (1996), the Court ignored a flatly contradictory precedent from only a decade before, Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). And only last year, when it held that the death penalty could not be applied to a juvenile in Roper v. Simmons, it blithely explained that it had “evolved” past its antithetical decision only 15 years earlier in Stanford v. Kentucky.