The Supreme Court’s decisions protecting gay rights were not rooted in the Constitution, and their logic could as easily apply to child molesters, Justice Antonin Scalia told a room filled with first-year law students at Georgetown University on Monday.

“What minorities deserve protection?” he asked. “What? It’s up to me to identify deserving minorities?”

He said those decisions should generally be made by the democratic process rather than by judges.

He also allowed that the First Amendment protects political and religious minorities but suggested that there was no principled way for courts to make further distinctions based on the text of the Constitution. “What about pederasts?” he asked. “What about child abusers?”

“This is a deserving minority,” he said sarcastically. “Nobody loves them.”