Stewart first addressed the arguments on the federal Defense of Marriage Act. He noted that the defense framed it as not morally based, but as a way to unify federal marriage standards. But then Stewart played clips of members of Congress decrying homosexuality in 1996, before voting to implement DOMA.
Stewart also ripped into conservative-leaning justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito. Scalia said during oral arguments on California's Proposition 8 Tuesday that there's "considerable disagreement" over the effects of raising children in single-sex couples.
"May I approach the Grinch — uh, dick — uh, bench?" Stewart joked, before pointing to a study from the American Academy of Pediatrics that found no relationship.
"If the new standard for recognizing marriage is whether or not the couple would make good parents, you, Antonin Scalia, should get cable," Stewart said. "Because it looks like, if I'm not mistaken, the consequences of heterosexual child-rearing are pretty severe, and those are just the heteros that let people film them."
Stewart also took on Alito's argument cautioning against a sweeping decision on a phenomenon that is "newer than cell phones or the Internet," saying that "
Watch the videos below, courtesy of Comedy Central: