Why we need grammar lessons.

Today's Best of the Web has an item headed "Scalia Gets Dowdified." I wondered how many of our current crop of high school graduates would understand Taranto's point that:

It turns out that although Scalia's dissent does contain this sequence of words ["I have nothing against homosexuals"], the network [CNN] egregiously misquoted him. Here's what he actually wrote:

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.

The object of the preposition against was not homosexuals but promoting.

Ah, the power of diagramming sentences!