Justice Antonin Scalia: Have Mouth. Will Yabber.
Every time I hear Antonin Scalia talk, all I can think is “that’s not talking, that’s just word spittin’.”
Well, he’s done it again.
Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.
“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.
So inducing unnecessary fear is the moral thing to do?
Nobody, and I mean nobody, can be as homophobic as Scalia without getting a little too excited when Ricky Martin starts a new tour.
You know, this banning of morality has always worked really well. From 1919 until 1933, nobody drank alcohol. Nobody. And it worked so well that Baptist are still trying to repeal the 21st amendment. And, of course, there is no illegal prostitution and we are winning the War on Drugs.
Scalia, who will never hurt his neck toting around his brain, fails to see the difference in murder and bestiality having a victim but homosexuality does not.
Number One way to know you might be gay: You show up in Antonin Scalia’s dreams.
Is it appropriate to say he’s simply ICKY?
1Personally I believe that Hefner’s marrying the young thing many years younger than his 80+ year old self is pretty immoral and disgusting, but it’s legal.
2Apparently the good judge (who brings shame to being Italian BTW) is not offended by this, which is why we have judicial judgements based on laws not on euwww’s .
I think we have another one of those “me thinks he doth protest too much” still-in-the-closet types and he’s one of the supremes (!) Scary! Can’t wait to see what he says when they take up the 2 cases on this topic. Even the Repugs are saying “nada” about the court agreeing to hear the cases. They were behind the DOMA case when it was filed (pre-election) and now want it to just go away…not this time, bozos!
3I think Antonin would have been right at home during the Spanish Inquisition….
4According to this logic it was a good and moral thing to outlaw mixed-race marriages since many people disapproved of them. And laws outlawing teaching slaves in the South how to read and write–obviously “moral” for a given value of moral.
Scalia is nauseating.
5Scalia covers over all this in his “Lawrence” dissent.
People are conflating two separate arguments. Scalia’s point is that legislatures and governments have “legislated morality” for centuries. Sometimes it is accepted (e.g., murder, bigamy) sometimes it isn’t (Prohibition), but it is ludicrous (in his view) to claim that democracies *don’t* have the power to legislate based on some consensus moral code.
Scalia goes on to say that if the consensus moral code changes, people are free to change the law; that process is described in the Constitution. What he would prefer they not do is pretend that the Constitution always enshrined whatever that contemporary view of morality might be.
The obvious tension (which I would say he does not address in Lawrence) is that the Constitution also protects minority rights. So just what is supposed to happen when society’s moral view changes? There is likely to be a grim transitional period during which a growing minority feels oppressed by the current laws and works to have them changed.
Sometimes (as with slavery) that emerging minority prevails. Other times it doesn’t – there is probably still some Mormon somewhere believing he is on the right side of history and waiting for society to honor his religious freedom and privacy rights with respect to bigamy. I hope he is not holding his breath.
Offhand I recall that Scalia mentioned bigamy and adult incest as acts the illegality of which seems to flow exclusively from a moral code. In that theme, I would suggest that laws about euthanasia are morally based and likely to come under great pressure in the upcoming years.
6Can we ban Scalia?
7I liked it a whole lot better when Supreme Court Justices were only “heard” or “read” in their legal opinions. Or when they were merely seen, and not “heard” at all. (Like all good children).
Scalia is supposed to rule on “law”, not his own morals.
8This so-called Intellectual Giant doesn’t seem to distinguish the differences in certain “immoral” conduct; i.e., incest, bestiality, murder, polygamy all require VICTIMS. Marriage between two consenting adults does not.
What a putz!
9Scalia has it floored in neutral in 1959. His definitions of right and wrong are frozen in place, just where his Dad taught him. That’s what guides him, not the law or the Constitutiion.
10Scalia is getting senile and very erratic in his old age. At the end of last session, Scalia made some really strange statements and comments including some rants about the SCOTUS opinion on the Affordable Care Act. These last comments just further prove that Scalia needs to retire.
11Scalia makes me ill. He thinks it’s OK for corporations to have the privileges of real citizens, and choose to buy…er….try to buy…an election, but it’s not OK for a woman to make choices about her own body.
12He will be 77 in march…he is obese…I can’t help but wonder what his shelf life is. He certainly does not look healthy. But then again there are some who believe that mean-spiritedness pickles people and preserves them for extended shelf lives so who knows.
13by the way, people who delve into the topics of sodomy and bestiality often turn out to be the ones who enjoy it themselves at some level–either the discussion of it or the actual practice. That’s another thing I wonder about Scalia. It’s the “thou doest protest too much” syndrome.
Seriously! look at how many hard-right politicians who have railed against homosexuality only to be found out to be homosexuals themselves?–at least 10 prominent hard-right politicians and/or religious leaders in the past 10 years.
14@Elizabeth Berry, I’ve read that many learned people agree with you on the “thou doest protest too much” syndrome. Many of these hard-right politicians do seem inordinately obsessed with the sex lives of homosexuals.
Scalia is puke-inducing.
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