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It seems to me that any U.S. Supreme Court Justice belching out homophobic nonsense like this needs to recuse himself from the Prop 8/DOMA cases coming up on the docket.
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.
Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, “Reading Law,” and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
…”It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”
He is just grotesque; a man unwilling to accept the social change before him, and it’s clearly going to cloud his view of the law. Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon:
Scalia is still clinging tenaciously to his “ew, gross” vision of homosexuality — and working with all his might to prove that the great love of his life, the Constitution of the United States of America, agrees with him. In October, he eyerolled at a lecture, “Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.” It must be difficult to find himself, a man appointed back in the glory days of Ronald Reagan, to be on the increasingly smaller, losing side of the culture war. To be the great and powerful Antonin Scalia, facing off against a measly college freshman, and to come across so defensive, so hollow, and so very, very wrong. It’s called reduction to absurd. Scalia’s living it.
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The only thing absurd about it is Scalia’s reliance on those false parallels, an argument that relies entirely on the concept of “morality” as the adherence to (often arbitrary) rules, rather than stemming from any real values. As far as morality and the law, there are many “moral strictures” that the law doesn’t interfere with, or does so only minimally and with rational justification — drinking ages, for example. We tried banning alcohol because of “morality,” and managed the greatest crime wave in American history.
One of the main reasons for banning something under the law is that there must be a victim — who is the victim in consensual intimate relations between two adults of the same sex? Not equivalent to murder at all.
Here’s a reductio ad absurdum for you: If we can’t take Antonin Scalia seriously as a lecturer, can we take him seriously as a Supreme Court Justice?
As I have typed about McCain and Cheney, it’s way past time for this man’s family to realize he’s ruining whatever precious conservation ‘legacy’ he has in American jurisprudence with his babbling senilities, and remove him to a comfortable but secure location. He’s embarrassing himself, and the Court, with these inanities. Time for a rest, Fat Tony.
Murder isn’t illegal because it’s immoral but because it violates someone’s right to life. Laws can’t be based on morality alone, but always need another justification.
Scalia says ‘reductio ad absurdum’ like it’s a good thing!
what BS!
Someone once asked Scalia (no time to dig up a link) if he sodomized his wife (which naturally he never answered). It’s still a good question.
Yeah, that Supreme Court “justice for life” thing isn’t working out as well as we expected. You’re saying his children should take away his robes? Wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment. Works for me Teddy!
Scalia has the dirtiest mind and must really enjoy the pictures he has to be watching in his head. He’s a creep.
I’d like Scalia to rule on PETA bringing a case to the Supreme Court on their moral objections to eating meat.
He’s supposed to be ruling on the law of the land, not the law of the bible.
Second greatest.
All 9 members of the US Supreme Court are either catholic or jewish yet catholics and jews make up less than 1/3 of the total US population.
Hmmm. It would appear that morality is what society says it is at any time. If so, then those states that recognize same sex marriage and gay rights.have set up a moral code, esp since it does not harm anyone. That suggests the moral code changes over time. The ban on alcohol strikes me as something nuts, not morality. In a federal union it just makes no sense for the law to be different among the states. So Tony gets to help decide which is more ” moral”.
He criticizes a student for what he terms a ‘reduction to the absurd’, but he feels it’s fine to set up a Straw Man to knock down with this:
“If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”
Have all the moral feelings you want about whatever you want, Tony. Just don’t legislate from the bench for the rest of the country based on those moral feelings.
The unwillingness of this decrepit piece of fecal matter to accept society’s evolution mirrors Taney’s ignorant position on slaves, which led to civil war.
The only “inferior person” here is a Judge.
The idea of ruling in court according to morals or religion is the exact opposite of our Constitution. The “moral” rulings would depend on the judge who could be a complete whack job – like Scalia. Dangerous territory.
It is about protecting rights. For Scaglia the only rights he wants to protect are the rights he thinks are rights deserving of protection.
Like the right of a corporation to lie, cheat and steal, under the protection of the first amendment, while killing million over the course of decades and passing the cost of healthcare on to the consumers, they addicted to a deadly product, via lies….
That is what this scumbag in a robe is all about. Protecting and continuing America’s servitude to corporate monopolies. In other words, “protecting the monied interests.”
AKA Corporate Fascists
A legislature can, and has, passed all sorts of laws by majority vote, but that doesn’t mean that these laws were legal, even though those rights are not specified in the Constitution. That’s because of Amendment IX – “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
That means that any legislature can’t legally deny or disparage our right to be immoral (whatever that is) if we choose to be.
Chief Justice Roberts has said that there’s no right to an abortion in the Constitution, and he’s correct. But that doesn’t mean that a state legislature can legally deny that right.
So I agree with those who say let’s get back to the Constitution, a document intended to limit the power of government, particularly in regard to behavioral rights.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Not recusing himself on cases relating to an issue he has publicly spoken about so many times seems like it should an impeachable offense.
Better question…Who have you sodomized more, your wife or the Constitution?
We are well aware of reductio ad absurdum, Nino. It’s what happens to your argument when the word “homosexuality” is replaced by “miscegeny.”
Now go take a course on logic you idiot.
Scalia is such a twat …
Scalia is an unsophisticated thinker who believes that morality and ethics come from God and are revealed through religion. That is the basis for theocracy.
If we adopt the guideline that you are free to do whatever you want as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others, then murder is ruled out, but consensual homosexuality is allowed.
?
This crazy old fart is the most overrated justice since Oliver Holmes , another pernicious majoritarian who zealously defended the tyranny of the status-quo . I never heard anyone expound on his brilliance who wasn’t a cream puff who was either a pack-thinking conformist or some pansy who confused tough-minded aggression with self-confident superiority .He’s clearly an addle-minded embarrassment to modernity and Constitutional integrity .
Morality and the law are two separate things, unless we’re talking about a theocracy — which is something I’m not sure Scalia would be against. In this country, at least, law grows out of the social contract — our mutual agreement to behave within certain standards of public conduct. There’s an area of “public morality” that is subject to the law because it violates that contract. Murder is not illegal because it’s immoral, but because it transgresses the victim’s rights, as Stevie1 pointed out above — a violation of the contract. Private morality is just that — private — and the state has no business legislating it.