In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said abortion, “homosexual sodomy,” and the death penalty are easy cases.
His exact words: “The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state,”
Wonder how that will fly with Massachusetts voters?
Please share widely!
If someone cuts down a tree on someone else’s land, he will pay for it.
If someone is careless when watering his fields, and he floods someone else’s by accident, he will pay for the grain he has ruined.
If a man wants to throw his son out of the house, he has to go before a judge and say, “I don’t want my son to live in my house any more.” The judge will find out the reasons. If the reasons are not good, the man can’t throw his son out.
If the son has done some great evil to his father, his father must forgive him the first time. But if he has done something evil twice, his father can throw him out.
If a thief steals a cow, a sheep, a donkey, a pig, or a goat, he will pay ten times what it is worth. If he doesn’t have any money to pay with, he will be put to death.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If a man puts out the eye of another man, put his own eye out. If he knocks out another man’s tooth, knock out his own tooth. If he breaks another man’s bone, break his own bone.
If a doctor operates a patient and the patient dies, the doctor’s hand will be cut off.
If a builder builds a house, and that house collapses and kills the owner’s son, the builder’s son will be put to death.
If a robber is caught breaking a hole into the house so that he can get in and steal, he will be put to death in front of that hole.
If a son strike his own father, his hands shall be cut off.
but tough on the populace.
It makes a much sense a Sherria Law, which because of the separation of Church and State will never happen. I choose to live in the 21st century, we don’t need another Oliver Cromwell.
Scalia would have felt right at home in ancient times.
If someone puts up a Scott Brown lawn sign that says TEXT BROWN TO 68398, that is not freedom of speech. Texting while driving is illegal in Massachusetts. Most people who see such lawn signs are driving cars. TEXT BROWN TO 68398 does not fall under permissible speech, but is actually a call to imminent lawless action: the breaking of our Massachusetts law against texting while driving a motor vehicle.
Does nobody walk where you live? Because most people are temporarily in a situation where it would be illegal to do a thing does not make calling for that thing to be done illegal. Even those who are driving can either pull over and text, or remember the number for when they finish driving.
I can’t believe that Scalia’s standard is if the law was on the books in every state for 200 years it must be OK.
slavery…
Nobody besides white male landowners gets to vote.
he’s saying that the proper place to get rid of laws that are no longer appropriate is through the political (legislative) process, not the courts invoking the Constitution. Slavery was specifically outlawed with the 13th Amendment, voting qualifications were changed by legislative enactment and the 15th and 19th Amendment.
His argument is do it politically, not by creating what he sees as a “new” constitutional right based on the judge’s policy preferences. I don’t share that view of the Constitution, but that’s what he’s saying.
Where he loses me is his dissent in Romer v. Evans (1997), where he was just fine with a state constitutional amendment that sought to preclude recourse to the political process. It said that gay people could not be treated as a “suspect class” by any court, legislature, etc. in Colorado. That would have eliminated anti-discrimination laws, on the books and won through the political process, in Denver, Boulder and Aspen.
I think he’s more interested in being anti-gay than pro-democratic process, but that’s just my suspicion.
Why would anyone want to be fair to Antonin Scalia?
By being fair, you gain more authority.
By being fair, you also force yourself to answer your opponent’s strongest argument. That’s better than offering up weaker, easy-to-answer arguments.
By being fair, you also get a better idea of why what the other side says is appealing and can better craft political messages to counter it.
And yes, I’m taking your comment — more witty than serious — much more seriously than intended. Likely you could have written the above yourself too.
But Scalia strikes me as a fundamentally unfair jurist, hence my comment. Note the comments below on “homosexual sodomy” and medical marijuana – the man is anything but fair an impartial.
Note the focus on “homosexual sodomy.” Nary a mention that ALL “sodomy” was illegal in every state for 200 years.
It reminds me of Justice White’s paranoid focus on “a Constitutional right to engage in homosexual sodomy” in Bowers v. Hardwick, eviscerated by Justice Stevens’s dissent pointing out that the law at issue did not distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual activity, and in any event all people should have the basic “right to be let alone” in sexual matters.
Many issues of troublesome nature are linked to Justice Scalia. Dogmatic, flamboyant, lacking judicial temperament and restraint are amongst his troublesome character traits that he exhibits from the bench.
The incumbent career politician who currently occupies the US Senate (junior) seat from Massachusetts has identified the justice described thusly by Conor Clark of Slate:
Look further into Scalia’s positions particularly on support of the strong Executive and detainees, habeus corpus. The man scares me as he is stuck in a time warp pre-Vatican II. And, that is who Scott Brown emulates.
It is so precious when one sees a pol off-script.
Oh wait…
http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/20/scalia-changes-his-tune-on-wickard-and-t
…picks and chooses how “strict” they want to be based on their own modern day belief system.
This constitutional “textualist” stuff is absurd…interpreting the constitution based on the state of mind of the founders in the 1780’s. Convenient when you want to support the death penalty. But what about gun control, for example. The founders clearly felt a one shot pistol or musket was legal, but that certainly does not protect an automatic assault weapon. Hell based on this textual BS, the US Air Force is unconstitutional. Scalia, Thomas and others use this originalist smoke and mirror show to advance a contemporary conservative agenda, under the false pretense of defending the constitution.
are legal, as opposed to Biblical, fundamentalists, limiting the interpretation to the most literal possible, even if they have to jump through umpteen illogical hopes to do so.
Some part of strict constructionism seems like a former of Hero Worship reminiscent, a bit, of Hadith. It’s as if there were some value in keeping our Constitution anachronistic. That actually seems against the original intent which was precisely to provide a vague document useful for an unimaginable future.
However, as pogo above and others have noticed “strict constructionism” has come to mean something else. Just as conservatism has degraded from a political ideology or philosophy into a mere market share, so too has strict constructionism degraded from a game of “What would Madison and Hamilton have said?” into “What do the leaders of my Conservative Tribe tell me?” If a ruling is not consistent with very modern Conservative predilections and preferences, by that view, it could not possibly have been intended by Hamilton or Madison — and so it has to be “judicial activism”.
Regulating marijuana is thus exactly what the Commerce Clause was for, and regulating carbon emissions is exactly what it wasn’t for. Don’t you know? Alexander and James would have agreed! Hanity says so.