Antonin Scalia may be the left’s least-favorite U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice. Caustic, harsh, and lacking empathy, Scalia is known for his claim of being a strict “texturalist,” reading the Constitution not as a living document meant to grow with age through time, but as a static document that cannot be interpreted, only read as the exact words on the page.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that in Colorado over the weekend, Scalia declared the Supreme Court was unqualified to decide on “homosexual sodomy.” The longest-serving justice was referring to the Court’s landmark ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down as unconstitutional sodomy laws, effectively declaring sex between people of the same-sex legal.
“Scalia used the twin terrors of Nazi Germany and radical Islam to warn a Snowmass Village audience Saturday about the dangers of judicial activism,” a report in the Aspen Times yesterday notes:
Scalia cited numerous issues that have been thrown to the courts — a woman’s right to an abortion, society’s right to execute someone for a crime, whether “homosexual sodomy†ought to be allowed — and claimed that judges are unqualified to answer them.
Medical doctors, engineers, ethicists and even “Joe Six Pack†would be just as qualified as a legal professional to settle some issues that have come before the high court.
Instead, he said, society at large should set its own moral standards. For example, when women’s suffrage became an issue in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Supreme Court wasn’t asked to interpret the Constitution. Congress responded to public pressure by giving women the right to vote.
But Scalia’s suggestion, essentially invoking Godwin’s Law, that the U.S. is approaching Nazi Germany, was shocking.
“Scalia opened his talk with a reference to the Holocaust, which happened to occur in a society that was, at the time, ‘the most advanced country in the world,'” the Aspen Times added:
One of the many mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges began to interpret the law in ways that reflected “the spirit of the age.†When judges accept this sort of moral authority, as Scalia claims they’re doing now in the U.S., they get themselves and society into trouble.
Scalia is the co-author of four books, including Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.
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Hat tip:Â TPM
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