Scalia To Graduating Class: Human Species Is 5,000 Years-Old

Antonin Scalia is a United States Supreme Court Justice (1982-present) unfit to hold the position.

Notes Jeffrey Tayler in Salon: "Last week, Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a commencement speech at an all-girls Catholic High School in Bethesda, Maryland. He warned the assembled, 'You should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented. Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were."

This was Scalia in his element, openly displaying an ignorance of science and a perverse embrace of religion, demonstrating his delight of playing the troll, more significantly the corrupt troll.

Scalia made headline a few years back when he told Jennifer Senior of New York Magazine that Scalia believes "hell" is real, and so is the "Devil," but He/It doesn't possess people "very much anymore ... because he’s smart ... [and] got wilier." (Mal Contends)

That's Scalia for you, unpredictable and usually incoherent, ever the ideological troll who becomes petulant when the Court doesn't embrace Scalia's crazy animus towards gays, women, Democrats and other segments of humanity held in disfavor by the Republican Party.

As America awaits the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell—whether the five GOP justices decide to invalidate and ultimately eviscerate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)—no doubt Scalia is enjoying himself playing with another segment of America whom Scalia and the GOP hold in disfavor, The Uninsured: Adam and Eve never had healthcare, why should Americans get it?

Antonin Scalia: Devil, Hell Are Real; Wily Satan Affects Human Affairs

Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, has long appalled thinking Americans for his brand of authoritarian, incoherent jurisprudence.

Scalia is a bigot, a troll, so it is no surprise to read in Scalia's meandering thoughts on metaphysics and evil in Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine interview that Scalia believes in hell, the Devil who is both "smart" and who "got wilier" in his evil engineering project still to be accepted and put into production in human affairs.

Want to know why Scalia votes the way he did in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Bush v. Gore (2000)?

Because Scalia is a goof.

An excerpt from Jennifer Senior's interview with Scalia in New York Magazine:

Scalia ... When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy.

Senior (NY Mag) You believe in heaven and hell?
Scalia: Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?

Senior (NY Mag) No.
Scalia: Oh, my.

Senior (NY Mag)Does that mean I’m not going?
Scalia:  [Laughing.] Unfortunately not!

Senior (NY Mag) Wait, to heaven or hell?
Scalia: It doesn’t mean you’re not going to hell, just because you don’t believe in it. That’s Catholic doctrine! Everyone is going one place or the other.

Senior (NY Mag) But you don’t have to be a Catholic to get into heaven? Or believe in it?
Scalia: Of course not!

Senior (NY Mag) Oh. So you don’t know where I’m going. Thank God.
Scalia: I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, 'Who am I to judge' He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?

Senior (NY Mag) Can we talk about your drafting process—
Scalia:  [Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.

Senior (NY Mag)You do?
Scalia: Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

Senior (NY Mag) Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
Scalia: If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.

Senior (NY Mag) Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
Scalia: You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

Senior (NY Mag) No.
Scalia: It’s because he’s smart.

Senior (NY Mag) So what’s he doing now?
Scalia: What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

Senior (NY Mag) That has really painful implications for atheists. Are you sure that’s the ­Devil’s work?
Scalia: I didn’t say atheists are the Devil’s work.

Senior (NY Mag) Well, you’re saying the Devil is ­persuading people to not believe in God. Couldn’t there be other reasons to not believe?
Scalia: Well, there certainly can be other reasons. But it certainly favors the Devil’s desires. I mean, c’mon, that’s the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place. He used to be all over the New Testament.

Senior (NY Mag) Right.
Scalia: What happened to him?

Senior (NY Mag) He just got wilier.
Scalia: He got wilier.

Senior (NY Mag) Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
Scalia: You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

Senior (NY Mag) I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it.
Scalia: I was offended by that. I really was.

Vatican Conspired to Hide $Millions from Sexual Assualt Victims

U.S. Senator (R-Wisconsin), Ron Johnson
Opposed Wisconsin Child Victims Bill giving
legal protection against Predator Priests

Update: Two facts to keep in mind about the Milwaukee Archdiocese documents released on July 1

U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) testified before the Wisconsin State Senate in 2010 against state legislation, the Child Victims Act, to eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual abuse crimes, making it easier for victims of sexual abuse to seek damages from the Catholic Church or any other culpable institution, Talking Points Memo, Dan Bice, Daily Kos, Uppity Wisconsin, and many other online journals reported.

In 2009, Johnson, a private citizen, also traveled from Oshkosh to Madison to deliver additional testimony opposing the Child Victims Act.

Johnson was successful in his efforts.

In Johnson ready now to recant his testimony?

Today would be a good time.

Not sure how often Johnson reads the New York Times, but today's report that "documents reveal that Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, as Milwaukee’s archbishop, moved to protect $57 million in church assets from sexual-abuse victims," is the kind of news that might result in a Johnson re-think.

And today, State Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point) has reintroduced the Child Victims Act, noting that the "National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect estimates that only about 3 percent of child molesters are ever caught. That raises the specter of hundreds of pedophiles walking the streets of Wisconsin towns, safe in the knowledge that they are protected by the law from ever being held accountable for their crimes."

Whose side is Ron Johnson on?

His friends hide $57 million and he helps kill legislation that would offer a chance of some measure of healing for sexual assault victims.

From a policy perspective Johnson takes the side of the perpetrators, against the children.

With allies like Sen. Ron Johnson, the Vatican, Cardinal Dolan and the molesters must believe they are untouchable.

They are not.

That smoke wafting from the Vatican and Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan's New York plush offices today is not white smoke signaling the election of a new Pope.

This smoke is emitting from a smoking gun; or perhaps more justifiably described as a decades-long smoke screen the Catholic Church hierarchy has emitted to cover up the sexual abuse of its clergy against children.

Out of Milwaukee, we are treating to the news reported by Laurie Goodstein (NYT) that documents reveal Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, as Milwaukee’s archbishop, moved to protect $57 million in church assets from sexual-abuse victims. [See also Michael D'Antonio's and M.L. Johnson's reporting on the Catholic Church's shanda.]

Why should people traumatized for life by the Catholic Church hierarchy, with the complicity of the Vatican, be compensated?

It's called decency, a human trait apparently absent from Cardinal Dolan, regarded by some as a reformer—in Catholic Church holy nomenclature, this means a church official who has beseeched the hierarchy to stop shielding predatory priests, stop molesting children, but works against legislation stopping victims from receiving funds from the Church to help treat sexual trauma.

Not surprisingly, the Republican legislature didn't slip in the Child Sexual Abuse Victims Act into the state budget (lamely opposed by the Democratic Party). I guess sexual abuse victims don't make for sympathetic players in Scott Walker's Wisconsin. Open for business, and that includes you, sexual predators, just don't get caught and then you're home free.

Writes Goodstein:

But the documents lift the curtain on [Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan's] role as a workaday church functionary concerned with safeguarding assets, persuading abusive priests to leave voluntarily in exchange for continued stipends and benefits, and complying with Rome’s sluggish canonical procedures for dismissing uncooperative priests who he had long concluded were remorseless and a serious risk to children. In one case, the Vatican took five years to remove a convicted sex offender from the priesthood.

“As victims organize and become more public, the potential for true scandal is very real,” he wrote in such a request in 2003 to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican office charged with handling abuse cases until he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

Victims on Monday called for a federal investigation into the actions of Cardinal Dolan and his predecessors, but the cardinal sought to deflect criticism by saying in a statement Monday that he welcomed the release of the documents.

The current archbishop of Milwaukee, Jerome E. Listecki, had announced his decision to release the documents in April, one day before a judicial hearing. Lawyers for abuse victims had asked a judge to compel their release.

Archbishop Listecki released a letter last week warning Catholics in his archdiocese that the documents could shake their faith, and trying to explain the actions of church leaders while offering apologies to victims.

“Prepare to be shocked,” he wrote. “There are some graphic descriptions about the behavior of some of these priest offenders.”

Shocked by "true scandal?" No shit.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests '(SNAP) reaction is to seek the hidden $ millions and award the money to the 1,000s of victims.

New York Cardinal conspired with Vatican while in Milwaukee to transfer nearly $57 million into new corporation for the “protection” of funds “from any legal claim and liability”

Milwaukee Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in January 2011 not claiming Dolan’s transferred funds as assets.

Survivors asking US attorney to investigate Dolan for criminal charges of “fraudulent conveyance”

Statement by Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director (Milwaukee) CONTACT: 414.429.7259

Click here for Dolan letter to Vatican.

See Below for Ron Johnson Testifing Against Child Abuse Victims; Opposing Child Victims Act in Wisconsin

Justice Ginsberg Way-off on Roe v. Wade

Update: Erwin Chemerinsky writes "Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should retire from the Supreme Court after the completion of the current term in June. She turned 81 on Saturday and by all accounts she is healthy and physically and mentally able to continue. But only by resigning this summer can she ensure that a Democratic president will be able to choose a successor who shares her views and values." (LA Times)

Diane P. Wood, Margaret Raymond, and so many brilliant, young jurists are ready that Ginsberg's obviously outstanding tenure aside, not stepping down is selfish in the face of American misogyny and the brand of authoritarianism that is arising now from underground into the judiciary.
---Time for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to get off the Court

What ahistorical spasms have taken ahold of Justice Ginsberg?

"Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993-present) told an audience at the University of Chicago Law School on Saturday night that a lack of 'judicial restraint' in the court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade gave abortion opponents a 'clear target' that continues to fuel anti-choice activism 40 years later," notes Katie McDonough this morning in Salon.

A clear target?

Women have been the clear target of the Catholic Church hierarchy and free roaming misogyny since the inception of the United States of America.

Roe stopped the enforcement of anti-choice state laws outlawing abortion.

Salon's McDonough also references similar comments that Ginsberg made in April:

As noted by the New York Times editorial board and Yale Law School professors Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, Ginsburg’s previously-asserted idea that the court got 'ahead of public opinion' on abortion and 'short-circuited' an evolving political process at the state level is deeply problematic.

If one follows Ginsberg's logic, the Court should never protect the constitutional rights of minorities in the face of majority opinion because that would make political targets of minorities by assorted majority bigots and oppressive, tyrannical law of which America has a long, shameful tradition.

Ginsberg goes on pursuing several lines of thought, all of which do not demonstrate a clear hold of any conception of the civil rights of Americans, and certainly not specifically the constitutional imperative to protect free choice, an issue that props up the GOP and Tea Party as major political forces.

Ginsberg's public forays into political strategy are ill-conceived and foolish for a sitting justice of the Court, and her constitutional jurisprudence is suspect.

Ginsberg is 80-year-old.

And she is no William O. Douglas or Robert Jackson. Ginsberg should resign at the end of term in June.

The stakes are way too high with this reckless, statist Roberts-Scalia court and the forces of authoritarianism that hold sway in the majority of states.

The Catholic Church's Moral Bankruptcy

Archbishop Jerome Listecki is off to a deplorable start as he continues the cover-up of child sex abusers by the Catholic Church.

He condemns a bill that would eradicate the statute of limitations on civil actions by victims of child sex abusers, like priests, under employ of the Catholic Church.

Incredibly, Listecki says the Catholic Church is the victim here [suffering the "injustice of targeting the Catholic church"] and that the bill would bankrupt Catholic dioceses throughout the state.

How about moral bankruptcy? How about selling off some property to pay victims for what the Church has done?

Listecki makes it clear that absolutely nothing has changed since the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal first broke and that the Catholic Church is devoid of compassion for its many victims.

Hey Listecki, how about letting the light shine in?