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?

The GOP's War on Marriage and the 14th Amendment

Equal protection and due process—we have come a long way, baby but 14th Amendment cases involving marriage rights is one battle of a wider war launched by the GOP and judges such as Antonin Scalia against the 14th Amendment.

U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby has directly applied the Supreme Court’s decision (United States v. Windsor (2013)) that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act to a state’s (Utah) ban on same-sex marriage on Constitutional grounds.

"The Constitution protects the choice of one’s partner for all citizens, regardless of their sexual identity," U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby writes in his 53-page opinion. Utah is blazing a path for Australia, India and Russia.

Judge Shelby writes: ''The court holds that Utah's prohibition on same-sex marriage conflicts with the United States Constitution's guarantees of equal protection and due process under the law. The state's current laws deny its gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry and, in so doing, demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason,'' reports Erik Eckholm and John Schwartz in the New York Times.

As noted by Dylan Scott in Talking Points Memo, Shelby cites anti-same-sex marriage Justice Scalia several times from this statist reactionary's dissent in United States v. Windsor (2013) using Scalia's words comprising legal logic leading to Constitutional rights ultimately being guaranteed to Americans of the same sex who wish to be married:

From beginning to end of Shelby's opinion Friday, in four different citations scattered throughout, he favorably cited Scalia's dissent, buttressing his legal analysis with Scalia's warnings.

In its 5-4 decision in June, the Supreme Court held that the federal Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional because it violated individual liberty, but did not rule that all state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional. In his dissent in the case, United States v. Windsor, Scalia wrote that the majority opinion's logic would inevitably lead to the state bans being declared unconstitutional ... .

Scalia is right.

Consider also Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas (2003): "Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda (sic), by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. ... One of the most revealing statements in today’s opinion is the Court’s grim warning that the criminalization of homosexual conduct is 'an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.'"

How ghastly, criminalization that is.

Moral opprobrium is indeed an evolving concept now attaching to jurisprudence, as Justice Scalia may not have anticipated.

Seventy percent of American cannot legally marry. There are 76 Countries where anti-gay laws are as bad as or worse than Russia’s. Mauritania is one of four African countries where same-sex relations between men can result in the death penalty. Homosexuality is illegal in 41 out of 53 Commonwealth countries.

As the Toronto Globe and Mail writes, "The global struggle for sexual justice for all has come extraordinarily far in a short time, but it's far from over. "(Robert Leckey. December 13, 2013)

Advise reading Judge Posner's new book Reflections on Judging (Harvard University Press, 2013) and checking out Posner's book for holiday fun as Posner devotes part of Reflections eviscerating Scalia's "textualism" or "originalism." Posner ridicules Scalia's approach as 'gotcha' jurisprudence (p. 182) in Posner's turgid yet acerbic style.

Not just Judge Shelby and Scalia has taken to effectively using Scalia at Scalia expense.


Consider Scalia in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), in his own bizarre dissent:

Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda (sic), by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.

Moral opprobrium is indeed an evolving concept morphing into jurisprudence, as Justice Scalia feared.


Consider Laurence H. Tribe's piece on Hollingworth v. Perry (2013). Tribe writes: "But Justice Scalia – in a portion of his dissent that Chief Justice Roberts conspicuously declined to join – couldn’t resist the temptation to use the occasion to insult the Court’s majority, and Justice Kennedy in particular, in essentially ad hominem (and ad feminem) terms. I write this comment principally to highlight the extraordinary character of this particularly vitriolic and internally inconsistent dissent." (Tribe. DOMA, Prop 8, and Justice Scalia’s intemperate dissent. June 26th; SCOTUSBlog)

More than 30 states, including Wisconsin, have passed amendments or laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman.

The Supreme Court has not ruled on whether state constitutional amendments limiting marriage to a man and a woman are inherently unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. That challenge may reach the Supreme Court in 2016.

And Scalia would be only to happy to follow his Party as it blasts away at gays, blacks, Latinos and whichever group the Republicans can find to blame for America's challenges.

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.