Scalia
Ridicules Court’s Sodomy Decision
Datalounge,
October 24, 2003
http://www.datalounge.com/datalounge/news/record.html?record=21042
WASHINGTON—Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia told an audience of conservative activists on Thursday that the
recent decision declaring sodomy laws unconstitutional ignores the
Constitution in favor of a modern, liberal sensibility. The ruling, said
Scalia, “held to be a constitutional right what had been a criminal offense
at the time of the founding and for nearly 200 years thereafter.” To the
amusement of his audience, he then adopted a nasal and mocking tone in reading
excerpts of the majority decision which legitimized the struggle for gay civil
rights.
Scalia wrote a bitter dissent in the case that was longer
than the ruling itself. Scalia said his colleagues on the Supreme Court ignore
“founder intent” in the Constitution when it suits them.
“Most of today’s experts on the Constitution think
the document written in Philadelphia in 1787 was simply an early attempt at
the construction of what is called a liberal political order,” Scalia told a
gathering of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. “All that the person
interpreting or applying that document has to do is to read up on the latest
academic understanding of liberal political theory and interpolate these
constitutional understandings into the constitutional text.”
Scalia is a hero to conservatives who, like him, favor
wiping out the civil rights advances of the last 50 years under the banner of
“strict interpretation” arguments.
In other remarks, Scalia appeared to blame the nation’s
institutes for higher learning on the nation’s predominantly liberal ethos.
While, “it would be foolish” to say that the “one-sided nature of
institutions of learning” is the product of “some left-wing academic
conspiracy . . . it would also be unrealistic to think [such a conspiracy]
does not exist.”
President Bush sent a video greeting to the conservative
group in which he praised their idealism and their defense of free market
values.
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