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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (8992)	1/13/2006 1:54:47 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541503

It would be hard to be more extreme than Scalia- at least in certain areas. He's legislating his own religious morality from the bench(and at the same time trying to say he's not doing that). I can't stand the man as a judge. There's something disgusting about disguising personal religious choices as strict constructionism, and saying one's own religious choices are what's "best" for a diverse people in a sectarian country, while attacking other judges for ideological preferences frequently based on political ideology rather than religious. It would make sense, in a sectarian country, to attack religious judicial legislators more severely than those motivated by politics- but the logic of that clearly escapes Mr. Scalia. This is excerpted from a pretty fair article about him: "Scalia’s own ideological preferences are well-known. He is a strong social conservative who, in a 2002 essay in First Things (adapted from a speech at a conference on religion in public life), deplored the “tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government,” a trend he urged “people of faith” to resist. Scalia has repeatedly maintained that his personal philosophical beliefs play no part in his court rulings. Yet the texts of his opinions are steeped in his philosophy. A striking example can be found in Scalia’s splenetic dissent in the 2005 case McCreary County v. ACLU, in which the majority ruled that a Ten Commandments display at a Kentucky courthouse was unconstitutional. Scalia clearly regards “governmental affirmation of the society’s belief in God” as not only permissible but laudable; moreover, he stresses that such affirmation cannot remain entirely nondenominational, insofar as it endorses monotheism. “With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief,” Scalia wrote in McCreary County, “it is entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.” (Of course, our nation’s historical practices also permitted, for a long time, blatantly sectarian religious tests for state government offices.) In making his case, Scalia not only cites the Founders rather selectively but also makes a strained argument that the government, even post-Lemon, has continued to give preferential treatment to religion. One of his examples is property tax exemptions for churches. But such exemptions are strictly nondenominational and are available to nontheistic religious organizations—as well as, in most cases, secular charitable and educational organizations. Ostensibly, Scalia is discussing what he believes is the Constitution’s original intent. Yet the tone of his dissent strongly suggests that he is also talking about his idea of a proper civic order—one in which those who do not adhere to traditional religions are, in an important sense, relegated to second-class status. The same is true of his Lawrence dissent. Thomas, too, dissented from the majority in that case, on the ground that in his view anti-sodomy laws were not unconstitutional; but he also noted that the Texas law was “uncommonly silly” and deserved to be repealed. Scalia, on the other hand, waxed eloquent at some length about the right of Americans to enforce “the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct” for the purpose of “protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.” Scalia is hardly the only justice whose personal values bleed into his rulings. He is, however, the one most critical of his colleagues for allowing their decisions to be dictated by ideological preferences. There is no reason to believe Scalia is consciously hypocritical on any issue. Yet time and again, his strict construction of the Constitution happens to coincide, almost precisely, with some ideological preference of his own. " reason.com