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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/31/13

Scalia and The War In the Supreme Court Over Gay Marriage

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Such treasonous views are accepted in the U.S. because the nation's culture had transformed during the two centuries since its founding. Thus, on 29 July 2006, The New York Times headlined "Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools," and Neela Bannerjee reported on how the lone Jewish family in a small Delaware town had finally, after 30 years, become fed up with officials of the local public school routinely introducing Christian admonitions, and "a minister's prayer proclaiming Jesus as the only way to the truth," so that the parent, Mona Dobrich, requested the "school board to consider prayers that were more generic and, she said, less exclusionary." She wasn't interested in protecting the rights and equal-protection position of atheists or agnostics, but only of herself and her child, and yet, "As news of her request spread, many local Christians saw it as an effort to limit their free exercise of religion, residents said. Anger spilled onto talk radio, in letters to the editor and at school board meetings attended by hundreds of people carrying signs praising Jesus." She sued the local school district, and, due to threats by the mob, moved her family away to a large city. A few other non-Christian families in this small town anonymously joined her lawsuit, terrified by the reigning bigotry they were experiencing, and condemning "the pervasiveness of religion in the schools and seeking financial damages," as well as "alleging proselytizing in the schools and the harassment of their daughters." But the local majoritarian bigots persisted, and continued assuming that it was not for themselves to have to send their own children to religious private schools of their choosing and to pay privately for doing so if they wished religious indoctrination to be imposed by the school their child attended, but rather for minority families to have to pay privately for the privilege of avoiding being proselytized at their own and other taxpayers' expense. To the vast majority of these local Delawareans, the U.S. Constitution protected only themselves and their co-believers, and gave them and their co-believers the right to abuse and exploit any minorities. However, this was the way of Serbia, Lebanon and Iraq -- not of the United States of America, according to the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives everywhere are the same, and conservatism had been soaring in America: it's hostility to the Constitution, and to the nation for which it stands.

 

On 14 April 2009, Adam Liptak headlined in The New York Times, "Reticent Justice Opens Up to a Group of Students," and reported on Scalia's fellow far-Right jurist, Clarence Thomas, "reminiscing fondly about seeing "a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.'" If the basis of the law is morality, and the basis of morality is one's personal religion (whatever that happens to be), then Christ and the crucifix will naturally be the actual "constitution" a devout Catholic such as Clarence Thomas will place at the basis of all our laws, even if this violates the oath of office he took in order to win his post. Thomas, also naturally, agreed with Scalia on almost all Supreme Court decisions.

 

Scalia stated his very influential supposed "theory" of Constitutional jurisprudence in his 1997 A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law, in which his view was also debated by a few legal theorists. Scalia said that his way to understand the Framers' original intent wasn't to examine the discussions they or the public had had at the time that led to the clause which is now being interpreted, but instead to examine only the way that the particular clause was understood and interpreted by the public in its own time, however burdened by pre-democratic and now-archaic cultural prejudices (especially by religious preconceptions) this might be. He openly asserted his personal deference to cultural traditions, especially to old ones; and he thereby repudiated the revolutionary character of the U.S. Constitution and of the American Revolution that had led to it. He asserted that democracy consists of majority-rule, and that any protection of the rights of a minority from encroachments by the majority should therefore be allowed only to the extent that the Constitution (as understood at the time by the public) unambiguously asserted such a minority right. (Like any extreme conservative, or fascist, he was viscerally against minority rights, especially when religion was involved.) His essay ignored all Constitutional provisions (such as the Preamble, the Constitution's Sovereignty Clause) that contradicted his theocratic prejudices. As Ralph A. Rossum subsequently noted in his internet-posted essay "The Textualist Jurisprudence of Justice Scalia," Scalia's doctrine became so influential that Senators and Representatives were now widely being guided by it in their drafting of laws. No one publicly pointed out the false, and even treasonous, aspects of Scalia's theory of Constitutional jurisprudence. It won the day, because of the victory of conservatism in U.S. political culture after 1980 -- the Republican dominance that has cursed this country since 1980. Liberals, being merely diluted conservatives, many of whom themselves were religious, had nothing to offer in the way of any theoretical alternative to Christian theocracy -- they just wanted it to be "liberal." (Maybe "Sermon on the Mount" passages, instead of the ones favored by Republicans.) A highly organized aristocratic movement exists in the U.S., which agrees with Scalia about the moral authority of government coming from the Lord above, instead of from the people below.

 

As inJustice Scalia so subtly phrased the matter during his 25 January 2002 speech at the University of Chicago: "It is easy to see the hand of Almighty God behind rulers whose forebears, deep in the mists of history, were mythically anointed by God, or who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battle whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts; that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God or of any higher moral authority behind the fools and rogues -- as the losers would have it -- whom we ourselves elect to do our own will." The electorate, to Scalia, is composed of "fools and rogues" who vote for "fools and rogues." Of course, his contemptuous "we" was intended to refer, with only a fake modesty, to himself; but actually to such people as had only recently voted for the "fool" or "rogue" Al Gore, whose candidacy Scalia himself had terminated barely more than a year earlier, in 2000, and certainly not to theocrats like Scalia himself -- who knew better than to do such a thing as to vote Democratic (or to validate the votes from the people who did). That statement, of faith in The Almighty, instead of respect for democracy and commitment to Scalia's own oath-of-office, expressed extreme hostility against what America's great Founders had established, and Scalia exhibited his determination to do whatever he could to destroy their handiwork. Scalia reflects feudal values, the values that America's Founders waged war against and defeated.

 

The war within the Supreme Court is between theocrats such as Scalia, whose ideology is actually treasonous theocracy, versus liberals, who don't have any ideology at all, and who are therefore unable coherently to defend the U.S. Constitution against the theocratic assaults on it coming from the other side of the Court.

 

Scalia is relying upon there being enough such traitorship still at the Court, for him to be able to win the day on Hollingsworth v. Perry. He is playing a desperate game, and the question is whether Anthony Kennedy, who has written some things on the opposite side of it, will cast that aside and now go all-in for feudalism, or instead join the liberals on this and just kick this can further down the road. I predict the latter: a technicality will be found to avoid ruling on the Constitutionality of bans against gay marriage. Maybe the group that is bringing the case will be determined not to have legal standing to do so.

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that (more...)
 
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