11 hours ago
Scalia defends past comments some see as anti-gay
Posted by
CNN's Kevin Liptak
(CNN) – <snip>
Speaking at Princeton Monday, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said his previous comments {analogizing homosexuality with bestiality and murder}, made in multiple Supreme Court dissents, were effective in making the argument that legislatures should be able to ban behavior deemed immoral.
When a questioner who identified as gay asked whether making such comparisons was necessary, Scalia said "I don't think it's necessary but I think it's effective."
"If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder, can we have it against these other things?" Scalia asked, according to an audio recording provided to CNN by someone who attended the event, which was meant to promote Scalia's new book, "Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts." The website of Princeton's department of communications said more than 700 people attended the session.
Scalia said his dissents were meant to be "a reduction to the absurd," not a comparison between homosexual acts and murder.
He did not specifically reference the court's decision to hear arguments involving the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which denies federal benefits to same-sex couples legally married in their own state. The court is also slated to hear a challenge to California's Proposition 8, a voter-approved referendum that took away the right of same sex-marriage that previously had been approved by the state's courts.
In the initial question, Scalia was asked about his dissent of a 2003 Supreme Court ruling tossing out state laws against homosexual sodomy – a decision Scalia said "called into question" state bans against "bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity." The case was Lawrence v. Texas.
<snip>
"His position is moral disapproval of homosexuality, of bestiality, of murder is legitimate grounds for government action. The question is whether four other justices agree with him," Toobin said.
<snip>
Scalia excused himself in a high-profile 2004 case over whether public school children should be forced to hear the Pledge of Allegiance being recited in the classroom. He had made comments on the topic at a Virginia rally months before the arguments.
CNN's Bill Mears contributed to this report.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/11/scalia-defends-past-comments-some-see-as-anti-gay/?hpt=hp_t3During confirmation hearings, Justices decline to answer questions on issues likely to come before the court, but this turd in jurisprudence's punch bowl runs his mouth wherever and whenever he feels like it on issues he knows very well are on their way to the court.
Lower court judges don't like to have the Supremes reverse their decisions and legislators don't like to have the Supremes declare laws they pass unconstitutional, etc., so his mouthings are as dangerous as they are foul and political, rather than jurisprudential. So, he should be excused from every case involving an issue that he's mouthed off about.
This is one revolting and dishonest specimen.
On the merits, forbidding of things like bestiality to all humans raises no issue of giving one class of humans more rights than others. Also, sex is different from marriage. (Ask any one who is married.) Being married, as opposed to having sex, has never been considered immoral. Also, marriage is a fundamental right. Bestiality and prostitution are not fundamental rights.
Passing that, no one has a right to have all their moral "feelings" enacted into law. I may have a moral feeling that no one should have sex outside marriage. Do I have a right to insist that people serve a life sentence for sex outside marriage? (A life sentence is the only one that would make sense, in light of the very high risk of recidivism.)
The SCOTUS now faces the ludicrous position of saying that any two consenting adults have a Constitutional right to have sex with each other, but no constitutional right to marry. Well, I have a lot of moral "feelings" about the highest court in our land reaching those conclusions in the name of moral feelings.
But, I don't kid myself. Scalia knows all that better than I do. He is much smarter than I. Too bad he uses his intelligence to be disingenous and dishonest.
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