For nearly 3 decades, Justice Antonin Scalia has been the staple of conservative judicial ideology. Recently, he provided some insight to the man behind the robe in an interview with New York Magazine.?Here are the top 5 most-telling facets he revealed:
1. Modern society is a bit coarse for his taste:
??… You can’t go to a movie?or watch a television show for that matter?without hearing the constant use of the F-word?including, you know,?ladies?using it.. And you can’t have a movie or a television show without a nude sex scene, very often having no relation to the plot. I don’t mind it when it is essential to the plot, as it sometimes is. But, my goodness!?
2. He would change the structure of amending the Constitution:
??the country has changed so much. With the divergence in size between California and Rhode Island?I figured it out once, I think if you picked the smallest number necessary for a majority in the least ?populous states, something like less than 2 percent of the population can prevent a constitutional amendment.?
Justice Scalia is a self-described ?originalist,? meaning that he believes the constitution should be interpreted only as it was meant when it was signed. Admitting that there are faults with applying the original framework in amending the Constitution is inescapable from concluding that the country and how it is (or should be) ruled have changed.
3.?Same-sex marriage, to him, falls in the jurisdiction of the legislative branch and not the courts:
??They have a democratic right to do that (referring to state anti-sodomy laws and DOMA), and if it is to change, it should change democratically, and not at the ukase of a Supreme Court.?
While he admits that discriminating by gender and race are prohibited by the Equal Protection clauses, he does not seem to think similarly about sexual orientation. If states are allowed to discriminate by sexual orientation in these fields, what keeps them from similarly discriminating in elsewhere, or for that matter, in other criteria such as race? Alternatively, as Will McAvoy put it on HBO’s The Newsroom: ?Our Declaration contains the words ?We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.? In order to arrive at the conclusion that homosexual love is something less than heterosexual love, you have to begin with the premise that a homosexual is something less than a man??, but surely Justice Scalia does not believe that.
4. Scalia is not a fan of levels of equal protection scrutiny:
?I am not a fan of different levels of scrutiny. Strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny,?blah blah blah blah. That’s just a thumb on the scales.?
These levels of scrutiny are how courts judge the Constitutionality of discrimination laws. For example, the weakest test, Rational Basis, allows for laws to prohibit the severely mentally impaired from driving while the strictest test prohibits race discrimination. If discrimination laws were judged by only one standard, one of these would have a chance to be legal.
5.?When he’ll retire:
?I’ll know when I’m not hitting on all eight cylinders?One [telltale sign] will be that I won’t enjoy it as much as I do. I think that’s the beginning of the end??
Edited/Published by: SB
