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Sunday, Jun 14, 2015 10:00 AM UTC
Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind
The justice claims to be an originalist, but his real loyalty is to religion and a phony man in the sky
Topics: Supreme Court, Religion, Evolution, Antonin Scalia, News, Politics News
Readers of this column already know that faith-derangement syndrome has stricken the highest levels of the executive branch of government, afflicting President Obama and virtually all his potential successors. Now we have evidence that it has spread to the top organ of the judiciary, the Supreme Court.
But first, a clarification. Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in said ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as “God”) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.
Secondary symptoms exhibited by sufferers of FDS comprise feelings of righteousness and sensations of displeasure, even outrage, when collocutors question, reject or refute the espousal of said absurdities. Tertiary symptoms, often present among individuals self-classifying as “evangelicals”: Duggar-esque hairdos and Tammy Bakker-ian makeup, preternaturally sunny dispositions and pedophiliac tendencies, sartorial ineptitude and obesity.
Back to FDS and the Supreme Court. Last week, Justice Antonin Scalia delivered a commencement speech at an all-girls Catholic High School in Bethesda, Maryland. He warned the assembled, “You should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented. Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so” – sic, italics mine – “and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.”
At least one “challenge” (anthropogenic global warming) is indeed unprecedented, and scientifically demonstrated, and, considering the threat it poses to humanity, not something to ho-hum about. But what is science to a man suffering from faith-derangement syndrome? Not much.
Arguably one of the most visible members of the nine-member body charged with the decisive resolution of our republic’s most contentious legal matters, Scalia confronts us with a sui generis challenge of great urgency: how to go about declaring a magistrate appointed for life of unsound mind and thus unfit to serve? Scalia rejects the fact of evolution – the foundation of modern biology – in favor of the opening chapter of a compendium of cockamamie fables concocted by obscure humans in a particularly dark age, evidence that his faculty of reason has suffered the debilitating impairment associated with acute FDS. He therefore cannot be relied upon to adjudicate without prejudice and should be removed from the bench henceforth.
We have even more damning evidence of Justice Scalia’s FDS-related impairment, and it came to my attention thanks to the website of the New Civil Rights Movement. A couple of years ago, Scalia nonplussed a contributing editor at New York magazine, Jennifer Senior, who made the understandable mistake of assuming that the Harvard-educated SCOTUS potentate lived in the real world, and not in a phantasmagorical realm of djinns and genies and junk cosmogony.
Senior interviewed Scalia for her magazine. She asked for his opinion of the pope. Scalia reacted with untoward prickliness, saying he would not “run down … the Vicar of Christ.” Nothing surprising, really. A Reagan-era appointee, Scalia has long been known for his staunch Roman Catholicism.
But then the interview took a comic, almost sinister turn. Senior asked Scalia about homosexuality. Though professing to be “not a hater of homosexuals at all,” he said that he accepted “Catholic teaching that it’s wrong.” She pressed him to evaluate how such a position will look to people 50 years from now. He responded, “I have never been custodian of my legacy. When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy.”
“You believe in heaven and hell?”
“Oh, of course I do. Don’t you believe in heaven and hell?”
No, Senior answered, she did not. Scalia then proffered an entirely serious aside about Judas Iscariot’s current location in the hereafter, prompting an uncomfortable Senior to remark, “Can we talk about your drafting process?”
No. Here Scalia’s FDS recrudesced in full. He leaned toward her and whispered, surely with eyes ablaze, “I even believe in the Devil … he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.”
By this time, Senior must have been scanning the room for the emergency exit. But she pulled herself together. “Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?”
Scalia replied, “You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore … because he’s smart.” Scalia attributed the spread of atheism to Satan, who was “getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.” Satan had, in Scalia’s estimation, become “wilier,” which explained “why there’s not demonic possession all over the place.”
One can only imagine the look of bug-eyed incredulity on poor Senior’s face. Scalia certainly noticed it.
“You’re looking at me as though I’m weird,” he declared. “My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.”
Clearly a traveler in circles of folks far saner than six out of 10 Americans, Senior nevertheless observed the societal convention according to which we are to keep calm, nod and act normal when victims of FDS solemnly utter their characteristically rank inanities. She responded, “I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it.”
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