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July
1, 2003
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer
Scalia and the
Sodomy Cops
By
ELAINE CASSEL
On
June 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Texas the right
to prosecute consenting gay couples engaging in sex.
That's all it did. If you read Justice
Scalia's scathing dissent (3 pages longer than the majority opinion
deftly written by Justice Kennedy) in Lawrence vs. Texas,
you would think the Court came out (nice pun, there!) and endorsed
homosexuality sodomy, bestiality, incest, and adultery. But
that is just because Scalia is intellectually dishonest, among
his other many flaws. His ad hominem attacks on his colleagues
is shameful; his admitted disgust of homosexuals appalling.
This man ought to be impeached.
Scalia is the opposite of a conservative.
He accuses the court of social engineering (he made a similar
argument in dissenting in the University of Michigan law school
case) by "buying into the homosexual agenda" (whatever
that means). He rants and rails that civilization as we know
it will end with the decision.
It is he who would end civilization as
we know it. For civilization cannot thrive without civil liberties.
It is he who would dictate his doctrinaire ideology on every
man, woman, and child in the United States, perhaps the world.
He would deny minorities any opportunity to better themselves
after they have been repressed and abused by White Anglos and
Catholics. He would deny a rape or incest victim an abortion.
He would deny young women contraceptives.
Scalia is an arch-Catholic, proponent
of the most extreme version of Catholicism. He likes a stiff
drink and likes to smoke a cigar and swear, but he wants to tell
you to whom and how you should express affection. And what to
do and not do with your body. He buys into the control agenda
of the power-mongers of the Catholic Church, the old-school Church
that sought to control every aspect of its members spiritual
and temporal lives. The branch of the church where the liturgy
is in Latin so the people cannot understand it, where the Pope
is almost God himself.
It is this same church, this same power,
that has allowed rampant sexual abuse against young people to
continue for years on end. That has engaged in frauds and coverups
so massive that one wonders why the federal government has not
instituted racketeering charges. Well, we know why--the Catholics
have enormous power in Washington, D.C. and around the world.
Power, money, greed, the holy trinity of all that is wrong with
society--is at the heart of the Catholic Church's shameful coverups,
even enabling, of rape and molestation.
Like the Catholic Church itself, Scalia's
rant is all about power. It is about exclusion and bigotry. His
claim of moral superiority is patently absurd, belied by his
own words. For a moral man does not seek to control every thought
and action of his fellow man. A moral man does not think that
only he is moral and good. A moral man recognizes that morality
is born of disparate social and individual values, and cannot
be dictated by theology, let alone law. Taking a page, so to
speak, from George Orwell's 1984, in touting his self-professed
morality, Scalia is decidedly immoral.
Scalia cries out for the days when law
enforcement could persecute gays by breaking into their homes
unannounced and arresting them in an intimate moment. I suppose
he would brand and whip adulterers and women who have abortions,
too (the dissent is as much a rant against Roe v. Wade
and the court's continued deference to it than as it is about
sodomy). Prosecuting gays is the moral thing to do, he insists.
How dare the law make it illegal to do so?
In his contempt for the decision of the
majority, Scalia shows his disdain for any law that is not consistent
with his ideological or theological world view. The word for
that is anarchy. A close reading of Scalia's dissents will usually
reveal a veiled invitation for courts and governments to violate
a decision of the court he disagrees with, as he did in the case
of Sell v. United States, dealing with the forced medication
of criminal defendants, in which he opined that some judges would
be stupid enough to abide by what he considered the Court's ill-advised
decision.
Read his dissent in this Lawrence,
and keep repeating to yourself--this is Bush's favorite Supreme
Court Justice. This is the man that Bush seeks to emulate in
his judicial nominations.
Picture yourselves ten years from now
with a majority of Scalias on the bench. With moderate O'Connor
and Rehnquist gone, with liberal Stevens absent. Bush's adoration
of the man who wrote one of the most despicable and hate-filled
dissents in the history of jurisprudence should be among the
top reasons to do everything in your power to defeat George Bush
in 2004.
For now, contact the Senate Judiciary
Committee and resist George Bush's nominees. Read about them
and write your newspapers. Write the senators from your state
who are on the committee.
We only know that Scalia despises homosexuals
and minorities. What other groups are on his list?
Elaine Cassel
practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia and teaches
law and psychology. She is writing a book on civil liberties
post 9/11, and keeps an eye on Bush and Ashcroft's trampling
on the Bill of Rights at her Civil
Liberties Watch. She would love to write a book about Scalia's
jurisprudence, but finds it too depressing. She can be reached
at: ecassel1@cox.net
Weekend Edition
Features
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Shahid Alam
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Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
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Laura
Carlsen
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Noah Leavitt
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Joanne
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Engel
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