Antonin Scalia

JD, Harvard University

The monstrousness of Antonin Scalia cannot be overstated. He was a racist. A homophobe. A religious fanatic. A bully. And a smug little prick. So are many other people. The difference is that this prick had a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. When an ordinary prick behaves prickishly, you do your best to escape. But there’s no escaping a Supreme Court justice: Scalia deliberately inflicted pain on millions of captive Americans. Herewith, a few examples of his pricky handiwork.

Scalia and Race

Scalia wrote the dissenting opinion in a case brought by a white woman contending that she was refused admission to the University of Texas because—any guesses? That’s right! Because she was white! And an affirmative-action black kid took her place!

Scalia insinuated that black students shouldn’t be aiming so high: “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.… Most of the Black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.… I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many Blacks as possible.”

Less advanced. Slower. Lesser institutions.

Do note that, starting in the late 1960s, Scalia taught law, first at the University of Virginia, then at the University of Chicago. Black students at both elite* institutions complained that he graded on a biased curve: if you were black, your grades curved downward. He seemed to delight in putting an F on a black student’s work, and rarely did he deign to go higher than a C. His white students thought him a fair grader.

Scalia and Homosexuality

“Many Americans,” wrote Scalia in his dissent to a decision that tossed out a Texas law criminalizing gay sex, “do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.” Imprisoning homosexuals, his logic goes, will be applauded by these “many Americans” because “They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.” Those poor, poor Americans. Lock up the perverts! And while you’re at it, try substituting “Jewish religious practices” or “Islamic lifestyle behaviors” for “homosexual conduct” in the above dissent. Why should a Christian have to endure anyone else’s immoral lifestyle?

In another dissent—this from a Colorado law banning discrimination against gays*—he said, disingenuously, that “it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings,” then goes on to excrete some nice, steaming hate: “But I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible—murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals—and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of ‘animus’ at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct.” It’s an animus Scalia shared, encouraged, and wallowed in, so, hey, let’s criminalize the homos.

In the aforementioned Texas case, the attorney opposing the law making gay sex illegal cleverly pointed out that if nonprocreative sex is bad—a loony stance of the antigay faction—then, logically, it should be illegal for straight couples to have sex unless they make a baby. Scalia countered with this gem: “It doesn’t say you can’t have any sexual intimacy. It says you cannot have sexual intimacy with a person of the same sex.” So: to avoid breaking the law, gay people should simply start having normal, unperverted sex with a person of the opposite gender. Which is not a crazy thing to think if it’s, say, 1954 in Elmhurst, Queens, you’re a spoiled only child—the son and grandson of Italian immigrants—attending a Jesuit high school, and you a) have not only never (knowingly) met any gay people but would probably have hurled insults at them if you had, and b) believed in the actual, personal existence of the devil.

Some sixty years later the man was on the Supreme Court, and he still thought that way.

Scalia and Religion

Speaking at Colorado Christian University*: “I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion.” Actually, a close reading, or even a sloppy reading, of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution reveals the exact opposite of this Scalia trope. If the government has no say over the establishment of religion, it has no say over whether an individual American has to give a flying fuck about religion at all.

But Wait! There’s More!

Much more! But, alas, to keep our Scalia musings from expanding to the size of the Encyclopædia Britannica, we must cut it short here. Suffice it to say that Antonin Scalia diapered up his festering hatreds in deliberately obscurantist constitutional mumbo-jumbo—his “originalist” shtick—to make his prejudices seem to emanate from a dispassionate Olympus of rational reasoning and profound philosophizing, with perhaps a slug of old-time religion.

Would he have been viewed as anything but a twisted little bigot—or seated on the Supreme Court—if he’d gone to a “lesser” law school?^*