Scalia Defends Segregation and Bans on Gay Sex and Abortion

Justice Scalia has said that segregation was not unconstitutional, and neither were the laws banning homosexual sex and abortion.

Justice Antonin Scalia claims that his colleagues are inventing new rights.

Phoenix based East Valley Tribune reported that, “One of the most conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday his more liberal colleagues are trying to manufacture new constitutional rights that were never intended by the drafters.”

Scalia was speaking at University of Arizona College of Law, where he argued many points and ended up contradicting himself several time.

He believes there is no right to an abortion, claiming it was illegal for 200 years before someone decided it was a right women had.

He believes that same for homosexual sodomy too. And segregation in public schools.

Justice Scalia argued for an “originalist” way of seeing the Constitution and argued against the “evolutionary” view. Describing the latter as, “close your eyes and decide what you think is a good idea.”

Sharing the stage with Scalia was Justice Stephen BreyerJustice Stephen BreyerJustice Stephen Breyer, who argued against Scalia.

The East Valley Tribune reported:

[Beyer] said the changing nature of society, by necessity, requires more than looking at what Scalia called "originalism.''

"You don't look to the details,'' Breyer said. "You look to the value.''

For example, he said, flogging may have been legal even as the framers of the Constitution were banning "cruel and unusual punishment'' in the Eighth Amendment.

"I don't know the exact details of what everybody in the 18th century thought was cruel and unusual,'' Breyer said. He said that by enacting that particular ban, they enacted "a set of values, not a particular set of 18th century circumstances.''

And Breyer warned that using Scalia's approach, "it won't be a Constitution anyone will be able to live under.''

Scalia, to my surprise, views the Constitution as a document that was designed “to constrain the desires of the current society”.

Did you get that? According to Scalia, the Constitution is a document meant to limit current society, not free it.

The East Valley Tribune again:

Scalia said even his 2001 decision outlawing the use of "thermal imaging'' equipment to let police peer through walls to see activity inside a house did not require him to use an evolutionary approach to the Constitution, even though such equipment did not exist in the 18th century.

"I did it by regarding what the framers would have thought about a technique that essentially intrudes into the house without the consent of the homeowners to find out what is going on in the house,'' Scalia said. "They clearly would have thought that was unlawful.''

That last quote he said is what gets me about the way many view the Constitution, “They clearly would have thought that was unlawful.”

I don’t give a sh!t what they would have thought in the 1700s. The Constitution is a document that is meant to stand on its own, without the beliefs and habits of the framers, tainting it.

What they thought in the 1700s was that women shouldn’t vote, slavery is okay, there are just 13 states in the Union, and only 10 amendments to the Constitution. Americans that came later, changed all that, and changed the Constitution as well.

Scalia is only half right when he says that the Constitution is a document that limits society. The Constitution is also the document that gives specific freedoms to society as well. It contains all the amendments.

It’s strange for Scalia to use the right to privacy when the thermal imaging case came up, but the right to privacy for homosexual sex, the Constitution has nothing to state about that? Ridiculous, privacy is privacy.

Also Scalia, want to explain to me why amendments are allowed through the Constitution if the document was not meant to be a least a little “evolutionary”.

Justice Scalia said there is a remedy for those who want different or broader rights: go to the Legislature. He said those bodies are free to decide whether abortion or homosexual activities should be legal.

I wonder where they get their authority and understanding of the law from? The legislative body of the government can not make any laws that are in contradiction to the Constitution. Though they have many times, it is the Constitution and the Supreme Court that ultimately destroyed old, discriminating laws.

This man is on the Supreme Court? This man?

This is how he defended segregation in public schools, from the Huffington Post:

Scalia said he likely would have dissented from the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared school segregation illegal and struck down the system of "separate but equal'' public schools. He said that decision, which overturned earlier precedent, was designed to provide an approach the majority liked better.

"I will stipulate that it will,'' Scalia said. But he said that doesn't make it right. "Kings can do some stuff, some good stuff, that a democratic society could never do,'' he continued.

"Hitler developed a wonderful automobile,'' Scalia said. "What does that prove?''

Separate but equal, even though it was separate and not equal, was okay as far as the Constitution was concerned. Which it was, but Scalia’s argument is, that the only reason it was turned over was because more people wanted it that way, and that is not correct.

That argument is also ridiculous.

The argument was not more people now want it this way, it was things are not separate and equal, and in order for them to be equal colored people need to be in the same schools as the whites, sitting in the same classroom.

Separate but equal doesn’t work, it ends up being separate and unequal.

And as per Scalia’s suggestion that these kinds of matters be taken to the Congress, they were and then they made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Also, if the reason for changing “separate but equal” was that majority of the people now believed that separate but equal did not provide equality, which was mandated by the Constitution, would it not end up being a decision that the Supreme Court would have to rule on?

This guy gets to rule on these kinds of important decisions? In this day and time? This guy?