I’m so glad Scott Brown said Scalia was his favorite supreme court justice. Maybe the good voters of Massachusetts will notice this little gem of an interview. Basically Scalia is saying that abortion, and homosexuality are easy cases to decide because they were illegal back when the Constitution was framed so they should be illegal now. Yeah, and slavery was legal too. So should we go back to that? And women didn’t have the vote? Also a good move?
Even my Republican former law professor believes that the Constitution is a living, breathing document that has to grow and adapt to changing times.
What a jackass.
I thought he was saying that those issues were ones the framers never would have construed as questionable at the time of ratification. You can certainly take a different approach and hold to a different theory of interpretation, but I think it’s a little unfair to say this somehow means slavery is something Scalia’s argument would support, given that slavery was a questionable issue at the time of ratification.
Even if that’s what Scalia meant slavery wasn’t considered questionable. Certainly some people opposed the practice, but legally speaking it was not considered questionable. Hell, they enshrined it in the Constitution with the counting of black slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of House representation and the allocation of taxes. To me the genius and glory of the Constitution is that it has always been interpreted to expand rights if you take the position it is a evolving document. The one time we passed an amendment to curtail rights it was a disaster — prohibition. If you hew to the strict construction interpretation you end up limiting rights. Just because being gay was criminal in 1790 does it mean we’re must support that position? That’s what I find so offensive in his statements.