To honor this great jurist and his incredible contribution in giving us the Cheney/Bush legacy, here is a link to one of my fave speeches of all time, given in 2002 in Chicago:
http://pewforum.org/deathpenalty
You need to link through the Pew website to get to the speech and then scroll down a bit in the speech itself for the money quote (it's one among many, actually), but I re-print it here in case you'd rather not bother with all of that -- it really is priceless:
It seems to me that the reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should be not resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible, and a principal way of combating it, in my view, is constant public reminder that – in the words of one of the Supreme Court’s religion cases in the days when we understood the religion clauses better than I think we now do – "we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being".
Got that? "People of faith" (who, presumably, count for more than people whose faith do not measure up to Justice Scalia's standards, as I assume he, or the Pope perhaps, might choose to define them) must "combat . . . as effectively as possible" democracy's "tendency to obscure the divine authority behind government". Got it?
This, from a sitting United States Supreme Court Justice. I had to read it a few times before I could believe what the good Justice was actually saying - not implying - but literally saying.
I don't recollect many examples of guardians of the republic using the word "combating" and "democracy" in the same sentence, unless they were referring to combating somebody else in defense of democracy. I don't know about you but I'm having a really hard time imagining any circumstances under which citizens would justifiably "combat" their own democratic form of government. Remember: Justice Scalia is issuing a call to arms not to combat corruption in government, or a particular political party he doesn't like, or even the government itself: he is stating clearly and unequivocally that there is something inherent in our form of government - a democracy - which is inimical to something else that he believes is more important: the "divine authority behind government".
This isn't just about semantics: don't all Americans have a pressing interest in understanding exactly how Justice Scalia proposes to combat an inherent "tendency" of democracy without combating democracy itself?
There are other equally outrageous statements in this particular speech that betray a quite candidly unapologetic contempt for democracy -- mostly as a justification for the death penalty, of all things. You gotta hand it to him: you could never accuse Justice Scalia of trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. The statements in his Chicago speech and myriad other statements (see posts further below) have been practically screaming at us for years just what he thinks of the sanctity (triviality) of the vote and the importance (irrelevance) of the Establishment clause, not to mention the Great Mistake that was the Enlightenment. Bush vs Gore should not have come as a surprise.
The Obama cavalry arrived in the nick of time -- with people so focused on the economy, the wars and the various other Cheney/Bush-set brush fires and lapses requiring immediate attention, I'm not too sure they are aware of what a bullet we've dodged in the Supreme Court. Now Justice Stevens can retire with some semblance of peace of mind.
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