On Friday, Judge Antonin Scalia passed away at the age of 79. Let us pray for him – a man who believed in the Real America; the one our forefathers worked and bled and died for, the one we would like to hand down to our children.
Here are a few quotes from Justice Scalia which, as well as seems possible, give a sense of his character and his love of our country –
A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.
That’s the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.
To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.
Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.
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… We do Him [God] honor in our pledge of allegiance, in all our public ceremonies. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is in the best of American traditions, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. I think we have to fight that tendency of the secularists to impose it on all of us through the Constitution.
If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Day by day, case by case, the Supreme Court is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.
~~~
Dear Lord, we are grateful for the gifts and blessings which you have given to our nation through Antonin Scalia, by his honorable service to us, his fellow countrymen. And now that You have called him home, we pray that he be blessed to hear those sweet words of welcome, “Well done, My good and faithful servant”.
