So much for being a protected class due to my LGBT status. According to a Supreme Court Justice the right to discriminate supersedes my right to get an education or employment at a religiously based school.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently gave a speech at the historically Catholic Duquesne University School of Law. According to this article at Think Progress Justice, “Justice Antonin Scalia urged the university not to stray from a religious identity hostile to gay and lesbian students.” That fact that Justice Scalia was recently irked by the the topic of gays reminded me of a talk he gave in St. Louis about three years ago (to the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis) where he displayed a condescending tone while mentioning gays and the law on several occasions during a single speech.
Why is this guy even on the bench? Did he not understand the concept of keeping religion's "moral" judgments out of someplace like governance and education? If he needs to learn the historical reasons why this is a bad idea I can refer him to texts that show this sort of wishing for a religious candyland is damaging not only to democracy but society in general.
“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent upon diversity in all other aspects of life seems bent on eliminating diversity of moral judgment — particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” Scalia said.
As examples, he cited attempts to sue a religious university in Washington, D.C., for offering only same-sex dorms and other attempts by a law school association to bar schools that discriminate against homosexuals.
“I hope this place will not yield — as some Catholic institutions have — to this politically correct insistence upon suppression of moral judgment, to this distorted view of what diversity in America means,” Scalia said.
I might suggest that he read something called the Federalist Papers as his understanding of the intent of our founders is quite skewed there as well.
Scalia's interpretation of the Constitution, which holds that the meaning of the document's words doesn't change over time, has shifted the country's legal landscape during his quarter-century on the court. During a panel discussion after his speech, he defended that approach against those who say his approach is too ideological or rigid.
"The Constitution is not an empty bottle. It says some things and doesn't say others. ... What is a moderate interpretation of the Constitution? Halfway between what it really says and what you want it to say?" Scalia said.
Scalia has been the court's most forceful and outspoken advocate of this philosophy, called orginalism.
"He has an approach to constitutional interpretation that was fairly unorthodox when he came on the court, and is now central for a significant segment of the legal community," said Arthur Hellman, law professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
Perhaps Alexander Hamilton could clarify it for him:
IT MAY be contended, perhaps, that instead of OCCASIONAL appeals to the people, which are liable to the objections urged against them, PERIODICAL appeals are the proper and adequate means of PREVENTING AND CORRECTING INFRACTIONS OF THE CONSTITUTION. It will be attended to, that in the examination of these expedients, I confine myself to their aptitude for ENFORCING the Constitution, by keeping the several departments of power within their due bounds, without particularly considering them as provisions for ALTERING the Constitution itself. In the first view, appeals to the people at fixed periods appear to be nearly as ineligible as appeals on particular occasions as they emerge.
I fear that Tomás de Torquemada would be thought of as a role model with his thinking being so regressive.