Oh but it was just a joke you see, a rhetorical flourish. From USA Today (12/11/12):
"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"
Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.
Then he deadpanned: "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded."
And here quite possibly is a video replay:
Scalia is clever in the same way that an embezzler is. He sneaks a bit here and and there, hoping that he won't be caught, but confident that whatever he's stealing its rightfully his anyway, because he didn't get the promotion, and he's got to pay for that new Lexus somehow.
Note how he sets up the false assumption, that someone somewhere is saying that there can be no moral judgments enacted by the legislature. Then he slips in a sly little quip comparing the propriety of laws against gays to laws against murderers -- as if there was some reason to compare the two.
The worst part of this sad performance is that Scalia, a powerful and influential man, adopts a condescending and patrician attitude towards the powerless.
I'm surprised he even took questions, but I think this man derives some sick pleasure from putting people down. We saw it in the Obamacare case when he waved around the thick law and said it would be "cruel and unusual punishment" to make him read it -- before he (if he'd got his way) would have struck down a law which he'd never read as being unconstitutional.
That was a two-fer for him, getting to mock the 8th amendment as well as the scope of the new law. Ha ha.
Scalia thinks he is changing the law, or, "restoring" it. But compare his petty arrogance to the genuine dignity of a man who really did change the law, the great Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870-1938), who lived quietly but achieved much simply through the strength of his thought and scholarship.
Scalia could learn from Cardozo's example. But I doubt he will.