Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Monday, October 6, 2014

Scalia: Originalist, Religionist, Douchebag-ist



Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a proud "originalist," one who believes that the U.S. Constitution was immaculate in its original conception, never requires interpretation, and that everything was better in 1789.  (A true originalist must be really pissed off by those 27 Amendments -- Amendments! -- to the holy writ.)

The original Constitution said absolutely nothing about religion.  The Founding Fathers had seen enough theistic states in Europe to repeat the error over here.  The First Amendment added only this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  

And that's it.  America has never had any "official" religion, despite what many believe.

So here's Scalia speaking last week at Colorado Christian University:

"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."

No surprise, but in Scalia's interpretation of the First Amendment, government should favor religion. This is about as far from originalism as one can get, but Scalia doesn't give a shit.  His personal beliefs trump everything else, and if you don't like it, he flips you the figurative bird:

"What can they do to me?  I have life tenure," Scalia said.  "It's even better than academic tenure." 

Jeez!!  The sooner this Reagan-appointed troglodyte leave the bench, the better!

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