Word: scalia
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...hasn't worked out that way. When fellow Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy wrote, for the 6-to-3 majority in Romer v. Evans in May, that a state constitutional amendment denying legal redress for discrimination based on homosexuality violated the equal-protection clause, Scalia wrote a withering dissent. He scoffed at the majority opinion's "grim, disapproving hints that Coloradans have been guilty of animus or animosity toward homosexuality, as though that has been established as un-American" and derided Kennedy's reasoning as "preposterous" and "comical," then dismissed the holding as "terminal silliness...
Such insulting language has become Scalia's signature style. It does not win friends or influence jurists--except perhaps to move them off the fence into alignment against him. Georgetown University law professor Mark Tushnet, who has studied the personal papers of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, says Scalia "annoyed everybody at one time or another...They'd get over it and say, 'That's just how Nino is,' and then he'd do something else. It has to have left some residue of unwillingness to accommodate...
...fact, a decade of exertions has not won a single Justice to Scalia's originalist point of view; his only dependable ally is Clarence Thomas, who shared his philosophy in the first place. On the nine-seat court, Scalia is one of seven Justices chosen by Republican Presidents. Yet "he has this view of himself as embattled," observes Yale law professor Robert Burt, "always fighting the desperate fight...
...Scalia's siege mentality was manifest in his speech this spring at a Mississippi prayer breakfast. "We are fools for Christ's sake...We must pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world," he declared, explaining that in educated circles Christians are regarded as "simpleminded." The speech echoed one he gave last year at Princeton University, where he maintained that his views on the proper role of judges were regarded as "simpleminded" in "sophisticated circles...
Despite his self-image as a member of a beleaguered group, Scalia, as a matter of judicial principle, consistently leaves minorities, including religious minorities, at the mercy of majority rule. Only when the majority's duly passed laws contravene an explicit provision of the Constitution does Scalia believe he must step in--sometimes against his own political preferences: he cast the fifth vote to overturn laws prohibiting flag burning because they violated freedom of speech ("A result that I'm quite sure in his heart of hearts he hated," says Chicago's Stone...