But conservatives favor our "freedom":

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The Constitution says what it says and it doesn’t say anything more,” said Scalia to an audience of 250 people, most of them legal professionals and academics.

The 74-year-old jurist, appointed to the high court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, warned that government by judges is inevitable when the original meaning of legal language in laws and constitutions is not respected. This attitude, he said, allows “five out of nine hotshot lawyers to run the country.”

“Under the guise of interpreting the Constitution and under the banner of a living Constitution, judges, especially those on the Supreme Court, now wield an enormous amount of political power,” continued Scalia, “because they don’t just apply the rules that have been written, they create new rules.”

Scalia pointed out that the high court distorted the meaning of “due process” (referring to legal procedure) in the 14th Amendment to invent new rights under a “made up” concept of “substantial due process.” That has allowed the 14th Amendment to become the gateway to legal abortion and other behaviors, which the constitutional authors never intended and viewed as criminal.

“The due process clause has been distorted so it’s no longer a guarantee of process but a guarantee of liberty,” Scalia expounded. “But some of the liberties the Supreme Court has found to be protected by that word - liberty - nobody thought constituted a liberty when the 14th Amendment was adopted. Homosexual sodomy? It was criminal in all the states. Abortion? It was criminal in all the states.”

As per here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/justice-scalia-slams-high-court-for-inventing-living-constitution-right-to/

And the other excerpt, also under a cut:

 

"If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, you have legislatures," Scalia said during a 90-minute question-and-answer session with a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. He said the same was true of discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The 74-year-old justice, leader of the court's conservative wing, is also its most outspoken advocate of "originalism," the doctrine that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the original meaning of those who drafted it.

The court has ruled since the early 1970s that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws applies to sex discrimination, requiring a strong justification for any law that treated the genders differently. That interpretation, Scalia declared Friday, was not intended by the authors of the amendment that was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War.

"Nobody thought it was directed against sex discrimination," he said. Although gender bias "shouldn't exist," he said, the idea that it is constitutionally forbidden is "a modern invention.

 

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/17/MNJE1FFTSO.DTL#ixzz16J4VlhL5

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There is so much wrong and evil here that I literally don't know where to start. First, there's that in the society he's referring to, Scalia would have been one of those papist dagoes here to convert the USA to the evils of Popery and to turn the United States into a dictatorship dominated by the Bishop of Rome. Second, when he refers to its original protection it was designed to ensure citizenship for slaves liberated by the 13th Amendment, whose citizenship had never been granted for what I hope should be a blatantly obvious reason by the statesmen of the Old South. This was why the Amendment then and during the high tide of people like Theodore "Permanent solution to the Negro Problem" Bilbo was as controversial as it was.

Third, people like Thaddeus Stevens wanted an amendment that was positive in language, not a negative one, and were forced to accept the negative one after extreme backlash from ex-Confederates and the large racist bloc in the North. Fourth, the idea of a large standing army is very much counter to the original design of the Founders, they hated and feared the very idea as a lead-in to tyranny, vividly illustrated at the time by Catherine II's repression of the only truly popular revolution in Russian history. I predict Scalia here would be as keen to ditch the original intention of *that* aspect of the Constitution as he is to try to twist the 14th Amendment into something with no reference to the rights of women or LGBTQI.

My other comment is that it's a fine irony when a US Supreme Court Justice sounds like a Mullah in Iran arguing that *his* religious legal texts do not permit rights for women under the highest laws of the land.

Even more obvious refutation is obvious: http://www.policyalmanac.org/culture/archive/crs_abortion_overview.shtml at the time the 14th Amendment was adopted abortion was legal in the United States and the concept of outlawing it did not really take off until the 1880s. Even then the first state to adopt an anti-abortion law was Connecticut, the last was.....Kentucky. So the irony is that while the USA at that time was perfectly fine with say, racism against blacks the idea of prohibiting abortion was not one that occurred to too many people in that time or for 20 years afterward.

Not that facts ever trouble reactionaries as it is, but eh......oh, and Scalia also considered the Citizens' United decision constitutional despite the fact that not even Alexander Hamilton, the most pro-Industrialization big-government Founder of them all considered a corporation a "person". A liar and a hypocrite.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Oh I'd love to see it.