Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may be an utter asshat, but at least he’s occasionally a funny asshat. Take for instance the latest fuck-tussle over his equating laws against sodomy with laws against murder. Yes, that’s pretty much the comparison he made. But look, it’s not like he thinks they’re exactly the same! He’s just sayin’, is all. When a gay student, Duncan Hosie, asked Scalia at a recent Princeton speech why he had compared laws banning sodomy with laws banning murder and bestiality, Scalia defended the sacred American right to dickish hyperbole:
“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.
As paid members of the Dickish Hyperbole League, we would even agree that outright bullshitting can be effective, too, although it is maybe a little unsettling to think that people’s civil rights may depend on the opinion of such an enthusiastic practitioner of the art.
“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.”
Look, we know Scalia’s “originalist” beliefs about the Constitution are the worst sort of nonsense, and apart from his tendency to be an absolutist for free speech,* we think he’s been a disaster on the Court. We don’t even think he’s right about this instance of hyperbole. But that “I’m surprised you aren’t persuaded” is snark of the first order, and should be appreciated for what it is.
But don’t ask us to get in bed with the guy. You just know he thinks “Dutch ovens” are the height of hilarity.
*Though we don’t really hold with his notion that corporate money is “speech.”
{ 150 comments }
Scalia needs to spend more time with Lindsey Graham and Marcus Bachmannn.
Even they can recognize a bad top.
"Boy, one thing about you goatfuckers: you sure can't take a joke."
Sorry, my edition of Bartlett's is a few years old. Is that Wordsworth?
Emily Dickinson, the Mount Holyyokel Unabridged Edition.
Not the same? Damn, no wonder it didn't matter how much I ass-fucked her, she just wouldn't die!
Friction burn gape foul!!!
Is that you, Walnuts?
I'm not sure you're doing it right…
Fuck the other end, mebbe they'll choke.
At least President Chelsea Clinton will get to appoint his successor.
Oh, dear lord, it hope it comes sooner than that.
With any luck, one of these days Scalia will be so busy being the only one laughing at his own jokes that he will miss the Courthouse entrance and crack his head open on the doorjamb.
Or laughing so hard during one of his talks that he chokes on his own saliva and there's no one there to do a Heimlich…
Oh, there will be plenty of people there to do the Heimlich, just everyone in the room will conveniently forget the steps until it is too late.
Hell, if he doesn't start taking better care of himself, it may be President Hillary Clinton (god willing) who ends up appointing his successor.
One can dream
So homosexuality is immoral? Just like making sure everyone has health insurance is immoral?
Got it.
And I guess it's OK to murder health insurance because someday your health insurance will try to kill you with some kind of "not covered".
Murder health insurance because you can't fuck or marry it.
It is the same if you're doing it right.
la petit morte?…
I know that Scalia and a rotting tampon aren't the same thing…but you know, comparison for comparisons sake.
Don't insult the common rotting tampon please.
At least tampons served a purpose *before* they were rotting.
Constitution is a WASP word, Antonin.
"Antonin Scalia Knows Sodomy & Murder"
On a first name basis?
Good afternoon, I'd like you to meet my friends Sodomy and Murder. They don't usually hang out together – but sometimes they like to party.
GLENN BECK LIBELZ@!!!!1!!!
When it comes to the Constitution and the rights of American citizens, yes, on a first-name basis.
Everything about the man just screams "Fuck You". His picture, his attitude, everything. This is why the left shouldn't turn in all of their guns. Then only people like this will have them.
Amen, amen, amen.
Perhaps it has something to do with the just- completed under-the-chin-flick gesture and accompanying smirk. Such an ass to think no one would notice it.
POS. Die, smug fucker, die! -with votes.
ahhh that takes me back to that fantastic scene in 'titus andronicus' when rapine and murder are presented to titus and he gets to gut them and feed them to their mother.
good times.
Scalia is obviously resorting to the well-known argumentative ploy of reductio ad assholem.
Or "I-don't-like-it-therefore-it's-un-Constitutional".
"Calling balls and strikes," as Roberts put it.
Getcher' Latin straight, there Elvis.
Reductio ad anum [spit!]
I stand impressed, skoal, I stand impressed.
Hey, I was going for lyricism, not literalism, you… originalist.
Wait, isn't that a form of sodomy?
I believe the definition is "Shrinking one's head in order to properly fit it inside one's ass." So, yes.
Whaddaya mean I'm funny? Funny like a clown?
Fuck, Kill or Marry. Pick two.
Well it sure as fuck ain't gonna be fuck!
I wouldn't fuck/marry that if it were on sale for just $9.95!
Marry, never consummate, kill for the insurance money.
Kill, kill.
“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.
No, dumbass — they can't. That's the whole fucking point of the fucking Bill of Rights — otherwise they could ban segregation, miscegenation, or wearing Capris with big calves.
Oh I wouldn't be surprised if Scalia thought Loving v Virginia was wrongly decided.
Neither would I — or Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda, and every civil liberty decision going back to John Peter Zenger.
He's been meaning to have a word with his silent sidekick about that very thing…
Actually, didn't he basically pretty much say as much right there? That was basically the entirety of the State of Virginia's position back then, that
, including interracial marriage.
You'll get the rights that Nino thinks you should have, no more and no less. If it isn't enumerated in the Constitution, it doesn't exist and you can't have it. And Originalist Nino isn't too crazy about those so-called "amendments," either.
Except Emendamento Due. He likes that one big time.
Yeah, that struck me right off, too. Not really what you'd think to hear from a "strict Constitutionalist."
I certainly don't think that craven Supreme Court judges being made to disappear is necessary, but…
Wookie, clearly you have missed Scalia's point, that the Bill of Rights only applies to corporations and money, which are in desperate need of its protection.
Not to mention he maintains the idea that the only reason murder is illegal is because– eww gross!
Not to mention that being gay doesn't infringe on anyone else's right, as murder does, unless you count the right to impose your morality on someone else.
Oh, wait. That's what he's saying, if he doesn't like it, he can vote against it. Got it.
I'm make the wearing of capris, in general, a capital offense.
It's all really funny until your realize this guy is a Supreme Court Justice.
That's what makes him one of the most dangerous men in America.
Right below the picture of Scalia is an ad for a large Dominoes pizza. Way to be ethnically insensitive (yet, somehow, incredibly appropriate) random internet ad generator program.
UPDATE: Now it's an ad for Pizza Hut. It's time for a sternly written letter.
My Pizza Hut ad is in Spanish. BOYCOTT NOW!
IMPIZZA !!1!!
At least Pizza Hut isn't run by far-right homophobic, misogynist nuts like Dominoes (or that other national pizza chain).
Little Ceasar's Libel!!!
Dear Shit Fer Brains…
Gettin' better – now it's Lysol!
Maybe Auto Editor is trying to tell us something.
"Duncan Hosie" is just his gay stripper name, right?!
"You just know he thinks “Dutch ovens” are the height of hilarity."
He does look a bit like Ernest Borgnine. Thanks Drew Friedman.
so you're saying Scalia masturbates a lot to stay young?
“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective.” That's a pretty wide stance you got there, Antonin.
I actually had to google "Dutch Ovens". I'm definitely losing my edge.
I have some moral feelings about this utter jerkwad being on MY supreme court. They are not pretty or happy feelings.
I don't have enough words in my vocabulary to accurately, adequately state how much contempt and loathing I have for this man.
You can have all the "moral feelings" against homosexuality you want, you gigantic douchebag. You can choose not to invite gays to your next Ku Klux Klan rally in your backyard. What you CAN'T do is have the State unconstitutionally infringe on my life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Damn straight!
Oh, wait.
Clearly he hasn't considered the questionable morality of discriminating against an entire group of people who he has ambiguously decided is immoral.
So if this statement had been uttered by Consolidated Assf**kery & Homicide Inc., it would have been okay. Well, hell, I'm gonna run down to Delaware tomorrow and incorporate!
But we don't ban murder because we think it's immoral; we ban it because murder results in actual harm to people, you know, killing them.
Sodomy, meanwhile, harms no one, and in fact can be very fun.
Even many of the morons who don't believe it's possible to be moral unless cowering before a scary invisible sky-dude ready to smite them at any wrongdoing and/or condemn them to an eternity of torture for not believing in things for which no evidence exists, still manage to understand the difference between Ritual law ("do this because I said so") and Natural law ("don't do that because it harms people") in the Bible.
Not our Nino, though. He once had a reputation for being a smart guy, which he now only retains amongst the people who think W was a good President.
Yeah, by the same justification Scalia uses for criminalizing consensual sodomy we could criminalize, say, eating pork or wearing mixed fabrics. It comes from treating some old book as the basis of what they call morality, even though isn't really morality at all, but religious taboos.
Sodomy is, according to certain sects of Christianity (and sects of Judaism, and of Islam, etc.) sinful; but it is morally neutral.
Or in certain cases (food rules), merely a reflection of the fact that the refrigerator hadn't been invented 2000 years ago and the Middle East lacked ice houses.But yeah, what we're seeing is that wholesale reliance on a combination of a book, some dude in Italy wearing a funny hat, and fear of an invisible being to tell you what's allowed and what isn't is emphatically not a sound basis for morality, rather it leads to the attrition of the ability to think meaningfully about morality and ethics; in Scalia's case, that attrition has pretty much run its full course, it seems.
That's the problem with reducto ad adsurdum, for it to have any legit argumentative value, Obamacare really DOES have to equal Holocaust. So it's not good for much at all, except if you want to argue that people are stupid.
That's the whole point. Fun is sinful to these people. Unless it involves those who have money and/ or power oppressing those who don't. That's a laugh a minute, and not sinful at all.
No sir! Sodomy is PLENTY harmful to others, if you believe that society will collapse into a Hobbesean nightmare unless we restrict sexuality to married heterosexual missionary-position. You don't need to be religious (only stupid and repressed) to believe that.
They will take my married buttsechs from my cold, dead, happy, satisfied hands.
Scalia is a spoiled brat's spoiled brat. The only grandchild of four grandparents, and not called "Nino" for nothing. He was also granted by Fate a first rate mind, so as he grew up got used to being the Smartest Kid In Class.
Scalia's life made into the quintessential conservative. If life always hands you lemonade, you are naturally inclined to endorse the status quo. The annoying part is that instead of pursuing wealth, or fame, or endless unrequited blow jobs, Scalia pursued a legal career, and now is positioned to act out his life being the judicial equivalent of the guy in the lifeboat who uses an oar to clobber others, rather than having to move over to let them in.
Thoughtful analysis – and highly accurate. The only thing I'd add is that he is a cornhole of the first magnitude…
I know someone who knows someone who is quite close to Scalia. There is a decent chance I might someday meet him. I make a solemn vow to my fellow Wonketeers, that upon this meeting, I will do my best to "accidentally" do some slight harm to him….stomp his foot, open a door into him, spill an entire glass of red wine on him. You know the usual. As I am a notoriously clumsy hot mess of a person, I believe I can get away with it scott free.
“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd’”
Scalia went on to say "after all, if you read any of my opinions, you'll see numerous reductions to the absolutely absurd…"
/FFS
My girlfriend screams bloody murder when I accidentally sodomize her.
Sure, you "accidentally" hit the wrong hole; that's easy to do.
That's the excuse I always used…didn't work then won't work now…sure worth the try tho
Sodomy=Murder=Knocking down a tent.
OT
Better brace for a flurry of UNION THUGS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Couple of upset people knocked down a tent in Lansing, MI. http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/12/11/violence-b…
Treason!
Worse than Hitler.
Coupla Wonks nearby up there.
FEELINGS. NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS.
FEELING LIKE THOSE BATH SALTS ARE MELTING THE TV…
Hairy douchetard "originalist" is a hairy douchetard "originalist" asshole.
I was thinking "reduction to the absurd" just meant Scalia had lost a little weight.
If legislatures can ignore the Constitution to decide what is immoral, they can ignore the Constitution to give, say, Elena Kagan five votes on the SCOTUS.
If biblical morality trumps the Constitution, let's not forget Scalia lit the match as we watch it burn. Inhale the smoke Antonin — it's your legacy.
Look, it's really simple. [spit!] If you're not fucking right, then you're fucking wrong. [spit!] And if you'r fucking wrong, you should be fucking punished, since wrong ain't right. [spit!] And the Bible says "No Homo"!
What part of this legal reasoning are you having trouble with, libtards?
I think you're beginning to channel Him.
Gee, you give someone a job with almost unlimited power, tell them they can't be fired or voted out, and pay them a crap load of money to hardly any work, and they turn into an asshole on you? Weird. Just to remind me, why do we need 9 black-robed tyrants to rule over us? Oh yeah, to protect our rights, I forgot.
Yup, yet another gift that keeps on giving, courtesy of Bonzo's administration…
If the argumentum ad baculum were not a fallacy I would suggest it as the only way to persuade the learned justice of his error.
Somewhere in Scalia's basement is a sensational news story involving missing teen-age runaways and a uniform
Did Duncan Hosie's name turn him gay? Just wondering…
HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE SCALIA
Tell him he's a "made" man and have him show up in a room where plastic is covering all the walls?
He's really lucky to have a job at all in any economy.
One snark makes up not for a life time of douche baggery.
-George Washington-
Sounds more like Ben Franklin…
That would be douche baguettery.
Actually, he only asked for deux baguettes. But his French kinda sucked, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Well yes, Scalia was very effective at making himself look absurd.
Of course, that's not difficult, because he is absurd.
I'll just toss in a casual mention that legal gay sex (a) is legal, and (b) involves consenting adults, whereas murder (a) is very illegal, and (b) does not involve the consent of the dead party. Yes Nino, most of us knew that from when we were very, very little. No, sadly, you cannot be impeached for being Dumber Than Jeff Foxworthy.
With votes?
Sodomy immoral? This is bad news for pussy eaters and cock suckers. For many "older" Americans, it's all they have left.
Perhaps he does not know the difference because Mrs. Scalia mutters, "oh. yes. you're killing me" every time she wakes up to find she's being had sex with (he finishes up quicker that way and she can get back to sleep sooner).
Also, shut the hell up and make me a damn pizza. I do not want or need your approval, I just need to be treated as any other citizen.
If sodomy was murder well guess we'd extinct. ERGO they are EXACTLY the same. DUH.
Someone on Twitter today said this was the kind of reasoning ability one would expect from a third grader, which I think might actually be giving Scalia too much credit.
In fairness to Scalia, both sodomy and murder can involve a gun to the head, if you know what I mean.
And both run the risk of accidental discharge.
I guess Justice Kennedy's swinging a large one then.
Sodomy may not be the same as murder, but "Dirty Sanchez" is EXACTLY the same thing as "ruining an otherwise perfect evening without the kids".
Fuck Fat Tony with a rusty Garden Weasel (of votes).
Sadly, he's immune to votes.
Anyone who thinks that sodomy is immoral clearly hasn't had it done correctly.
This guy is so bad at sex that just the regular way makes you wish you were murdered.
Scalia is like that guy who says boys are better at math because they are.
I don't know if I want to know if this is something that means something else completely unrelated yet salacious and possibly revolting. I've lost my edge so much I'm in another dimension.
This guy should have a lifetime appointment to be sodomized. I can't say with votes because he wasn't elected.
It's simple. Conservatives believe that anything that feels good must be immoral. And sodomy and murder both just FEEL SO GOOD.
Do you think Scalia hates blow jobs, or loves them but is ashamed?
Lots of yahoos still have 'moral' objections to integration. If we cannot have moral objections to integration, can we have moral objections to murder?
Why yes, yes we can. He seems to be arguing that a legislature can ban anything that it judges to be immoral, or else it can ban nothing at all. The legislators moral judgment is all that matters.
We tried that. First we called it slavery, and then we called it Jim Crow, but it was and remains an attempt to legalize the bigot's 'moral' judgment that black people could not be full citizens.
That is what the Supreme Court does, asshole. The Supreme Court's job is to say that a legislature's attempt to enforce its 'moral' judgment against a certain group violates that group's constitutional rights. And that is very different from murder.
I want to smack Scalia, with votes. Oh, wait…
Scalia is living proof that intellectual prowess does not mean you can't make an idiot out of yourself.
"Reduction to the absurd" describes Scalia's career.
I can see him in clown paint. Can anyone else see Scalia pursing his true calling as a circus clown?
I've heard that he's a fan of East Village bondage bars.
If it is immoral, we can ban it. Scalia says its okay to ban masturbation, so that reducto ad absurdamism is not absurd enough. So in the world according to Scalia, the government can ban anything it wants, except speech. Got it.
It's almost like Scabia is saying "I'll suggest about yes O wait now sonny my turn is coming" to the whole country.
My general rule: Anyone who spends time telling other people how "immoral" their harmless, private lives are is probably spending his weekends buggering animals or jetting off to the Philippines for a little pedo-tourism.
can i just say? that dude is GROSS.
that is all.
Scalia of course, being the crown price of absurd, knows from where he speaks, or some such thing.
The Court's in Session. Here come the Judge that should shut the fuck up and go back to work.
Missing, of course, is any rational explanation of what makes gay marriage "immoral" in the first place. For some reason, Nino never cites his (2000-year-old) source for that tidbit.
Fat Tony knows murder, let me tell you…
So, a state could allow for commercial businesses to ban blahs and messicans and such as from their establishments, again, right Tony?
If you have not already I strongly recommend reading The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin. Available from Amazon by clicking a link somewhere on this website.
If anyone needs to get kicked off the court it's Scalia.
Scalia: living proof of what's wrong with this Country.
Comments on this entry are closed.