(AP/Kevin Lamarque)
Earlier this year, Rachel Maddow made headlines when she told Jon Stewart, after watching the proceedings of the Supreme Court, that Justice Antonin Scalia is akin to an “internet troll” who gets excited by using the “N” word in a blog’s comments section. That’s perhaps the best framework to interpreting his recent comments to the Utah Bar Association, where he said that “judicial activism” of the sort that overturned sodomy laws and legalized abortion is partially what led to the Holocaust:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia invoked Nazi Germany and radical islam Saturday to highlight the dangers of judicial activism in a speech to Utah State Bar Association in Snowmass Village, according to The Aspen Times.
The conservative justice opened his speech with a comment on the Holocaust, saying it occurred in one of the “most advanced countries in the world” and one of the mistakes that Germany made in the 1930s was that judges interpreted the law in ways that reflected the “spirit of the age.”
[…]
Scalia cited issues like abortion, the right to execute someone for a crime and the legality of “homosexual sodomy” as examples of issues that judges aren’t qualified to rule on, arguing that professionals in the specific field are more qualified to speak to these.
Well, all right. It does seem like he makes these sorts of comments just to get a rise out of people. He certainly isn’t concerned about his judicial legacy.
Of course, Californians can continue to thank Scalia, in part, for their marriage equality, so that’s good.
