Scalia Continues to Want to Impose His Religious Views on U.S. Constitution

Personally, I find Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to be a Christianist nutbag. The man is utterly incapable of removing his own religious beliefs from his interpretation of the U. S. Constitution and other laws. Sadly, he subscribes to the typical Christianist approach of "my way or the highway" and is a prime example of those who seek to infuse one particular religious view into the laws - grant special rights, if you will - and by doing so undermines the very Constitution that he has sworn to uphold. Be assured if things were different and citizens were discriminated against because they held to a particular Catholic matter of dogma, Scalia would be screaming bloody murder and would do all in his power to end the religious based discrimination. In my view, the man is a hypocrite and blow hard. Speaking at Hastings University, Scalia has pontificated that the U. S. Constitution not only does not bar discrimination base recently on sexual orientation, but it also does not bar discrimination based on sex either. So much for equal protection under the civil laws. Here are highlights from the San Francisco Chronicle:
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The U.S. Constitution does not outlaw sex discrimination or discrimination based on sexual orientation, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told a law school audience in San Francisco on Friday.
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"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.
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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.
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"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."
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Scalia said Friday he's not a purist and is generally willing to accept long-standing court precedents that contradict his views. One exception, he said, is abortion, in which he continues to advocate overturning the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision and later rulings that have narrowed but not eliminated the constitutional right to terminate one's pregnancy.
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He also described the legal underpinnings of the court's 1965 ruling declaring a constitutional right of privacy - the basis for Roe vs. Wade - as a "total absurdity."
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Having Scalia on the Court is as basically little different than if Pope Benedict XVI were on the Court - women are inferior, abortion should be illegal in every case, and gays are inherently disordered to Scalia's way of thinking. Someone should have asked Scalia if he, like Benedict XVI, supports covering up for priests who are sexual predators except for when caught by the media.