February 15, 2016
The Thomas More Law Center joins the nation in mourning the loss of a great American, defender of our Constitution and a devout Christian — Antonin Scalia. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Maureen, and his family. May he rest in peace.
“If I have brought any message today, it is this: Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”
“God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools … and he has not been disappointed.”
Justice Scalia stayed true to his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution despite the political winds of the moment. On many occasions he did so with provocatively expressed legal arguments which earned him the respect of political conservatives and the enmity of the liberal legal establishment.
One of his greatest dissents was in the recent 2015 Supreme Court opinion, Obergfell v. Hodges, making same–sex marriages a constitutional right.
- “I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.”
- “Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”
- “This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
- “This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government.
- “A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”
- “[T]o allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”
- “[W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch.”