From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 02:48:02 BST
Sam said:
So: conservative and Conservative are not the same. The latter is an
intellectual level filter designed to preserve social level quality from
dangerous innovations, not a social level reaction against all innovations
whatever their source.
DMB:
Here's an example of a real life Conservative who explicitly favors social
values over intellectual values; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Last
January he gave a speech defending the morality of the death penalty to the
Pew Forum.
He started out by explaining that the Constitution is a "dead" document and
that it means exactly what it meant in the 18th century. Since the death
penalty was allowed then, it is "clearly permitted today". He went on to
say, "not only for murder but for all felonies including, for example, horse
theiving."
Shall I you remind you that this is the guy who put GWB in the White House?
But hanging horse thieves, weird as it is, isn't as weird as Scalia's
backward religious views and their effect on his legal reasoning. He that,
"the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death
penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian
Europe and has least support in the the churchgoing United States. I
attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big
deal."
I guess that means non-believers are the only ones to think death is
serious. I guess the afterlife takes the sting out of it, unless you're
going to hell. Sheesh. No, wait. There's more. Refering to a saying of
St.Paul's, Scalia also said,
"the Lord repaid - did -justice- through His minister, the state." This
conception of the state and the law, he says, "was the consensus of Western
thought until very recent times." And Scalia said he was concerned that
"that consensus has been upset by the emergence of democracy."
That would be the clincher, where he asserts religious social values of the
intellectual value of democracy. This would make him a pretty extreme
Conservative, but he crosses the line even further.
"the reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure
the divine authority behind government should be not resignation to it but
resolution to combat it as effectively as poossible."
There you have it. A Supreme Court Justice advocating divine authority over
democracy. Add that to his tendency to hang all felons and you can see an
anti-intellectual, reactionary, theocratic, authoritarian, lethal concoction
that can only be called American fascism.
Is he un-intelligent and uneducated? No. But he's certainly
anti-intellectual and is hostile to modernity. I have no idea what makes
this guy tick. I saddens me to know that Bush would love to appoint Scalia
clones to that same bench. Say good bye to the Constitution. Say so long to
democracy. Kiss your rights good bye.
And God bless America,
DMB
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