From: Kevin (kevin@xap.com)
Date: Thu Oct 10 2002 - 17:38:58 BST
Platt:
In his post of 6 Oct. trashing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia,
David Buchanan presented a completely misleading report on what
Scalia said in a talk to the Pew Forum on the morality of the death
penalty. In his eagerness to do a hatchet job on a conservative, David
used the technique of that master prevaricator, James Carvell, by
presenting only partial quotes out of context and then loudly engaging
in
character assassination and the rhetoric of personal destruction so
widely practiced during the Clinton regime.
There's no point in doing a line by line refutation of David's twisted
version of Scalia's talk since what Scalia really said is available on
the
web for you to read if interested. The site is:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0205/articles/scalia.html
Kevin:
Thanks for the link. I've read a lot of criticism of that speech and was
glad to finally read it in it's entirety.
Scalia doesn't sound quite as lunatic as some of the quotes would
suggest, but I'll maintain that he's dangerously dangerously irrational.
I can't think of anything I've read from anyone in recent time that
offers a dimmer view of Modernity, Democracy, Intellectualism,
Individual Liberty, Secular society, or Dynamic Quality than Scalia's
little essay.
He seems joyously entrenched in absolute conviction that so called
Sacred Texts and Catholic Tradition are categorically and fundamentally
closed to interpretation and revision. This essay shows Scalia to be
more intransigently committed to protecting Static Social Patterns from
any and all Dynamic change than I could have ever imagined possible for
a man in his position of authority outside of the Vatican. In fact, he
seems to think the Vatican too liberal and suggests " We need some new
staffers at the Congregation of Prudence in the Vatican " because they
are betraying Scalia's notion of immutable Divine Morality as
encapsulated in ancient texts.
If I were a Conservative, I'd would hate Scalia for reinforcing a
negative stereotype of Conservatives as reactionary, bible thumping,
theocrats.
With fear and losing hope,
Kevin
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