If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.
ANTONIN SCALIAThe death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.
More Antonin Scalia Quotes
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The right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the unalienable rights with which the Declaration of Independence proclaims ‘all Men are endowed by their Creator.’
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Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.
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If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?
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A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
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The wise do not investigate such silliness.
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This is an execution, not surgery. Where does that come from, that you must find the method of execution that causes the least pain?
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As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically.
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It is difficult to maintain the illusion that we are interpreting a Constitution, rather than inventing one.
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The principal purpose of stare decisis is to protect reliance interest and further stability in the law.
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The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
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You could have 50 different states having 50 different regulations until they were all litigated out.
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[International law] doesn’t show what the Constitution originally meant, and it doesn’t show what is fundamentally important to Americans today. It shows what’s fundamentally important to somebody else today.
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On this day, when we’re celebrating our constitutional heritage, I urge you to be faithful to that heritage – to impose on our fellow citizens only the restrictions that are there in the Constitution, not invent new ones, not to invent the right because it’s a good idea.
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What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?
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To many Americans, everything from the Easter morning to the Ascension had to be made up by the groveling enthusiasts as part of their plan to get themselves martyred.
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People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.
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Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ’s sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.
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Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.
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I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over nonreligion.
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[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.
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Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.
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Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.
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A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.
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Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.
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A law can be both economic folly and constitutional.
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One can be sophisticated and believe in God. Reason and intellect are not to be laid aside where matters of religion are concerned.
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