I won’t mourn the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and I don’t think anyone in the gay community should feel obligated to have any sympathy for him. I don’t think any American with a working heart should spare him another thought.
I was scrolling through my Twitter feed when news of Scalia’s death broke. Minutes after his passing was confirmed, there came the finger-wagging. Tweets written by exclusively straight, white and cisgender men reminding people that “regardless of their politics” it is “distasteful” to speak ill of the dead. These same people insisted to their followers that Antonin Scalia had a “brilliant legal mind” and a “great wit.”
That’s easy for you guys to say. In the nearly 30 years that Scalia spent on the Supreme Court, his rulings never denied you anything: your rights, your dignity or your personal freedom. Antonin Scalia worked his whole career to drag social progression back to 1776. He was very proud of his “originalist” philosophy, meaning he believed the Constitution should remain exactly as it was written, instead of a living document that must grow and evolve to reflect the needs of the American people.
He compared homosexuality to all manner of colorful things, including: flagpole sitting, rooting for the Chicago Cubs, eating snails, incest and recreational heroin use. Infamously, Scalia once told a gay law student that he believed marriage rights shouldn’t be opened to same-sex couples because of the moral stance against it. He compared marriage laws to the laws against murder, saying that murder is illegal because of moral feeling. He was quoted as saying to the gay student: “I’m surprised you’re not convinced.”
