Antonin Scalia

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Former SCOTUS Justice Tier 4 - Personhood Never Contrary to popular belief, Antonin Scalia is not pro-life. He believes that the unborn child does not have a right to life, and, whereas our rights come from God, he claims that such a right would have to come from the majority. He also says that he would strike down a law that was the opposite of Roe v. Wade and that, by his judicial philosophy, if he had been a judge in Germany, he would have been prosecuted in Nuremberg.

• Contrary to Popular Belief: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is not pro-life:
  
  - Justice Antonin Scalia claims that "most rights" are created by popular vote (i.e., rather than endowed by the creator).
  
  - Antonin Scalia claims that constitutional equal protection and due process does not apply to an unborn child.
  
  - Scalia says he will strike down any law that prohibits abortion nationwide.
  
  - Scalia claims the only ultimate moral principle relevant to the judiciary is, Thou shall not lie (ignoring Do not murder, Do not steal).
  
  - Notre Dame Law School professor emeritus Dr. Charles Rice said that Scalia and every Republican on the court accepts the central holding of Roe v. Wade, that the child is not a person. 
  
  - Scalia says that he finds some good points in the "pro-choice" argument.
  
  - Reply to a question at Pepperdine University Scalia said that by his principles he would have been prosecuted at Nuremberg.
  
   
• Scalia: Most Rights Are Created By Popular Vote: Regarding the killing of an unborn child and therefore, even the "right to life", Antonin Scalia advises those advocating "legalized" abortion how to proceed. He claims that "most rights" are "created in a democracy" by popular vote, 1  despite the reality that rights are endowed upon us by our Creator. The Declaration of Independence rightly stated that the right to life is inalienable. 2 The 5th Amendment states that, "No person shall be... deprived of life... without due process of law", 3 that is, unless convicted of a capital crime. The 14th Amendment declares, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life... without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." 4 Scalia however rejects the idea that the unborn child has a right to life. He claims that as a judge he can legitimately allow Planned Parenthood to dismember an unborn child as long as some man-made (constitutional) process is followed. In a 2008 CBS interview with 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl 5  In reality, rights come from God. The right to life is inalienable. Thus God commanded, Thou shall not murder. We have the right to own property. So God said, Thou shall not steal. We have the right to due process. Therefore God declared, Thou shall not bear false witness. Human rights do not come from the government, for then they wouldn’t be rights; nor from the majority (consider America and slaves, Germany and Jews); nor at birth from the delivery doctor or hospital. For rights come from our Creator, at that moment we are created. Jeremiah 1:5 quotes God: "Before I formed you in the womb [i.e., at fertilization] I knew you." The Declaration of Independence affirms what those who believe in God have always known, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life…" 2  We have human rights because we are made in our Creator’s image and likeness, which is why governments, and parents, unlike animals, have a moral obligation to protect and love our children, born and unborn.

• Scalia Says He Would Strike Down the Opposite of Roe: After the states started decriminalizing child killing, with 19 of them beginning to regulate abortion from 1966 - 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court sped up the process by alleging, falsely, in their infamous Roe v. Wade opinion that they had the authority to compel every state immediately to permit abortion. In a 2002 Pew Forum Antonin Scalia said: "I will strike down Roe v. Wade, but I will also strike down a law that is the opposite of Roe v. Wade. You know, both sides in that debate want the Supreme Court to decide the matter for them. One (side) wants no state to be able to prohibit abortion and the other one wants every state to have to prohibit abortion, and they’re both wrong." 6  In the 60 Minutes interview in 2008, Scalia said that he believed the right to life should be reserved for "walking-around persons." He criticized pro-lifers who demand that the government recognize the unborn child's God-given and therefore constitutionally-protected right to life. "And indeed, there are—there are anti-abortion people who think that the Constitution requires a state to prohibit abortion. They say that the equal protection clause requires that you treat a helpless human being that's still in the womb the way you treat other human beings. I think that's wrong. I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons." 7  Therefore, by his own definition of "persons," Scalia would also be in favor of infanticide, since infants do not "walk around." Judie Brown, no exceptions (Tier 1) president of the American Life League, wrote of Scalia: "Regardless of your preference – Catholic teaching or scientific fact – when examining the positions taken by a United States Supreme Court Justice who is allegedly pro-life, the above documentation makes it perfectly clear that Justice Scalia does not deserve that title. He may be... a strict interpreter of the Constitution of the United States in the opinion of some, but he is not pro-life. In fact, having thought about his most recent comments on 60 Minutes, I would venture to say he is one of the preborn child’s worst enemies." 8
• Morality Not Required as a Supreme Court Justice: Antonin Scalia openly admits his moral relativism: "my difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than a moral one." 9  Scalia also alleges that the only principle from his Christian worldview that is relevant as a judge is the Ten Commandments, "You shall not lie." In that 2002 Pew Forum, Scalia stated: "You mistook my remarks if you took away from them the notion that my religion helps me in my job as a judge. It doesn’t. I cannot do anything in my job as a judge that I consider immoral." Legal positivism is moral relativism in law, and Antonin Scalia is a legal positivist. He continued, "I try mightily to prevent my religious views or my political views or my philosophical views from affecting my interpretation of the laws, which is what my job is about... They can make me leave the bench if I find that I’m enmeshed in an immoral operation, but the only one of my religious views that has anything to do with my job as a judge is the seventh commandment – thou shalt not lie. I try to observe that faithfully, but other than that I don’t think any of my religious views have anything to do with how I do my job as a judge." 10  At 4:35 into that CBS News interview above, Scalia says, "I'm a law and order guy." However, when the highest court in the land sets aside the oldest prevailing legal authority, God's enduring command, Do not murder, you no longer have a nation of laws, but a lawless nation.
• "Something to be said for Both Sides": The Notre Dame Law School professor emeritus Dr. Charles Rice wrote of Antonin Scalia and all his fellow Republicans, "Every justice now on the court accepts the Roe holding that the unborn child is a non-person." Also speaking of Scalia, the apostle James wrote that, "a double-minded man [is] unstable in all his ways" and Jesus condemned the man who is "lukewarm" and "neither cold nor hot." Concerning abortion, Scalia said to the National Italian-American Foundation in 2006 that, "there's something to be said for both sides." 11  While liberals often get away with making the most racist and bigoted comments (like understanding what "compelled the Romans to throw select Christians to the lions" 12 ) imagine the outrage if even a liberal judge on the court, looking back at the Holocaust or slavery in southern states, remarked that there was "something to be said for both sides" on either issue.

• Scalia Admits He Would Have Been Prosecuted at Nuremberg: A longtime staff attorney for Focus on the Family, James Odom, contacted the researchers at Pro-life Profiles to relate the following information. During an appearance at Pepperdine University in the Q&A session Justice Scalia was asked about his admitted practice of ignoring morality to strictly follow the law. Specifically, the student asked Scalia if he had been a judge in national socialist Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and had followed his own moral relativist advice, how he would have fared? Antonin Scalia answered: "Well, I guess I would have been prosecuted at Nuremberg." 13  Exactly. (And sadly, Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ founded institution, apparently lacked the wisdom to recognize the wickedness that was being presented, and did nothing to admonish Scalia nor to warn their students.)
• Scalia: The States May Permit Abortion On Demand If They Wish: Describing the U.S. Supreme Court after National RTL's decades of "leadership," Notre Dame Law School's Professor Emeritus Rice wrote, "Every justice now on the court accepts the Roe holding that the unborn child is a non-person... The situation remains as described by Justice John Paul Stevens in Planned Parenthood v. Casey." For Stevens had written that "the Court... rejected, the argument 'that the fetus is a "person"'. ... there was no dissent..." And Clarence Thomas wrote in his Stenberg dissent that "a State may permit abortion," and Antonin Scalia wrote in Casey, "The states may, if they wish, permit abortion-on-demand..." 
  
   
• Lobbied Obama Administration to Nominate Elena Kagan: Tearing apart children was an abstraction to Scalia, not an atrocity. If medical researchers ripped the limbs off of living fetal pigs, countless Americans would fly into a rage. Yet Justice Scalia was happy to have others know that he could carry on famously even with those who authorize the dismembering of unborn children, like Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. [Putting that together with Scalia's Pepperdine Nuremberg comment suggests that at another time he would have savored too the company of those who persecuted blacks and Jews.] So Antonin Scalia lobbied Barack Obama's senior advisor, David Axelrod, for the administration to consider nominating Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court, 14 which they eventually did. First, Barack Obama promoted the judge whom George H. W. Bush had put on the federal bench, Sonia Sotomayor; and next, he nominated Scalia's friend.
• In the Related Matter of Marriage: Notice from Antonin Scalia's dissent in the 2013 Windsor case that, because he is a legal positivist (i.e., a moral relativist in jurisprudence) he is in no way committed to upholding marriage between a man and a woman. He is only committed to the process. Pass a law allowing marriage between two or more men, between an adult and a child, or a man and a dog, and Antonin Scalia would uphold it. He gives no thought whatsoever to any violation of God's enduring commands such as Do not murder, Do not steal, and Do not commit adultery. As long as you follow whatever the current (arbitrary) governmental process happens to be, he will uphold the result. Judges may as well be soulless rubber stamps. Dissenting in Windsor, he wrote regarding: "traditional marriage" ... It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change..." No, both those things are fundamentally the same, with only mere process differences. Either way, if the change is to declare impermissible the gassing of Jews or buying of Blacks, it is right. Either way, if it is to permit the intentional killing of the innocent, or theft, or sexual immorality, it is wrong. Ultimately God will judge. And only a minority of His judgments will be based on any culture's idiosyncratic processes.

Summary:

Antonin Scalia is often held up as the model of what a conservative judge ought to be when it comes to interpreting the constitution. But, as is clear, Scalia is not an exceptional judge. He rejects the truth that rights do not come from the people but from God. He therefore rejects the right to life of the unborn child and, by hubris, believes that he has the authority to determine when and how an unborn child can be killed. By claiming that the 5th and 14th amendments protect only "walking-around persons" is immoral and, on a matter of such grave significance, is grotesque in thoughtlessness and superficiality. He signed on to the brutally wicked PBA opinion which states: "The medical profession [abortionists] may find different and less shocking methods to abort the fetus..." and is a virtual late-term abortion manual. Antonin Scalia is not the model of a good judge and cannot be trusted.​​​​​​​

• 1Boston.com (AP) article; Link temporarily broken; check back
• 2 a b USHistory.org Text of the Declaration of Independence
• 3USHistory.org Text of the 5th Amendment
• 4USHistory.org Text of the 14th Amendment
• 5CBS News – 60 Minutes interviews Justice Scalia on Life
• 6Pew Forum: A Call for Reckoning – Religion, Politics, and the Death Penalty, Jan. 25, 2002
• 7CBS News – 60 Minutes interviews Justice Scalia on Life, see transcript at page 6, at Part 2 of the video at 4:17 in
• 8ALL's Judie Brown, in Pewsitter: Catholic, Conservative Supreme Court Justice Scalia Not Pro-life
• 9Pew Forum: A Call for Reckoning – Religion, Politics, and the Death Penalty, Jan. 25, 2002
• 10Pew Forum: A Call for Reckoning – Religion, Politics, and the Death Penalty
• 11The Washington Post "Scalia sees shift in court's role"
• 12Former Denver Bronco and columnist Reggie Rivers, angry that a town was considering moving a sexually explicit business to a "remote" area (not remote as in Siberia, but as in a Denver suburb), Rivers wrote: "While I don't agree with the action, I can periodically understand the frustration and general fatigue that compelled the Romans to throw select Christians to the lions. It's not just that the lions were hungry; it was that the Romans were tired of listening to the self-righteous babbling of the Christians... regular citizens are getting fed up with puritanical Christians..."
• 13Pro-life Profiles researchers are requesting from the public more information on Scalia's comments at Pepperdine University. We believe this event was in November of 2003. Focus on the Family staff attorney James Odom provided the personal contact from whom he obtained this account. Pro-life Profiles followed up and found the information reliable, but from a private source. We are looking for public records of this event including a transcript and recordings. Please contact us with any information.
• 14CNN: A suprising request from Justice Scalia