• In total there are 0 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 0 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 758 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 3:50 am

Ch. 12 - Reason Embattled

#20: July - Sept. 2005 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
Chris OConnor

1A - OWNER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 17016
Joined: Sun May 05, 2002 2:43 pm
21
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 3507 times
Been thanked: 1310 times
Gender:
Contact:
United States of America

Ch. 12 - Reason Embattled

Unread post

This thread is for discussing Ch. 12 - Reason Embattled. You can post within this framework or create your own threads.
Megaeraa

Re: Scalia's speech

Unread post

Jacoby opens the last chapter of _Freethinkers_ with a discussion of Antonin Scalia's speech "God's Justice and Ours", delivered to the University Of Chicago Divinity School in January 2002 .">pewforum.org/deathpenalty...pt3.php3>. Justice Scalia's speech starts about 1/10 of the way down the page. I've included the speech at the bottom of my message.Seems to me that Jacoby misrepresents Scalia's message by quoting him out of context. For example, from his statement that the Constitution is "not living but dead -- or, as I prefer to put it, enduring. It means today not what current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted." She claims that this leads to the conclusion that, for example, "courts should be free to hand down death sentences for grand theft auto, the modern equivalent of horse theft." But that isn't Scalia's point. His point is that the judge's job is to interpret the law *as it was written*. It's the *legislator's* job to adapt the law to fit modern sensibilities. So if, for example, the death penalty is to be restricted or terminated, it should be the legislature that enacts new laws on the subject, not the judiciary who reinterprets existing laws.Another interesting statement from Scalia's speech: "Thus, my difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than a moral one. I do not believe
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Scalia's speech

Unread post

This part of Scalia's speech seems dangerous.Quote:It seems to me that 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 possible, and a principal way of combating it, in my view, is constant public reminder that
Post Reply

Return to “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism - by Susan Jacoby”