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

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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

This part of Scalia's speech seems dangerous.

Quote:

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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