Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has not been dead for twenty-four hours yet and already conservatives across this country are tripping over themselves to canonize the Catholic jurist a saint, but from my perspective as a Christian liberal with a sense of compassion for my fellow human beings, a man like Scalia warrants none of the hype or respect that are being afforded him. His family and friends are mourning the loss of a beloved member of their family, and they should have our sympathy and prayers, but the death of a man with a heart as cold as stone is something I can neither celebrate nor mourn, just as I took no delight nor grieved at the death of Osama bin Laden.
You’ll get no argument from me that Scalia was a brilliant man, but history is filled with brilliant men who used their intellectual powers to the detriment of mankind’s advancement, and Scalia ranks right up with the cruelest of them. Some men brutalize with weapons. Scalia did so with words, using the power of his position to send innocent prisoners to their death, to marginalize the oppressed, to disenfranchise minorities, to attempt to deny medical care to the sick, to place firearms in the hands of would-be killers and to thwart efforts to create a clean environment in which mankind could flourish.
Scalia’s legacy is not a legacy worth celebrating. What it truly merits is contempt and derision! He wasted his God-given intellect, not in the defense of freedom and human development, but in defense of an ideology that spawned slavery and continues to support greed and human oppression. That is not a legacy that a lowly carpenter from Nazareth would lift up in celebration. It’s the kind of legacy that Jesus would lament. It’s been said that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. In Scalia’s case, the terrible waste is twice as bad, maybe more.
I’d say rest in peace, but he doesn’t deserve it!
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