Originally posted by: Craig234
What makes you and Scalia 'insensitive assholes' is the lack of morality - the satisfaction with the small-minded interpretations and lack of regard for moral issues.
I'm not advocating that Justices say 'gee, I'd like this moral outcome, so I'll ignore the law'. That's the straw men people like you use to defend your support of evil.
There have been decisions that require the Justices to have a better moral understanding and that is a legitimate part of their job - within the constitution, but how it's interpreted.
For example, does the constitution allow for 'separate but equal' to be put into law by the states? There's nowhere black and white (no pun intended) in the cosntitution banning it.
You and Scalia easily could - and the Supreme Court once did - say 'yes', the constitution allows for that, and it remained the law for sixty years. It took an Earl Warren - a 'greater' man who had the stature that he'd been nominated to run for Governor of California by both the Democratic and Republican paries in the same election - to recogjnize the 'moral issue', and to look at the constitution, and to recognize a better interpretation of the same words which said separate but equal was unconstitutional.
People like you try to twist that into 'Justices run amok', because you lack the moral understanding to tell the difference between the important moral aspect in such decisions, and the Justices simply ignoring the constitution and doind whatever they want. And so you cling to your narrow interpretations and take pride in your 'toughness' to be willing to (let others) pay the price for your narrow interpretations.
Another example is the right to birth control. There's no spefici right in the constitution to the right to those pills, and people like you can easily interpret the constotution to rule that way - which just happens to coincide with the personal morality of many of the judges who follow that ideology. But judges with a better sense of the nature of freedom looked at the constitution and found an interpretation which allowed for personal rights and freedom, a 'right to privacy', and ruled accordingly and controversially.
You understand the idea justices who ignore the constitution to be 'activists', but you fail to understand the opposite - the justices whose narrow interpretations ignore the constitution's instructions not to be so narrow. There are places the constitution *directs* a broader interpretation of the rights of the people - but lacking black and white words, the activists on your side ignore the constitution's instructions and its 'spirit' in chooseing the narrow interpretations.
You benefit from the great Justices who have used interpretations that give you more freedoms, even while you happily will deny others rights, to say you're 'tough' on it.
Is our society better off with the Court saying separate but legal is not allowed, that you have the right to birth control, that gay sex cannot be criminalized (as of 2003)?
I suspect you wanting to race to your straw man and say 'who cares if society benefits, the law is what matters'.
Are you going to deny that the constitution in its brief guidance has only one black and white interpretation for every one of millions of speciic issues that arise?
That's clearly not the case. Whichever side you choose, you are making a *choice* to pick one interpretation or another that says more about your ideology thatn the cosntitution.
Some people like specifc rules, and they are the ones more likely to want to claim the constitution is such a black and white document - however much they have to ignore its actual words to do so. The simple fact is IMO that you have a weakness that leads you to misinterpret the constitution and agree with rulings bad for the people of the nation.
We want Justices who work within the consitution and subvert theit own moral views to it - but we want justices who *have* a moral sense over ones like you who lack one.
You just defended the notion of executing an innocent man in defense of putting process ahead of justice - not some constitutional principle, but simply the bureacratic 'convenience' of the courts to limit appeals - and you did not show any concern to want to look closely at the constitution and the law for the purpose of preventing the murder of an innocent person, as a moral person would, but you rather 'pride' yourself on coldly accepting the injustice, *pretending* you were defending the constitution.
Lower level judges can apply the existing precedents and the simple interpretations. Supreme Court justices need a broader sense of the larger constitutional principles.
Our freedoms rely on their moral judgement in interpreting the consittution, not their indifference to the well-being of the American people as they interpret the document.
This is where the great quaslity of an Earl Warren who dedicates himself to reduce injustice in the country, following not violating the constitution, recognizing the better interpretation of that document that obviously said nothing specific about whether the state could have segregated schools. The inconvenience the court caused by ordering the bussing of children to achieve integration was very unpopular - and it was right. People like you would happily not pursue such better interpretations, priding yourselves on being 'tough' enough to look at the injustice done to the blacks and think that you were somehow defending a good principle by 'happily' not being concerned with their suffering so you could take the simple, narrow interpretation and claim it's the only right one.
IMO, you have to choose between two bad choices to defend your position - you either are consistent and apply your ideology to cases such as the ones I named, and defend denying rights now long recognizaed by our laws and popular; or you can agree with the rulings I mentioned which are in contradiction to your stated position as you become guilty of hypcrisy, jumping on the bandwagon with the 'popular' decisions of old that required less narrow interpretations, in violation of the standard you say you support.
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