"A Call For Justice..."

I've previously referred to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as the face and voice of evil and irrational homophobia.  And I've held that position not because of what I say, but because of the bile and venomous hate speech that he spews so carelessly and freely that it's impossible to draw any other conclusion.  Friday, at Huffington Post, Michael Russnow made a compelling argument for why Scalia should be disqualified from hearing the upcoming DOMA and Proposition 8 appeals now before the court.

Scalia's Gay Stance Is Unacceptable: Recusal From Supreme Court Deliberations on DOMA and California Proposition 8 Is Called For

12/14/2012

The furor over Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's prejudicial stance against gay and lesbian Americans should not go away and ought to cause the Chief Justice and his court colleagues to insist that he, at the very least, recuse himself from the upcoming cases regarding the Defense of Marriage Act and the overturning of California's Proposition 8.

This is not just a question of a political point of view, which, depending on whether a justice leans right or left, often determines his or her vote on a particular case. Rather, this is a Supreme Court justice who, on numerous occasions, has aired his prejudices against the personal choices of human souls in the country he has sworn to protect as a distinguished jurist. How can he uphold his oath to serve when he has a personally vested interest in the case?

In his dissent in a 1996 Supreme Court decision overturning a voter-approved, anti-gay referendum in Colorado, Scalia wrote in support of the voter majority, "I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible -- murder, for example, or polygamy or cruelty to animals -- and could exhibit even 'animus' toward such conduct."

And in 2003, after the Supreme Court negated a law in Texas that had criminalized same-sex "sodomy," Scalia wrote in dissent, "The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are 'immoral and unacceptable' -- the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality and obscenity."

Justice Scalia's bias clearly hampers his judgment to deliver a balanced view of what should be acceptable or not under our Constitution. Defending his stance at Princeton last week, using the legal argument "reduction to the absurd" in a condescending response to student Duncan Hosie, he said, "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?" He insists he does not equate the two, but even talking about it in this manner, can he be taken seriously?

Read more here on Huffington Post

Michael Russnow's website is www.ramproductionsinternational.com.