Did you hear about the serious mistake Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia made at that
In a “Christian” nation at a gathering clearly designed and advertised as a religious assembly, Justice Scalia dared to express his strong personal religious beliefs out loud in public.
The Roman Catholic justice told the assembled Baptist law-school students that devout Christians are “destined to be regarded as fools in modern society” because they believe in the supernatural.
Borrowing the apostle Paul’s descriptive phrase, he said that all of us who believe in such things as the Resurrection, the virgin birth, and miracles must expect to be scorned as “fools for Christ’s sake.”
The scrambled eggs at that breakfast were not yet cold when Justice Scalia’s liberal detractors began to confess his sins.
That a Supreme Court justice would reveal his own convictions on “a sensitive topic such as religion” was, “out of the ordinary,” the Washington Post proclaimed.
Scalia’s imprudence was excoriated more directly by Barry
Lynn, who heads a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and
State. Evidently
Whatever happened to a Supreme Court justice’s First Amendment rights to free speech? And to free exercise of religion? Could it be that past Court rulings have eroded the judge’s own constitutional protections?
Jeffery L. Sheler of U.S. News says that “Scalia was echoing the thesis of Yale Prof. Stephen Carter that there is a long-standing tendency within the secular society to marginalize, ghettoize, and belittle religious belief.”
Carter says in his book The Culture of Disbelief, “We have pressed the religiously faithful to act as though their faith does not matter.”
If anybody doubts this, just review the media reaction to Justice Scalia’s prayer breakfast speech. When he was appointed to the Court, all of us knew he was a Christian. Now that he’s on the bench those who are paranoid about public expressions of religious faith want him to muzzle and submerge this part of himself and to pretend he’s not.