I think Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia should stick to law and refrain from making theological pronouncements.
Last Saturday while speaking at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metairie, Louisiana, this “puffed up” justice (to use a New Testament phrase to describe him) said that God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.
“God has been very good to us. That we won the revolution was extraordinary. The Battle of Midway was extraordinary. I think one of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor. Unlike the other countries of the world that do not even invoke his name we do him honor.”
Some commentators were rightly disturbed by the implications for church/state relations in Scalia’s remark, but I was much more aghast at the image of God he articulated.
For Scalia God is apparently a divine judge who hands out curses and blessings according to how people behave. Be good and you get divine kindness. Be bad and you get divine wrath.
That’s the image of God you find in the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses tells his people if they obey God when they go into the land God will bless them, but if they disobey God they will be cursed.
Thank God (no pun intended) the Book of Job debunks that kind of theology. In the story Job is a good man who lives a righteous life and still gets the shaft by life. His suffering is completely undeserved.
In fact, the mythical wager God and Satan make at the beginning of the book has Satan affirming the Deuteronomic ethic of blessings and curses and God rejecting it.
Maybe Scalia quit reading the Bible after he finished Deuteronomy and never got to the Book of Job, or ever took the time to read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People.
It is truly stunning that a Supreme Court Justice would say such a thing to high school kids who have probably already learned from the ambiguities of life that such silly theology doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. But there’s more.
Recently Scalia agreed with “those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.”
Apparently he believes black students “deserve” a better chance of succeeding by attending schools where they are not, in his words, “pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”
But none of this should surprise us. After all, Scalia is a “constitutional fundamentalist” who believes he can determine the “original intent” of the founders.
That’s the way Christian fundamentalists approach the Bible. They insist they know the “original intent” of the biblical writers. Scalia probably agrees with them on that as well, what with the confidence he has in his own powers of “divination.”
Given the state of the nation where our government cannot function and the presidential race is dominated by Republican candidates whose views can only be described as uniformed, ignorant, racist, incendiary, or absurd, the last thing we need is a Supreme Court Justice undermining confidence in the high court’s ability to reason fairly and justly, or perhaps to reason at all.
I said at the beginning that Scalia should stick to law and refrain from making theological pronouncements.
But that may not be enough. Better yet might be for him to resign before he does further damage to his already tarnished legal legacy and takes the Court down with him.
linnposts.com 