The Deacon's Bench
That was Antonin Scalia’s message to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh on Saturday. The Supreme Court Justice spoke at an event marking the school’s 100th anniversary.
From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:
Scalia’s 20-minute address to about 1,200 people in the A.J. Palumbo Center, Uptown, included a defense of religion in the public life and of an approach to constitutional law that he helped pull into the mainstream of legal thought.
“Our educational establishment these days, while so tolerant of and even insistent upon diversity in all other aspects of life seems bent on eliminating diversity of moral judgment — particularly moral judgment based on religious views,” Scalia said.
As examples, he cited attempts to sue a religious university in Washington, D.C., for offering only same-sex dorms and other attempts by a law school association to bar schools that discriminate against homosexuals.
“I hope this place will not yield — as some Catholic institutions have — to this politically correct insistence upon suppression of moral judgment, to this distorted view of what diversity in America means,” Scalia said.
Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution, which holds that the meaning of the document’s words doesn’t change over time, has shifted the country’s legal landscape during his quarter-century on the court. During a panel discussion after his speech, he defended that approach against those who say his approach is too ideological or rigid.
“The Constitution is not an empty bottle. It says some things and doesn’t say others. … What is a moderate interpretation of the Constitution? Halfway between what it really says and what you want it to say?” Scalia said.
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