If a man Antonin Scalia's age were caught in bed with a teenage minor he would find himself in court facing statutory rape charges.
He could try to argue that the girl in question was very mature for her age — that she was in some way an exception to the general rules, mores and laws distinguishing between minors and adults. He could even try to argue that the girl in question was, essentially, acting like an adult, and because she was acting like an adult he ought to be tried as though he she were one.
These arguments won't work, however. Every statutory rapist tries to make the same case, to deny that minors and adults are, and ought to be, considered in different categories under the law.
So it's good to see the Supreme Court of the United States finally reject the perverse logic of the statutory rapist in its 5-4 ruling yesterday that, as Charles Lane reports in The Washington Post, "it is unconstitutional to sentence anyone to death for a crime he or she committed while younger than 18."
The dissenting opinion was written by Justice Scalia, whose opinion on the competency of minors, William Saletan notes in Slate is rather elastic, if not bipolar.
Scalia is, famously, a practicing Roman Catholic. Yet here he finds himself unambiguously on the opposite side of unambiguous church teaching.
So, can we expect the kind of media circus we saw last year regarding John Kerry's weekly attendance at mass? This is, after all, a prominent public official, who is Catholic, taking a very public stance in direct opposition to church teaching. Will publicity hungry bishops elbow their way to the microphone to declare that they will refuse Scalia communion in their parishes? Will cable news networks follow the justice to church each week?
Don't bet on it. That would only happen if the bishops and reporters so allegedly concerned with Kerry's Catholicism last year had been acting honestly out of principle, and not just out of partisan hackery.
In any case, I don't want to see a repeat of last year's foolishness. Supreme Court justices, like United States senators, have a duty to uphold the Constitution, even when it varies from official Church doctrine. Scalia's dissenting opinion yesterday was wrong not because he was being a bad Catholic, but because he was being a bad jurist.
And you probably shouldn't let him anywhere near your teenage daughters, either.
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