Charles Pierce: Remember: Scalia Was a Corporate Life Raft Who Hated Science

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35475-remember-scalia-was-a-corporate-life-raft-who-hated-science

He was reliably a goon on most human rights and criminal-justice issues. But Scalia's legacy as a corporate life raft is sadly unexamined. If you think that the Republican intransigence on this issue is strictly a matter of being against anything the president supports, or that it's strictly a matter of loony constitutional theorizing, you're missing half the picture. They're stalling because the people who write them the checks need a reliable Supreme Court so that they can make more money and write more checks. Scalia was someone they could count on. He also was extraordinarily strange in many ways.

Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.

It's not all about dick jokes. In a country founded by people as driven to explain the physical world around them as they were driven to reconceive the relationship of governments to the people, in a country dedicated to the empirical rules of evidence in conjunction with the rule of law, it's also about how we choose, as a self-governing people, to view the world.