Anton Scalia Beheaded

If you have never visited Eye of the Tiber, you have missed a treat.  It does irreverent spoofs.  I know of at least one Facebook post from the site that was removed, presumably because people took it seriously.

On Inauguration day, the blog announced "Scalia Beheaded For Wearing Thomas More Hat To Inauguration."  It is great fun and do look at the picture.

I have always thought satire to be a conservative genre: leftists are too much black and white ideologues to pull it off.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are grounded in that foundation of all humor: the biblical belief that we all have feet made of clay.

Some of Anton Scalia critics have been anything but civil in their criticism of his Windsor dissent.  Perhaps they would react to the Eye of the Tiber report not as a spoof, but as welcome news and be disappointed that it were not true.

Justice Kennedy may have set the rhetorical stage for their intemperance.  Elizabeth Scalia writes
"It was easy to miss but on June 30 the New York Post carried brief editorial remarks by Michael Goodwin that read:

Count me among those cheering the Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage. At least I was cheering until I read the part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion where he claims the law he struck down was motivated by hate . . .[that] the law inflicts an “injury and indignity” on gay Americans and reflected a “bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” By extension of that logic, those who still oppose same-sex marriage are bigots."

The justice's critics are quick to launch ad hominem attacks rather than allow that some may differ in their judgements from the critics' exclusive mindset.  Elizabeth points to Kennedy for "Kennedy’s opinion makes it clear that the days of defending the freedom of others to think and speak outside of the ever-narrowing corridors of what is permissible are numbered; the line of delineation he sketches out is stark, bare, and singular: there will be one (correct) thought or there will be Bad People" and thus Anton Scalia is a Bad Person.

To attack someone who disagrees with you as a bad person is to kill the basis for democracy.