He continued:
“God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools, and he has not been disappointed.”
In his classic 1997 essay explaining textualism as the proper approach to the Constitution, Justice Scalia wrote these words:
“The American people have been converted to belief in The Living Constitution, a ‘morphing” document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean. And with that conversion has inevitably come the new phenomenon of electing and confirming federal judges, at all levels, on the basis of their views concerning a whole series of proposals for constitutional evolution. If the courts are free to write the Constitution anew, they will, by God, write it the way the majority wants; the appointment and confirmation process will see to that. This, of course, is the end of the Bill of Rights, whose meaning will be committed to the very body it was meant to protect against: the majority. By trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs to be done from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all.”
I fear that Justice Scalia was absolutely right in that analysis. We must pray that he was wrong.
This article originally appeared here.
