Politics has always been a contact sport, and should the era now ebb where the Supreme Court chose to play that game (in which sense doesn’t loom large), the future of individual rights looks to stay compromised.
Anticipations that an Italian-American with Antonin Scalia’s resumé would do honor to his office were nearly consensual—and warranted—as was his confirmation. That was then. His passing is no time for joy.
But it’s ironic that the Court—despite Justice Scalia’s adjudications to the contrary (“an island entire unto himself” in a sea of neo-liberalism) politicized some issues dear to conservatives and liberals alike so irreparably that they self-righteously usurped the people’s right to fix them without judicial tampering. And it’s paradoxical that in tribute to his hallmark career, the two instances where his opinions showed at once a tendency to be more doctrinaire than realistic and then again more dreamer than pragmatic, were resurrected out of mothballs where they should’ve remained; albeit they revealed something of His Honor that interprets as a flaw in the exalted levels through which he braved his private gauntlet: it’s called a heart.
The world hardly resembles one where “a man passing a piece of himself” out of it wouldn’t be a source of glee. Silence would behoove us—while the bell tolls not only for Antonin Scalia, but for each and every one of us.
— Noe Serna, Lima
