Most of the media has already jumped to the issue of what Obama will do (in terms of nominating another supreme court justice) but I want to stay focused just a bit longer on Antonin Scalia. I’ll admit, as I listened to the news report about his death, I was pleased. I grinned inside while a part of me was quite aware that it isn’t appropriate to be glad about a death. But I was. Antonin Scalia epitomized everything that’s wrong with the anti-LGBTQ conservatives, and his death can only be good for progressive causes now and in the future.

TowleRoad has a post, “Remembering Antonin Scalia: His 7 Most Hateful and Homophobic Remarks.” This one really sticks with me:

“[T]o allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”

This is why I’m so happy he’s dead. For being a brilliant jurist, he didn’t understand– or chose not to understand what was actually at stake with same-sex marriage.

The US Consitution is clear, and the majority justices found that to stop a same-sex couple from the right to marry is blatent discrimination. But Scalia doesn’t grasp that. For him, it is about “policy setting.” For as much as Scalia is heralded as an originalist, he was an activist judge of the worst kind. There is no notion of ” no social transformation without representation.”

Scalia may not have been corrupt, but his ideology was a corrupt notion of democracy where money is power and power rules.