For Leftists, It’s Open Season On Christians

If you doubt that Christians are fair game for ridicule by the cultural left, take a look at the hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Jeffrey Tayler for Salon.

I can’t decide which is worse, the title or the subtitle. The title: “Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind.” The subtitle: “The justice claims to be an originalist, but his real loyalty is to religion and a phony man in the sky.”

The writer is trying to be cute, but don’t conclude that any part of his thesis is intended to be tongue-in-cheek. He opens by telling us that “faith-derangement syndrome” has now infected the Supreme Court as it has the executive branch.

He writes: “Sufferers of faith-derangement syndrome (FDS) exhibit the following symptoms: unshakable belief in the veracity of manifest absurdities detailed in ancient texts regarding the origins of the cosmos and life on earth; a determination to disseminate said absurdities in educational institutions and via the media; a propensity to enjoin and even enforce (at times using violence) obedience to regulations stipulated in ancient texts, regardless of their suitability for contemporary circumstances; the conviction that an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient authority (commonly referred to as ‘God’) directs the course of human and natural events, is vulnerable to propitiation and blandishments, and monitors individual human behavior, including thought processes, with an especially prurient interest in sexual activity.”

Tayler is particularly exercised by his assumption that Scalia rejects Tayler’s sainted opinions on both “anthropogenic global warming” and “the fact of evolution — the foundation of modern biology — in favor of the opening chapter of a compendium of cockamamie fables concocted by obscure humans in a particularly dark age, evidence that his faculty of reason has suffered the debilitating impairment associated with acute FDS.” Tayler continues, “He therefore cannot be relied upon to adjudicate without prejudice and should be removed from the bench henceforth.”

Sorry for the extensive quotes, but I have to assume you’d think I were exaggerating if I paraphrased this harangue.

What apparently got Tayler’s attention was an interview of Scalia a few years ago by Jennifer Senior, a contributing editor for New York magazine. Tayler was disgusted that Scalia accepts the Catholic teaching about homosexuality and incredulous at his admission that he believes in heaven and hell and that the devil is “a real person.”

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