The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

I think it's safe to say, just a year and a half into his tenure, Donald Trump is the worst, most embarrassing president in U.S. history. Amid all his mistakes, lies, and public embarrassments, Trump and his supporters have consistently been able to point toward one accomplishment: the Supreme Court. After the passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, then President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland. Congressional Republicans blocked this move, and after Donald Trump was inaugurated, he and Congressional Republicans successfully moved conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement, it appears as if Donald Trump may very well be able to get another conservative judge onto the highest court in the land. Following the Gorsuch vote and now the Kennedy announcement, I've heard seemingly countless Republican talking heads saying, "You see how great President Trump is? He's done more in h...

As most of the world has heard by now, former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was pronounced dead yesterday at 79-years-old. He was seen by many Republicans as the bedrock of the Supreme Court and of conservatism. Democrats, meanwhile, tended to see him as the largest obstacle in their fight for progression. While it was inevitable, especially in an election year, that Scalia's departure from SCOTUS would be talked about ad nauseam shortly after his death (and for days, weeks, and months to come), I was highly disappointed, to the point of embarrassment, by some fellow progressives' comments regarding the matter. Some were celebrating, exerting jubilation about the news, saying, "Today's a great day!" Look, I know many of us despised Justice Scalia with just about every fiber of our being, but even so, this was a human being, a person who had friends and family he left behind, and we should be much classier than to celebrate this tragic news.

Reverend Paul Scalia - son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia - appears to be just as anti-gay as his old man. In fact, he may have one-upped the man voted less likable than Oscar the Grouch, as it appears the reverend doesn't even believe that homosexuality exists. In a 2012 article he wrote for Humanism: Issues in Family, Culture & Science , Paul Scalia said the following: "In short, we should not predicate 'homosexual' of any person. That does a disservice to the dignity of the human person by collapsing personhood into sexual inclinations. Indeed, the Church is still trying to find the right vocabulary to speak about this modern phenomenon ... Either our sexuality is oriented in a certain direction (i.e. toward the one-flesh union of marriage), or it is not. We cannot speak of more than one sexual 'orientation' any more than we can think of the sun rising in more than one place (i.e. the orient)." That was a lovely comparison made by Sca...