This from Slate…

Scalia the Mullah: The justice’s misunderstanding of morality, and how it leads him astray in cases about homosexuality.

In a speech last week titled “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” Justice Antonin Scalia told the North Carolina Bar Association that the court has no place acting as a “judge moralist” in issues better left to the people. Since judges aren’t qualified—or constitutionally authorized—to set moral standards, he argued, the people should decide what’s morally acceptable.

…and so on.   Nathanial Frank pegs it at the end of this piece, thusly:

Morality is not just whatever views a majority has long held, and it’s not simply what you learned on your mother’s knee or whatever it says in your faith’s scripture. Moral belief is a grounded judgment about what harms or helps living things.

(emphasis mine)   That.   Which leads to this:   Scalia, like a lot of homophobes, does not have a misunderstanding about morality; he has an assortment of smokescreens he hides his prejudices behind, that he calls morality.

They do that in the kook pews and that is why their moral judgements seem so haphazard and contradictory: They’re not making moral judgements, they’re jerking their knees, dancing from one thing to another to whatever tune their prejudices call.

Answer: Their mouth is moving.   This, from Joe. My. God…

Yesterday we enjoyed the evisceration of anti-gay NC Sen. James Forrester at the hands of Michelangelo Signorile, who got rather incredulous at Forrester’s lack of HIV knowledge, especially considering that Forrester claims to be a Fellow with the esteemed American College of Preventive Medicine. As it turns out, THAT WAS A FUCKING LIE.

Pam Spaulding has the delicious dirt via contributor Scott Rose, who got this response from the ACPM:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. The quick answer to your questions is that Dr. Forrester is not, and never has been, a member of ACPM (much less a Fellow, which is our highest designation of membership). However, this is troubling to us, too, that he’s apparently claiming to be a Fellow of ACPM, and we would like to know where Dr. Forrester is making these proclamations so that we can approach him and demand that he cease falsely using ACPM credentials in his campaign or wherever else he’s using it. If you can point us to some places where he’s using those credentials, we’d be most appreciative. Many thanks.

This you may recall, is the Upstanding All-American Heterosexual Christian Pillar Of His Community…

…who   introduced the current anti same-sex marriage amendment in the North Carolina Senate, and whose rational for doing that was in part, his longstanding work as a physician and Fellow at the American College of Preventive Medicine dealing with the medical problems of homosexuals.

When all is said and done, the only problem I have with bigots who live in their own alternate reality is they can’t actually go live there, they have to keep inflicting their fantasy world on the rest of us in the reality based community.   That said, it is occasionally sweet to watch reality bite them in the ass from time to time.   I stopped waiting long ago, for any of them to learn anything from the experience.   I just bask in the schadenfreude.   Can you at least take that little tin North Carolina Flag lapel pin off your jacket while you’re looking your fellow senators in the face and lying through your teeth?   Try to be respectful of your state flag man.