Scalia’s a funny guy, as any fule kno. On Monday he was talking at Princeton (which is in Princeton, which is where I grew up, or at least where I spent the years from 0 to 17) and he explained about why same-sex sex is a no-no.
A gay student named Duncan Hosie got up and asked Scalia about his avid support for bans on “sodomy,” i.e. same-sex couples doing it, and Scalia answered with this:
“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”
Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.
That’s a reductio ad absurdum? To say that if we can’t have “moral feelings against homosexuality” then we also can’t have moral feelings against murder? Talk about random. He might as well say if we can’t have moral feelings against jelly babies we can’t have moral feelings against murder.
But maybe it’s witch-hunty of me to criticize what he said. Maybe I should email him and ask him what he meant, first.