While presenting a speech to promote his book “Reading Law” at the Princeton University, Scalia apparently lost his cool when a gay student asked him why he equates laws banning murder and bestiality with laws banning sodomy. Scalia retorted “It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,' … If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”
The incident gives a clear indication about Scalia's possible stand in the upcoming review of the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act before the Supreme Court. The federal DOMA defines “marriage” valid only when it is a union between a man and a woman. The Supreme Court has very recently agreed to hear the challenges against DOMA from two cases.
While speaking on his book, which deals with the interpretation of statutes and decisions, Scalia said that proper interpretation of the law requires seeing the words in context of the meanings associated to them at the time a statute or decision is authored.
He also challenged the notion of the U.S. Constitution being a “living document,” and said that people who try to portray the U.S. Constitution as flexible are actually people who want to make policy permanent. Describing the U.S. Constitution, Scalia said, “It isn't a living document … It's dead, dead, dead, dead.”
