Lighten Up, Nino Baby

[x NYTimes]
June 29, 2003
Nino's Opéra Bouffe
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — Antonin Scalia fancies himself the intellectual of the Supreme Court, an aesthete who likes opera and wines, a bon vivant who loves poker and plays songs like "It's a Grand Old Flag" on the piano; a real man who hunts and reads Ducks Unlimited magazine; a Catholic father of nine who once told a prayer breakfast: "We are fools for Christ's sake. We must pray for the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world."

Like other conservatives, he enjoys acting besieged while belittling the other side. "Alas," he drily told the journalist Hanna Rosin, "being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear. Duresse oblige."

He's so Old School, he's Old Testament, misty over the era when military institutes did not have to accept women, when elite schools did not have to make special efforts with blacks, when a gay couple in their own bedroom could be clapped in irons, when women were packed off to Our Lady of Perpetual Abstinence Home for Unwed Mothers.

He relishes eternal principles, like helping a son of the establishment dispense with the messiness of a presidential vote count. (His wife met him at the door after Bush v. Gore with a chilled martini.)

He's an American archetype, or Archie type. Full of blustery rants against modernity and nostalgia for "the way Glenn Miller played, songs that made the hit parade . . . girls were girls and men were men." Antonin Scalia is Archie Bunker in a high-backed chair. Like Archie, Nino is the last one to realize that his intolerance is risibly out-of-date.

The court issued a bracing 6-to-3 decision declaring it illegitimate to punish people for who they are, and Justice Scalia fulminated in a last gasp of the old Pat Buchanan/Bill Bennett homophobic conservatism.

In his dissent to the decision striking down a Texas sodomy law and declaring that gays are "entitled to respect for their private lives," Justice Scalia raved that the court had "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" and predicted a "massive disruption of the current social order." (Has this man never seen a Rupert Everett movie?)

State laws could tumble, he huffed, barring masturbation. Next, Sister Scalia will tell us it makes you go blind. He also tut-tutted that laws against bestiality might fall away. (Maybe he should be warning fellow dissenter Clarence Thomas. Anita Hill told Congress he had been beastly to her by describing an X-rated film about bestiality.)

The stegosaurus Scalia roared that the court had "taken sides in the culture war." Conservatives shrieked the door was open to everything from lap dancing to gay marriage. (Note to the panicked right: Newsweek just reported married heterosexuals were strangers to sex. So, if you want gay couples to stop having sex, let them get married.)

Mr. Scalia has frothed about "Kulturkampf" since 1996, when he did an Archie screed on gays having "high disposable income" and "disproportionate political power." Sounds just like people at Bush fund-raisers. (One here Friday was headlined by the First Nephew, George P. Bush, to buck-rake for a group promoting conservative court nominees.)

Most Americans, even Republicans, have a more tolerant and happy vision of the country than Mr. Scalia and other nattering nabobs of negativism. Their jeremiads yearn for an airbrushed 50's America that never really existed. (The pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, which condemns homosexuality, proves that.) And the America they feared — everyone having orgies, getting stoned and burning the flag — never came to pass.

Nino is too blinded by his own bloviation to notice that Americans are not as censorious as he is. They like the complicated national mosaic — that Dick Cheney has a gay daughter, that Jeb Bush has a Latina wife, that Clarence Thomas has a white wife. Newt Gingrich can leave two wives for younger women and Bill (Virtues) Bennett can blow $8 million on slot machines. Even those who did not like Bill Clinton cringed at Ken Starr's giddy voyeurism.

Justice Scalia may play patriotic songs on the piano, but Justice Anthony Kennedy gave patriotism true meaning in time for the Fourth of July. His ruling eloquently reminded the country, "Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct."

In the immortal words of John Riggins, loosen up, Nino, baby.