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Scalia v. History
23 November 2004Jeff Sharlet: My colleague Kathryn Joyce, who posted the item below about Supreme Court Justice Scalia's imaginative ideas about church and state, has a dry sense of humor. I, meanwhile, am the type to belabor the obvious. Just in case anyone didn't get it: Either Scalia is off his rocker, or New York Newsday, which reported on his remarks, is pulling a prank. Newsday's Verena Dobnik writes that the Scalia told an orthodox Jewish synagogue that "official examples of the presence of faith go back to America's Founding Fathers," and that one such example is the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Did Dobnik think everyone would get the joke? A socialist named Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge in 1892; and as everyone who's read a paper in the last year or two should know, "under God" wasn't added until 1954. Which leaves us with the odd spectacle of Scalia -- an unquestionably smart fellow -- and Newsday -- a great paper -- playing Dumb and Dumber. But what's really dumb is Scalia's perversely ahistorical read of Holocaust history. "'Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America?'" Scalia asked the synagogue's congregation. "'I don't think so.'" Whenever I hear crap like this I think of a story a friend of mine told me about his shul, in liberal Northampton, Massachusetts. After listening to the rabbi deliver a Protestant sermon to the effect that any Jew who asked forgiveness before he died would have have his slate wiped clean by God, a cranky old man in the back stood and in thick, loud, Brooklynese, said, "What the hell are you talking about?" Justice Scalia, Newsday: Europe did not then and for the most part does not now enjoy separation of church and state. That's an American idea. An idea of the founders Scalia claims to revere. More importantly: The Jews of Europe were not killed by secularists. They were killed, for the most part, by men and women who called themselves Christians. That certainly doesn't make all Christians guilty for the Holocaust (nor for the centuries of massacres that preceded it), but statements such as Scalia's are simply wrong. Newsday had a responsibility to note Scalia's errors.
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