Scalia then laid out a philosophy in which democracy can never serve as a sufficient basis for governmental authority. “It is easy,” he asserted, “to see the hand of the Almighty behind rulers whose forebears, in the dim mists of history, were supposedly anointed by God, who at least obtained their thrones in awful and unpredictable battles whose outcome was determined by the Lord of Hosts, that is, the Lord of Armies. It is much more difficult to see the hand of God—or any higher moral authority—behind the fools and rogues (as the losers would have it) whom we ourselves elect to do our own will. How can their power to avenge—to vindicate the ‘public order’—be greater than our own?”
...The virtue of Scalia’s extremism is that it lays bare the messianic radicalism at the heart of the current assault on separation of church and state. This is not merely a constitutional or legal argument, though it is that too, but a far more fundamental attack on secularist and nonreligious humanist values. For the warriors of the religious Right, governmental power is not an end in itself but merely one more mechanism, along with institutions of education, communications, and finance, for advancing their values within society.
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