EDITORIAL: Scalia’s Foolishness

Two events in April threw light on a Christian's relation to the world. First, on April 9, came a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia to the Christian Legal Society chapter at Mississippi College School of Law. Scalia, a devout Roman Catholic, cited Saint Paul's advice to the Corinthians, that they be willing to be counted fools for Christ's sake. It is an old message: to be a Christian means holding values the world will count as foolishness.

"My hope," Scalia said, "is to impart to these who are here the courage to have their wisdom taken for stupidity; to have the courage to endure the contempt of the sophisticated world for these 'failings.' "

The reaction of some pundits and legal scholars revealed that at least their worlds are uncomprehending and scornful of a Christian world-view. Some criticized Scalia for imagining persecution. Others questioned Scalia's ability to judge objectively in religion cases before the court.

Scalia's critics were not only uncomprehending, they reinforced his point: Christians, who believe in a transcendent moral order and the power of God that raised Jesus from the dead, must be prepared for derision.

The second event, just one day later, was President Clinton's veto of the "partial birth" abortion bill (CT News, May 20, 1996, p. 74). Although the President has used the language of tragedy to describe abortion, and has claimed to want to make the procedure rare, he failed to cooperate with the Congress to restrict this one procedure, which makes abortion's violence most obvious and which so many Americans find repugnant.

Was the President knuckling under to special interest groups? to party honchos? to others in the White House? We may never know. But the President's complaint that the bill did not allow an appropriate exemption for health did not ring true. While Justice Scalia was being a fool for Christ's sake, was the President being a fool for political correctness?

Justice Scalia reminded his Mississippi audience of Sir Thomas More, King Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor who sacrificed not only his political career, but gave his life rather than compromise his Christian conscience. More, an articulate political philosopher and consummate politician, was unable to get his contemporaries to comprehend his staunch refusal to compromise.

What a fool, More's friends must have thought. More's God, we trust, thought otherwise. In our era of social upheaval, regardless of the way the world weighs us, may our God not find us plain fools but fools for Christ.