(Newser)
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Hot-button constitutional issues? No problem, says Justice Antonin Scalia—who supports the death penalty, opposes abortion, and believes in criminalizing gay sex. "The death penalty? Give me a break. It's easy," he said to a few hundred people gathered at the American Enterprise Institute. He described his abortion judgment as "absolutely easy," saying "nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion." As for "homosexual sodomy": "Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state."
Scalia described himself as a "textualist," meaning he reads the Constitution as he thinks the framers did, CBS News reports. He distinguished his ideas from those of an imaginary judge who likes reinterpreting the Constitution and saying, "'The Constitution means exactly what I think it ought to mean.' No kidding." As he has argued before, Scalia said people should try to change the law through lawmakers, not judges. But he conceded that "it is very difficult to adopt a constitutional amendment."
