Even before the inevitable encomiums about Antonin Scalia poured in after his death, it was already bruited about that he was a fiercely smart man—even if misguided in his originalism and conservatism. But how smart can a man be if he disses science? Can he be both smart and ignorant?

For surely Scalia wasn’t “ignorant” in the sense of not knowing that science was out there, and that there was a consensus about stuff like, say, evolution.

Remember, if you will, that Scalia, along with William Rehnquist, were the only dissenters in the famous case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), in which the Court overturned a lower-court ruling that a Louisiana law—the “Balanced Treatment Act” mandating the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public schools—was legal. That was the case in which the three-pronged Lemon Test convinced the other seven judges that such a law did not have a secular purpose and that it advanced a particular religion and fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. You can read Scalia and Rehnquist’s dissent here. You’ll see that they denied that the Act had a religious purpose, but maintained that it fostered academic freedom construed as “students’ freedom from indoctrination.”  Scalia and Rehnquist lost, but science won.

One of Scalia’s clerks was Bruce Hay, now a professor at Harvard Law School, though he looks about 18 years old. In a February 27 posting on Salon, Hay has severely indicted his former mentor in a piece called “I thought I could reason with Antonin Scalia: a more naive young fool never drew breath.” Hay minces no words:

Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.

His own weapon was the poison-barbed word, and the battleground was what he once labeled the Kulturkampf, the culture war. The enemy took many forms. Women’s rights. Racial justice. Economic equality. Environmental protection. The “homosexual agenda,” as he called it. Intellectuals and universities. The questioning of authority and privilege. Ambiguity. Foreignness. Social change. Climate research. The modern world, in all its beauty and complexity and fragility.

. . . When I applied for a clerkship at the Court, my hero Justice Brennan quickly filled all his positions, so Scalia became my first choice. He offered me a job and I thought I’d won the lottery. I knew we differed politically, but he prized reason and I would help him be reasonable. A more naive young fool never drew breath.

. . . What I took for the pursuit of reason in those chambers was in fact the manufacture of verbal munitions, to be deployed against civilian populations. From the comfort of our leather chairs, we never saw the victims.

In other words, Scalia was a master of confirmation bias.

At this point in his piece, Hay digresses severely, discussing a brilliant transgender woman, Mischa Haider, who left physics after getting her doctorate at Harvard because she was hounded, shamed, and humiliated by others for her change of gender. Such discrimination is detestable, and of course stems largely from ignorance and lack of empathy. But Hay decides to pin it on Scalia and his dislike of science:

[Haider] could not live with herself, she tells me, if she did not devote her talents to helping the many trans women whose lives are decimated by the bigotry and ignorance of those around them. Bigotry and ignorance inflamed by demagogues like Antonin Scalia, whose toxic rhetoric has done so much to incite and legitimate fear of gender nonconformity and elevate it to the level of constitutional principle. She is resolved to become a trans rights activist.

So that is Antonin Scalia’s contribution to physics.

I certainly agree that Scalia did nothing to foster gender equality or transgender acceptance (but did any cases of the latter ever come before him as Justice?). Still, that is an issue separate from his retrograde views of science. Hay’s article thus is two disparate articles: one on Scalia’s anti-science views, and the other on the opprobrium received by transgender people. The connection between the issues is tenuous: only neurons in the brain of a man whom Hay calls “erudite and frighteningly smart”. But how smart could Scalia really have been to be so strongly anti-science—to the point of denying that the Balanced Treatment Act had anything to do with religion? He may have been smart, but he was blinkered by his Catholicism.

As for Scalia’s lack of empathy for the oppressed, that too goes with being so conservative. Nevertheless, Scalia’s views on both science and gender tell us why Obama needs to replace him immediately with a more enlightened Justice.

h/t: Stephen S.