How Antonin Scalia's death was greeted by those opposed to his anti-abortion stance
Scalia was known for his opposition to abortion rights over his 30-year Supreme Court career
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Your support makes all the difference.Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice who was found dead at his ranch in Texas on Saturday, spent nearly 30 years taking a hard-line conservative stance on human rights issues.
Scalia's attitudes grew increasingly reactionary as he aged. When rejecting affirmative action policies intended to create racial parity in admissions to the University of Texas, he said that African Americans came from "lesser schools" and should go to "less-advanced", "slower-track" universities.
His attitude towards the LGBT community was consistently hostile, and he openly discussed his "moral disapproval of homosexual conduct" comparing it to "reprehensible conduct" such as "murder or cruelty to animals."
And as with any political figure, his death has provided an opportunity to debate the legacy he has left to the American people. And one of the most damning indictments of Scalia which has emerged so far is this single tweet by @JusticeBlaine which has been shared thousands of times:
Scalia was known for issuing statements expressing his minority opinion whenever he was overcome by a liberal voting majority and was happy to reiterate his opposition to gay marriage or affirmative action for African-Americans.
He was a "textualist" who took the views of the "Framers" of the American Constitution as absolute gospel. He also argued it was "egotistic" for the court to overturn the public's "freedom to govern themselves", implying that it was "unconstitutional" for the court to even make a ruling on gay marriage.
But he repeatedly defied public opinion when seeking to deconstruct Obamacare, remove limits on political campaign spending by big businesses, or put women's bodies and their health and security up for debate.
Scalia spent half a lifetime battling the seminal ruling in Roe v. Wade that women have the right to an abortion. In one dissenting opinion, he wrote of his "shudder of revulsion" at the "horrible", "visibly brutal" process of abortion, making clear a personal stake in the issue that went far beyond the parameters of the American Constitution.
Scalia's view that the Constitution cannot be used to make gay marriage legal enraged many commentators who were angered by his attempts to use it to make abortion illegal.
His death means the nine-person panel is split four apiece in terms of liberal and conservative voices and Republican Senators are expected to work hard to block any socially progressive replacement proposed by Barack Obama.
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