The Nine [110]
But the right had no monopoly on partisan vitriol aimed at the justices. The left, too, had its favored target. To be sure, Thomas was still widely despised, because of Anita Hill and his voting record on the Court; but because Thomas generally limited his public appearances to friendly audiences, he was rarely visible to his enemies. It was Scalia—brazen, outspoken, gleefully confrontational—who was the conservative whom liberals loved to hate.
The battle with his critics that meant the most to Scalia himself had a peculiar origin. In 1990, Byron White wearied of his assignment as the justice supervising the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Based in New Orleans, the Fifth Circuit covers the part of the South where many of the nation’s executions are scheduled. The resulting cases produce many emergency applications to the Court, and the circuit justice must administer the flow of paper to his colleagues; White no longer wanted the responsibility for keeping track of it. The job of circuit justice also includes making regular trips to the area for conferences that generally also include parties, receptions, and other social occasions. Once Scalia took up his responsibilities in the Fifth Circuit, some lawyers and judges decided to invite him to enjoy the local sport, hunting.
Scalia made an unlikely hunter. He was born in Trenton, in 1936, and raised in Elmhurst, Queens, as the only child in a thoroughly urban (and urbane) family. His father, a translator and a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College, was hardly one for outings in the woods. “My father was a much more scholarly and intellectual person than I am,” Scalia once said, as recounted by Margaret Talbot. “He always had a book in front of his face.” Scalia received a traditional Catholic school education, with four years of Latin and three years of Greek. He attended Georgetown University, excelled on the debate team, and graduated first in his class. His valedictorian address offered hints of both his literary style and his interests. “Our days were spent in hunting; but our prey was more elusive and more valuable than any forest deer or mountain bear or prairie buffalo,” he said. “For we were seekers of the truth.” He went on to Harvard Law School, where he made law review, and then, after a brief stop at a law firm in Cleveland, served on the faculties of several leading law schools. He spent the seventies and eighties shuttling between academia and increasingly important jobs in the Justice Department of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Along the way, he and his wife, Maureen, had nine children, one of whom became a priest.
It would be a mistake, however, to regard Scalia as just a bookish man. He was on the rifle team in high school (commuting on the New York subway with a .22 carbine), played the piano, sang in school shows, and fought for his intellectual beliefs with a nearly physical intensity. To his father, unchanging certainty about religion or politics, no matter what the current intellectual fad, was a sign of strength, not weakness. Scalia was only too happy to embrace the verities of Catholic doctrine and reject the moral relativism of the modern world. “For the son of God to be born of a virgin? I mean, really. To believe that he rose from the dead and bodily ascended into heaven. How utterly ridiculous,” Scalia said at a meeting of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization. “God assumed from the beginning that the wise of the world would view Christians as fools, and he has not been disappointed.”
Scalia relished the skepticism of critics. “Be fools for Christ,” he implored his fellow believers. “Have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.” Scalia’s mindset, of course, was precisely