When a public figure we loathe dies, we’re expected to observe a certain level of decorum. Here’s why that’s wrong
Originally posted February 18, 2016 on Salon
Like many people, I found out about the death of Antonin Scalia through social media, a Facebook chat to be specific. “DUDE! Scalia may be dead,” my friend messaged me.” After a few minutes of silence, my friend returned, in all caps, once again, to proclaim, “HE’S DEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
While Scalia’s unexpected death provoked a pseudo-constitutional crisis among the right wing, it provoked an existential crisis in me. I felt simultaneously happy, relieved, hopeful and guilty. He’s someone’s father! Someone’s husband! RBG’s bestie and opera partner! Even worse than what I felt was what I wanted to do! “OMG!” I typed to my friend. “Would a listicle of Scalia’s Worst Quotes be the worst?” Ironically enough, my friend’s verdict was Scalian; swift, punishing and punctuated with hyperbole and exclamation points: “NO! YOU MUST DO IT!” F&*( DECORUM!”
A woman of checks and balances, I sought counsel from other sources via other means of communication. I skyped an editor to ask for her ruling on the issue. Her judgment was Kennedyian and moderate: She urged me to wait 24 hours, reminding me that “dancing on people’s grave [was] not a good look.” When I texted another friend, a journalist, he concurred with the editor, writing, “I wouldn’t celebrate it.”
The majority, it seemed, had ruled. It would be in poor taste and bad judgment, an ethical breach, to openly rejoice about Scalia’s death.
I had no grounds for appeal. The decision was final… or so it seemed.
But then, I felt a flickering of hope, as I saw a flickering of light from my cellphone. With bated breath, I watched as dots of i-message judgment popped up on my screen. The journalist, it seemed, hadn’t finished his ruling: He thought I could make the argument that his death may have “saved the planet” with the court now unlikely to strike down Obama’s far-reaching emissions plan. “He was a bigot who made millions of people suffer.” With this Breyersian analysis, my friend granted my piece, which I had planned to kill, a last-minute reprieve.
I decided I’d “nudge,” if not totally violate, decorum. I compiled some of the late justice’s most “memorable quotes.” I can’t say I’m proud of my word choice. The cop-out-est of adjectives, “memorable” allowed me a convenient vagueness. But, in all fairness, Scalia’s equal opportunity bigotry made it hard to come up with a headline-length title that did him any justice: “Scalia’s most homophobic and/or sexist and/or racist and/or savage decisions, quotes or off-the-cuff statements” is a mouthful.
The guilt I felt over turning Scalia’s death into shareable content started to dissipate as I sorted through the bottomless pit of sexism, homophobia and racism that was his legacy. His cruel and draconian incarceration opinions, which had caused so much suffering, now offered me comfort, solace, conviction and a sense of righteousness.
But what really emboldened me was his near fetish for death and the death penalty. Not only did Scalia defend capital punishment for youth and people with mental disabilities, he also has famously said, out loud, that it wasn’t unconstitutional to execute the innocent as long as they had a fair trial: “[t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”
Why should Scalia, who was so brazen about his disregard for human life, even innocent life, deserve respectful or solemn commemoration in the public sphere?
Scalia wasn’t merely defending the death penalty in theory as an acceptable and appropriate punishment for guilty people; he was defending it for the innocent if it came to that. And, as one of the nine people on the Supreme Court, his ideas contributed and buttressed the state-sanctioned murder of innocent people.
Surely, whatever deficit of empathy I revealed paled in comparison to Scalia’s chasm of compassion. If he could sleep soundly with the deaths of innocents on his mind, who was I to feel guilty about a death I had nothing to do with. It seemed wrong. And also, profoundly un-Scalia-like. And that was when it occurred to me: What better way to honor the late justice than by asking #WWSD? What would Scalia do? The answer was obvious: He’d react to the loss of human life with heartlessness, cruelty and adherence to his own conviction.
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