Monday, December 23, 2019

Debunking a Meme about Scalia and Evolution

Late in the evening, my chores all done, I noodled around Facebook and found this on a Creation vs Evolution Public group:

Now Scalia was many things (chiefly a royalist who used "Originalism" when it suited and ignored it when it didn't) but he was not a dummy. (Others have said that he didn't really understand science, but who knows?)
It seems to me that the key to this meme is that the quote has no citation. Was it for real and what was the context?
Those words are from the "Edwards v Aguillard" case (Louisiana's 1990s attempt to mandate teaching Creationism.) In this quote, Scalia was summarizing what someone else believed. That's something judges do all the time without asserting what they themselves believed. When a judge says  "The defendant said he didn't do it" it doesn't mean the judge believes  "he didn't do it".

That's right: Scalia DID NOT SAY HE BELIEVED what is in that meme. He was just summarizing the argument of the losing side so he could explain his position (which was roughly that if the belief was sincere then it didn't matter if it was nonsense).

The big lesson in this s to be wary of unsourced quotes; you're likely to be repeating something false.
The small lesson in this is that if you want to debunk a quote, go to the source.

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