Carrying the Sword
"Separation of Church and State" is such a tired old platitude, so 1780s. "Carrying the sword in place of the Lord" just has such a nice modern, authoritarian, patriarchal ring to it:
In a 1989 ruling, [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia cast the deciding vote in Stanford v. Kentucky, concluding that the execution of a 16-year-old boy was not cruel and unusual punishment. At the forum [on the death penalty at the University of Chicago on 25 January 2002], Scalia claimed that the state had the moral authority to act "in place of the Lord in carrying the sword."
[From "Activists Take On Justice Scalia", by Julien Ball, The New Abolitionist, February 2002, brought to my attention by an article at TalkLeft.]
Posted on March 15, 2005 at 14.46 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.