A follow-up to my previous post (and to Matt’s and Peter Robinson’s): I’ve just listened to all five segments of Peter Robinson’s interview with Justice Scalia, and I found literally nothing in the entire series that remotely supports Andrew Cohen’s string of claims that Scalia was invoking religious rhetoric and displaying religious fervor. Cohen apparently is building his entire case on Scalia’s reference to the “temptation” that judges have to (as Robinson quoted Scalia) “play king”—a temptation that Scalia said the Court first yielded to in Dred Scott and “has been around a long time.” There is nothing in Scalia’s discussion of temptation that is religious in nature. And there is nothing in his mild manner that warrants Cohen’s claim that he “responded [to one question] with all the drama of a television preacher,” that he responded to another with “more sermon than statement,” and that the series revealed “how deeply Justice Scalia’s legal philosophies and tactics are dictated by his religious fervor.” Cohen is just making it up.

Indeed, Scalia specifically states, “There’s no such thing as a Catholic interpretation of a text.”