Sermon of the day

Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly. Nobody — remember this — neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, ‘Now, let’s create a really oppressive and evil society.’ Hitler said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order.’ And Lenin said, ‘Let’s take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world.’
“In short, it is your responsibility, men and women of the class of 2010, not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person. Then, when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction.”

Excerpted from Justice Antonin Scalia’s commencement address at Langley High School, in Virginia, where his granddaughter was graduating in June of 2010. http://nypost.com/2010/06/20/advice-for-a-new-grad/


headsup Instapundit 

two comments:
One, this is consistent with natural law theory. Too often people just say "it's my conscience" but forget that some people don't have a conscience, or are influenced by society and those around them to be blind to what is right and wrong. (Slavery was an example, as were the Jim Crow laws).

Two: Comment by GHReynolds in USATODAY
 on how Scalia opposed the courts making laws.

The virtue of a democratic system with a First Amendment is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly. That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the Court's criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal Court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter-majoritarian preferences of the society's law-trained elite) into our Basic Law."