At the beginning of the 1939 epic film, Gone With The Wind, scrolling text introduces the story as a time when “cavaliers and cotton fields” made up the Old South, where gallantry took its last bow among the “knights and their ladies fair,” as well as “master and slave.” It was “a civilization, gone with the wind.”

As I watched that opening to the Oscar-winning film recently, and listened to the sad strains of a lonely violin playing “Dixie” in dirge, I could almost envision a tear falling down the cheek of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Just as the folks from Tara and Twelve Oaks clung to a time where old times there are not forgotten, Scalia clings to a time when homosexuals were not among our teachers, co-workers, Scoutmasters or neighbors.

Scalia, as you know, is the associate justice who authored the Court’s biting dissent in the 6-3 ruling last month in Lawrence v. Texas — the case that effectively struck down our nation’s remaining anti-sodomy laws. In doing so, Scalia became a hero for those who see the Court’s decision as a threat to our civilization.

Not only does Scalia accuse his colleagues of signing on to the “so-called homosexual agenda” and taking sides in the “culture war,” he also strikes out at the American Association of Law Schools. He abhors the group’s politically correct influence and its excluding from membership “any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct.” Much like progressive Southerners a century and a half ago — who boasted about not having to beat their slaves — Scalia offers that he has “nothing against homosexuals promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.” He even tips his hat to the homosexual activists who, through legislative means, “have achieved some success ... by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining states that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts.”

But like Confederates who refuted their Yankee neighbors by reminding them that they were free NOT to own slaves, Scalia is quick to take a similar posture. He states on the record that many Americans “do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business or Scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.” After all, he reasoned, they, like all of us, have a right to protect themselves from a “lifestyle” that they believe to be “immoral and destructive.”

The ultimate slam comes when Scalia mocks the majority Court, as it “coos” over the notion that sexual intimacy between same-sex partners can be an “overt expression in intimate conduct” and “one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” Clearly, Scalia believes gays can love sex, but surely not each other.

Being in a 2-1 minority, you might wonder why the dissent of one justice takes on such importance, at least in my view. The reasons are two-fold. First, the venom with which Scalia writes his dissent sounds like Rev. Fred Phelps with a law degree. Second, President Bush, when asked on the 2000 campaign trail what kind of person he’d look for if he were president and had to appoint a justice, replied, someone just like Scalia. The only good thing about Scalia’s scurrilous dissent is that it politically disqualifies him from elevation to chief justice should Rehnquist soon step down. Even the toothless Senate Democrats would surely prevent his appointment based on his lack of appropriate “judicial temperament” — the quality of decorum and impartiality that is expected in our judiciary and surely the highest court. The greater concern is whom this President might appoint, given the opportunity, as the next Supreme Court justice. Will it be someone who supports states’ rights when it suits his purposes — like supporting Texas’ right to criminalize consensual, private same-sex conduct or over-ruling affirmative action goals of state universities?

Antonin Scalia sounds the states’ rights alarm bell with passion equal to that of confederates on the eve of the Civil War. He claims a “massive disruption of the current social order,” like that which must have riled many Southerners 150 years ago when slavery was threatened. Any central government that would intervene in the social order of a state, whether with slavery or anti-sodomy laws, must surely be curtailed or replaced in Scalia’s world.

Should we care who the next Supreme Court justice will be? Frankly my dears, we better give a damn!