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DIGITAL OPINION OPINION. USATODAY. COM Excerpts of what our online commentators are saying:

SCALIA’S DEFINING MOMENT There was one moment in Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s career that stands out more to me than any other. In 2003, when the court ruled that sodomy laws — used to persecute gay Americans — were unconstitutional, Scalia penned one of the most fiery dissents in court history. It turned on the notion that gay equality could not be lawfully embraced by the court because the founders had not envisioned it, and the people had not voted to make it so. The court, he said, had signed on to the “homosexual agenda.”

Gay rights? Only if the majority wishes. Affirmative action? For Scalia, it wasn’t a tool for realizing the promise of racial equality, but rather a means of discriminating against the majority. Sexual privacy? Not mentioned in the Constitution, so it didn’t exist. This is what the fights over Supreme Court seats ultimately boil down to — competing visions of what America is, and what it can be.

Stephen Henderson Editorial page editor “Detroit Free Press”

GREATER THAN MARSHALL

Scalia is one of only 112 Americans to have served on the U. S. Supreme Court, but he is the most important justice in American history — greater than former chief justice John Marshall. Scalia believed in following the law and in textualism. And he never misconstrued federal statutes to reach constitutional issues he wanted to decide the way chief justice Marshall did in famous cases such as Marbury v. Madison and in Gibbons v. Ogden.

Justice Scalia has reshaped the legal culture so that there is less use of legislative history and more reliance on the constitutional text than there was before his elevation to the Supreme Court in 1986.

Even liberal justices such as Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan often joined Scalia’s opinion or wrote textualist opinions that Scalia could join. Scalia has fundamentally reshaped the way Americans will think about law.

Steven G. Calabresi Law professor Northwestern University