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BY ZHENG HWUANG CHIA AND TRACY PFEIFFER

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Controversial Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is making waves again, this time for claiming the U.S. Constitution doesn’t give women equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

Here’s the contentious comment Scalia made during an interview with California Lawyer Magazine.

“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.”

Salon editor Joan Walsh fired back, telling MSNBC, the Justice is hanging women out to dry.

WALSH: “It’s ridiculous. He is writing more than half the country out of this protection. The other, you know, I think really specious thing that he keeps saying is, hey -- ‘If you don’t want discrimination against women, and if you’ve got support, write the laws and pass the laws.’ Well, do you know what that means, Ed? That means, if you want discrimination against women in Mississippi or in some state then you can write those laws and pass those laws.”

And it’s not just women who took offense to Scalia’s comments. The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur came out swinging as well.

UYGUR: “He doesn’t think the constitution prohibits sex discrimination. So if you want to say hey, I don’t want to hire women, or if they get pregnant, I want to fire them, or whatever other kind of discrimination that you think you want to do based on sex -- Scalia thinks that’s perfectly constitutional. ... No, it is not meant to protect women, or by the way, Latinos, Jews or anyone else, not meant to protect anyone else outside from black folks and George W. Bush.”

But while Scalia has endured his fair share of criticism, Amanda Carey from the Daily Caller came to the judge’s defense, saying -- this is a legal argument, not an attack on women.

CAREY: “Did he say that women don’t have equal rights? Am I saying that women don’t have any rights? No. I am saying that you can’t use the 14th Amendment to defend those. It’s not what the 14th Amendment is all about. ... His larger point is, we have an epidemic in this country. Proposing and passing laws, and then go all the way back trying to justify them by widening the interpretations, and sort of changing the meaning of different country’s provision. You can’t do that.”

So what do you think? Should Justice Scalia be criticized for his seemingly discriminatory comment, or does he have a solid legal perspective?

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