Over a century ago, the great Scottish runner, Eric Liddell, made the decision to withdraw from the Olympic race he was favored to win. It was scheduled on a Sunday and his religious convictions forbade competing on the sabbath. He didn’t expect any accommodation. Whether or not you are a religious person, he deserves respect for showing us what true religious conviction means and demands.
This obligation for personal sacrifice, just like other true teachings of their religion, is entirely lost on today’s ultra-religious evangelicals who have clogged up the docket of the Supreme Court with cases that seek to conform rules and laws to their narrow view or to grant themselves special dispensation to violate secular rules and laws that don’t comply with their beliefs.
The selectively “originalist” Court, especially the shamelessly religiously fanatical Alito, ignoring the establishment clause of the First Amendment, has consistently granted that desire, allowing Christians to thumb their noses at laws they don’t happen to feel like complying with or to impose laws that force their belief system on all of us. The Court has made it possible to divert public funds to religious schools and organizations and to insert Christian doctrine and training into public education.
As my grandparents, religious Jews who, would never have expected a court to exempt them from laws that didn’t support their religious practices, would say, “Azoy a Court?” (This you call a court?)
Currently a case is pending that will determine whether a president is totally immune from prosecution regardless of what crimes he commits. That such a ridiculous idea would even need to be considered by the Justices at all is absurd. They should never have taken this case, but then again, they should never have taken the plethora of “religious freedom” cases either. The rational reply of unbiased judges to such idiocy should have been a simple one word answer arrived at by consensus without need for argument.
“Bollocks.”
But the biases of the Trump Court, are clear. The critical judgement on absolute presidential immunity was pushed far into the future, further slowing the snail’s pace of the Trump’s trials, while they prioritized yet another pet case of the Christian right, whether access to an oral abortion drug that was approved over twenty years ago and proven exceedingly safe can be denied to all women, the overwhelming majority of whom support abortion rights. Read Alito’s questions and comments during the argument to see how he has absolutely no regard for the law or for reason when adjudicating on his pet issue, abortion. One so biased should never be allowed to be a Justice let alone participate in such cases. Likewise Clarence Thomas who makes no bones about his personal crusade to ban contraception and gay marriage.
Should the anti-abortion drug case or similar ones prevail, the whole system of drug approval and oversight based on science will crumble. From then on all kinds of decisions regarding the health and welfare of citizens will be wrested from the control of government agencies staffed by experts and put into the hands of unqualified entities such as the courts and state legislatures. This is all part of a movement that is undoing centuries of scientific progress and taking us back into the dark ages when ignorance and superstition ruled and the Church reigned supreme.
Such are the priorities of today’s Court. Such is the tragedy of the state of our democracy.
An Author's Inner Mind 