Fundamentalism and the Supreme Court.

 

Catholic fundamentalist Samuel Alito is not a fan of Thomas Jefferson.  Thomas Jefferson was arguably a deist or a theist, or maybe even a Unitarian.  His statute for religious freedom in Virginia was a template for the separation of church and state, later expressed in the Constitution. His views about keeping the preachers away from government are well known.  He was an enslaver, and a father of enslaved children, but his ideas about religion have been soundly reaffirmed in our republic—until now.  The separation of church and state has allowed different religions to thrive in all the states of the Union.  

 

And now, the Supreme Court of the United States has anointed itself as a priestly guardian of public morality and even worse, the reproductive freedom of women, to the point of reckless endangerment.

 

Everyone my age has heard stories about “fallen women,” back-alley abortions, and ruined lives.  We have heard stories of women dying in illicit, filthy, abortion clinics unstaffed by medical personnel, and seen Hollywood movies of the era depicting melodramatic, but true, tragic denouements to unwanted pregnancies resulting from rapes, incest, and medical emergencies.

 

Donald Trump, a man who never got a majority vote from the American people, appointed not two, but three extremist justices, creating a judicial Frankenstein, a renegade Supreme Court; justices rushed through by Mitch McConnell, who would not even meet with Merrick Garland to offer a balance to the court, lost by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death.

 

Let me digress for one paragraph: Mitch McConnell, could have, but refused, to whip votes or vote himself for Trump’s well-deserved impeachment conviction, followed up his vote with a sanctimonious speech about Trump’s possibly being held accountable by the courts…well you know how that has worked out.

 

But let’s get back to the Supremes.  

 

Five robed Catholic religious fanatics have pilfered women of their constitutional right to reproductive freedom, forged over 50 years ago by Roe v. Wade.  Justice Alito, an ideologue par excellence, conducted Machiavellian palace intrigue to rush through his obfuscating opinion as revealed in a recently published article by Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor of the New York Times.  This, including the arguable leaking of the opinion early to cement the votes of his colleagues who might have been wavering over this ill-thought monumental injustice.

 

Women are now fleeing from unfree states to free states, like the 1850s when slavecatchers roamed across state lines to capture runaway slaves. Ok. No slave catchers today.  Only regressive state legislatures and salivating Attorneys General like Ken Paxton of Texas threatening to sue or imprison women who travel from their home states to seek health care.  Physicians fear making health care decisions for their patients. They might go to prison for 99 years or lose their license.   Forget that a woman whose fetus has a fatal anomaly or that the woman could possibly die. 

 

There was a time when burning people at the stake for apostacy was de riguer.  Now prosecuting them for protecting their lives or their sanity is the fashion in Texas and some other states that have become bastions of religious fundamentalism.

 

The problem of course, is that the law is not purely a religious undertaking.  It is a mélange of both.  If it were not, we would be living in a theocracy, like Iran.   

 

What the anti-abortion crowd truly believes is that life begins at conception.  And it cannot be truly argued otherwise.   But since Roe v. Wade, it has been judicial practice that prior to viability, that the social implications of abortion far outweigh the religious proscriptions.  So, yes, there is a profound difference between truly held beliefs and what has evolved in modern legal thought.  Therein lies the dilemma.  The incurable malady.   Religion or socially desirable mores. Moderation or extremism.   70% of the American public are in favor of moderation.

 

What Justice Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett lied about, that they were committed to stare decisis, or long settled law during confirmation hearings, undermines not only their credibility, but their place in history, like the infamous Justice Roger Taney, when he authored the Dredd Scott decision, denying human rights to a Black man.  Even worse, also on the wrong side of history, Alito deserves a special place in judicial infamy for his unmitigated ability to alter modern legal thought into some contorted, thinly veiled religious rationalization actually citing 16^th century law.  A fall back to the good old days.  Those days were not so good, after all, despite what Samuel Alito thinks.  And no, he is no Jeffersonian.  Not even close.