The Supreme Court, compliments of the newest addition to that once august body, has made another dent in constitutional law and advanced us a step further toward theocracy, ruling as it has that the state has no right to protect its citizens from a plague if a religious entity insists on spreading said plague.
I’ve written before that these religous cases are simply part of a long term strategy of the right to legalize all sorts of behaviors that have been declared unlawful. All one need do, in the future, to avoid complying with any law that the right does not like, is plead that one’s religous convictions are offended. Even before Barrett arrived a Supreme Court majority came to the rather absurd conclusion that a corporation clearly involved in commerce can somehow have a religion, and that said religion can exempt it from following a law with which it purports to disagree. Discrimination against gay people has been countenanced, and we can expect more of that. A few interesting questions arise from this trend.
- Will the court have any problem getting Clarence Thomas on board when it rules that a person or corporation running a restaurant, hotel or other place of public accomodation need not serve black people if it offends their religious sensibilities?
- What legal principles will the court invoke when it explains that religious objections relieve a person from obeying laws or regulations promulgated by liberals, but not those promulgated by conservatives.
- How will the court explain that the new rules apply only to religions of which it approves, and can’t possibly be used by religions that are not Christian or certain forms of Judaism? This is an issue generally, but it will be extremely relevant when the court re-legalizes mandatory prayer in the public schools.
We need not fear that the court will be unable to come up with some rationale to accomplish the last two items on my list. It will likely be transparently irrational and unmoored from any respectable precedent, but that doesn’t matter anymore. This is now a completely “results oriented” court, and while I’m sure they prefer to have some sort of rational basis for their decisions, that’s now entirely optional. And, oh, by the way, everything they might decide with respect to religous rights is completely consistent with the original intent of the deists who wrote the constitution.
Notice: Not that many are likely to care, but comments are not working on this blog at the moment. I’ll be putting this notice on posts until I get the problem cleared up. That will involve attempting to contact someone at my web hosting service, which is both time consuming and aggravating in the extreme, so I’ve been putting it off until I have a few hours I can spend on hold waiting for someone to talk to me.
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