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A Pro-Religion Court

edited June 2022 in Off-Topic
I guess not surprising but distressing anyway: https://nytimes.com/2022/06/22/briefing/supreme-court-religion.html
The Supreme Court has become the most pro-religion it’s been since at least the 1950s, and it appears to include the six most pro-religion justices since at least World War II.

Yesterday’s ruling striking down a Maine law that blocked taxpayer dollars from funding religious school tuition furthered a transformation decades in the making. Since John Roberts became chief justice in 2005, the court has ruled in favor of religious organizations in orally argued cases 83 percent of the time. That is far more than any court in the past seven decades — all of which were led by chief justices who, like Roberts, were appointed by Republican presidents.
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Yesterday’s ruling pushed the win rate for religious groups even higher, to 85 percent, said Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who uncovered the trend for a forthcoming Supreme Court Review study she co-wrote with Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor....

....The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented. “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.

Other recent cases suggest that the Roberts court is growing bolder in defense of religious freedom — especially in benefiting Christian groups. Last year, it allowed a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia to refuse to work with same-sex couples. And while the court has repeatedly rejected plaintiffs who challenged state Covid vaccination mandates on religious grounds, it sided with those who sought to lift virus restrictions on religious services after Barrett joined its ranks.

Comments

  • Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval, a study of crucial events in the 18th century, covers the origins of the Establishment Clause, as it has come to be known. I am a Connecticut native brought up in the Congregational Church, or at least it was the church of my devout paternal grandparents. This was the church that tried to impose a rule requiring church membership for voters. Obviously, only men could vote, but the Founders saw the danger in tying the franchise to church membership and barred it in the Constitution. In other words, the Founders barred a link between the exercise of one’s rights as a citizen and a religious affiliation. In some respects, it’s a negative statute, forbidding the state from establishing a religion. Like the Second Amendment, this clause has certainly lost its original intent and application.
  • That decision sucks mightily. Abortions should be safe, legal and rare. Prohibition was repealed. This reversal can be reversed too, some way, somehow. Or maybe it will just take a bunch of deaths of the fart-brains on the Court. But the country is split, and you have the likes of doink-head Mitch ready to block everything, if we is able. Just because he CAN, once he gets a majority----- whether it makes sense or not. The Repugnant Party is an INSURGENCY.
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