For the second time in as many court days, what was formerly the United States Supreme Court, has reversed decades of legal precedent to reinforce Catholic doctrine. Thus, I propose that we no longer refer to that erstwhile court as SCOTUS, but, instead call it SCCOTUS — The Supreme Catholic Church of the United States — in recognition of the SCCOTUS Crusade.
Separation of Church & State Junk
There is an odd push these days by a substantial number of people for a theocracy. For those who don’t know, a theocracy is “a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.”
And the latest to complain that she’s tired of “this separation of church and state junk” is Lauren Boebert, mislabeled as one of our Representatives, and probably the last person on Earth who can claim, with a straight face, to have received divine guidance.
Boebert misunderstands the Constitution. No doubt because she’s never read it. She claims that the idea for separation of Church and State came from “a stinking letter.” Thomas Jefferson, one of the creators of the United States of America, and our third President, wrote the stinking letter in 1802.
Around that time, Americans were fighting hard for the First Amendment rule against establishing any theocracy.
The calls for a separation between church and state intensified in the 1800s as Americans feared the dominance of the Catholic church over government issues.
— Adela Suliman, “GOP Rep. Boebert: ‘I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk’” (June 28, 2022)
There’s a bit of irony for you: today’s Supreme Court is primarily Catholic.
Roman Catholics account for a bit more than 20% of the U.S. population, yet they are on track to hold six of the Supreme Court’s nine seats now that President Donald Trump has nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill its vacancy.
— David Crary, “If Barrett joins, Supreme Court would have six Catholics” (September 26, 2020)
Or maybe it’s seven.
Although Neil Gorsuch, appointed in 2017, attends and is a member of an Episcopal church, he was raised Catholic and it is unclear if he considers himself a Catholic who is also a member of a Protestant church or simply a Protestant.
— Wikipedia, “Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States” (June 27, 2022)
The other current “justices” are Jewish. When Mr. Breyer retires and is replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson this summer, there will be one fewer of the Jewish tribe, and another non-Catholic “christian.”
The current court certainly seems on-track to grant the non-Christian Boebert’s wish for a theocratic state. Or at least a theocratically-inspired one.
Roe, Roe, Rock the Boat
Some might find my suggestion regarding Catholicism offensive. But, answer me this: why are seven — or six, depending on how you look at it — of the nine Supreme Court “justices” Catholics, and why were so many of them, at best, misleading — and at worst, outright lying — during the selection process about Roe v. Wade?
Because the goal all along has been to get rid of Roe.
And, yeah, it’s not just Catholics who are anti-abortion, but our current “constitutional” jurisprudence is starting to look less constitutional, less juris, definitely not prudent, and very Catholic.
And no amount of dishonesty was below those whose goal was to create a court that would do this.
That’s how the Crusades always work.
Think I’m overstating the case? Take a look at what each of the “justices” actually said on the issue. They knew what people were concerned about. They understood the way the votes for them would go if they said, “Yes, I think Roe is up for grabs.”
So, instead, most of them indicated how very hard it would be for anyone to successfully challenge Roe: it’s “settled precedent.” One of the most deceitful — and it’s hard to really make this call, since the last few are all cut from essentially the same cloth — was Ms. Barrett:
Roe is not a super-precedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased. But that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.
— Amy Conehead Barrett, quoted in Becky Sullivan, “What conservative justices said — and didn’t say — about Roe at their confirmations” (June 24, 2022)
She knew what she thought. She just refused to say what she thought. There’s nothing philosophical that has changed between her — and those of the other Catholic judges who oppose abortion — confirmation hearing and their overturning 50 years of precedent.
Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”
— Nina Totenberg & Sara McCammon, “Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades” (June 24, 2022)
Those are not the words of someone who was suddenly convinced by new arguments on the issue.
The Catholic “justices” have always opposed abortion. They deliberately hid their views from the public, because they knew to be honest and forthcoming about what they already knew they were going to do would have potentially scuttled their nominations.
Mr. Roberts wanted the rest of the Catholic Crew to take things a little slower. Nudge people toward the overthrow of Roe.
But this new addition to the Crew said, “Hell, no! Roe, Roe, rock the boat!”
Pharisees on the Field of Battle
So that was Friday. Today is Monday.
The Supreme Court has long said that public school-sponsored prayer violates the Establishment Clause, even if the prayer is voluntary.
— Devin Dwyer, “Supreme Court rules First Amendment protects public school coach’s post-game prayers” (June 27, 2022)
But Pharisees are never pleased about being restricted from praying in public. Not even Jesus Christ could change that.
“It was my covenant between me and God that after every game, win or lose, I’m going to do it right there on the field of battle,” Kennedy told ABC News of his ritual, which he said typically lasted less than a minute.
— Devin Dwyer, “Supreme Court rules First Amendment protects public school coach’s post-game prayers” (June 27, 2022)
Or, in other words, “I’m going to make a public prayer, so everyone can see, right there on the culture war field of battle football field. It’s not just about being a Pharisee, you know: it’s proselytizing. And if those kids don’t like it, they can sit on the bench, or quit the team. I’m being godly!”
The Pharisees loved public displays of what they viewed as “godliness.”
The Pharisees started in the intertestamental period as a group who were upset because the people were abandoning the purity of the covenant that they had made with God and were being lax in their morality and in their obedience to the commandments of God.
— R.C. Sproul, “Why Did the Pharisees Hate Jesus So Much?” (January 27, 2021)
By the time Jesus showed up — and showed them up — as Sproul writes, they were counterfeit; they were fake.
American “christi-inanity,” and SCCOTUS, are the direct modern descendants of the Pharisees. Misunderstanding everything about G-d, Jesus’s teachings, free will, and freedom, they strive to control the lives of others who think differently than they do.
And the hypocritical, lying “justices” who deceived their way through their confirmation hearings are more than happy — now that they believe they have the unlimited power — to do what the Pharisees never could.
If the Legislature yet resists, then they’ll legislate the teachings of the Supreme Church Catholic Church of the United States from the bench.
For once, I find myself in agreement with AOC. Some “justices” lied to, and deceived, our legislature (and the American people). Congress should impeach them.
Precedent Schmeshedent
Every one of the blowholes who spoke in their confirmation hearings the last few years has been insistent on one thing: precedent matters.
Now, in the space of two court days, precedential decisions — and not just one, but literally hundreds — have been negated by these two decisions.
Mr. Alito, in his attempt to avoid showing his cards during his confirmation hearing, refused to talk about “precedents as super precedents or super-duper precedents.” To think of settled law that way, he indicated, reminded him of laundry detergent at the supermarket.
Ms. Barrett had no such compunction. She was willing to say that she didn’t think Roe was a super precedent, because there were people who didn’t like Roe.
Like her.
But it was still precedent.
Yet, in her mind, precedents — as, apparently, opposed to super-precedents — are meant to be overturned, once there is enough of a majority to do so.
And, so, like so much laundry detergent, all the cases over 50 years which have upheld Roe, and all the cases over the last few decades upholding the separation of Church and State, are now washed away in the dirt of SCCOTUS deception.
Don’t think those two cases — or their hundreds of progeny — are the only precedents the Church intends to do away with. My expectation is that contraception is next, followed by gays.
Government Funding for Religious Schools
In Carson v. Makin, SCCOTUS has continued its trend of turning the Constitution on its head.
The First Amendment, as already noted, was intended to prevent the establishment of any particular religion.
The very point of the Establishment Clause is to prevent the government from sponsoring religious activity itself, thereby favoring one religion over another or favoring religion over nonreligion.
In this case, Breyer explains, lawmakers “did not want Maine taxpayers to finance, through a tuition program designed to ensure the provision of free public education, schools that would use state money for teaching religious practices.”
— Jennifer Rubin, “No wonder Christian nationalists wanted these justices on the Supreme Court” (June 22, 2022)
But you can’t have a theocracy if you can’t force the government to pay for religious education.
So, SCCOTUS, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL!
Political Courts & Culture Wars
The one thing — aside from the Theocracy now being established by SCCOTUS — that is certain is that all courts in the United States (or, anywhere else, for that matter) are political. They always have been.
Courts are, after all, the embodiment of a nation’s values.
[P]olitical “culture wars” are being waged ever more explicitly on legal terrain. Congress, for instance, is increasingly confident it can change culture through legislative initiative.
— Naomi Mezey, “Law as Culture” 13 Yale J.L. & Human. 35, 36 (2001)
A frightening example — frightening of itself, but also for the similarity it bears to SCCOTUS’s overruling Roe — appears in a 1975 paper by anthropologist Jane F. Collier, of Stanford University:
Many authors, for example, have noted that some forms of disruptive behavior are ignored by the legal system, while some classes of people are defined as incapable of serious wrongdoing. Fallers provides a particularly vivid quote from a Basoga subcounty chief in Uganda who said, “You ask why the woman is never the accused in adultery cases. But if someone were to steal your shoes, would you accuse the shoes?” From a Marxist perspective such a statement cannot be dismissed with a laugh and a bow to cultural relativism. Its explanation requires an investigation of the interrelationship between the forces and relations of productc and the “superstructure” to find the conditions that give rise to, and perpetuate, the idea that women, who comprise half the population and perform important productive tasks, are legally equivalent to inanimate objects.
— Jane F. Collier, Legal Processes, 4 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 121, 127 (1975), citing L. A. Fallers, Law Without Precedent: Legal Ideas in Action in the Courts of Colonial Busoga, 101 (1969).
Well, thankfully, we’re a little more advanced than colonial Busoga, Uganda. I mean, here, we would never think of a woman as a mere inanimate object, without the freedom to be responsible for her own…oh…
At any rate, all people have tried changing behaviors, if not also beliefs, through the courts.
[L]aw, rather than a mere technical add-on to a morally (or immorally) finished society, is, along of course with a whole range of other cultural realities from the symbolics of faith to the means of production, an active part of it.
— Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology 218 (1983),quoted in Naomi Mezey, “Law as Culture” 13 Yale J.L. & Human. AT 45
As Jane Collier alludes to in Legal Processes, “judges and lawyers [are] human beings instead of cardboard figures who mechanically apply rules to fact situations.” Collier, supra, at 127.
Or at least some studies allege.
SCCOTUS & the Revival of the Religious Crusades
Because judges and lawyers are human beings instead of cardboard figures, it seems unfair not to treat the six or seven Catholics on the husk of the Supreme Court — now transformed, as I’ve pointed out, into SCCOTUS — as human beings.
These human beings have been part of a long-running “culture war.” Their crusade to defeat freedom, and retreat to an earlier time where women were essentially breeders — or, to be more accurate, fit only for husbandry — and governments were overtly religious in nature (particularly state and local governments, which is one reason, perhaps that SCCOTUS favors them) is completely consistent with the influence of their Catholic upbringing.
No surprise, then, that they have revived the Crusades run by the Roman Catholic Church of old.
Make no mistake: the common thread amongst the rulings I’ve discussed in this blog post is religion. Those small cells multiplying inside a man’s property (i.e., the woman he impregnated) aren’t just small cells which, if untouched, would maybe grow into human beings (if they didn’t kill their host before they achieved the ability to exist on their own). They’re souls.
So say the godly. The Pharisees.
And those Pharisees co-opting school activities — or other government-sponsored activities — aren’t really just Pharisees, no matter what that idiot Jesus said. They’re not just trying to intimidate kids who want to play football, or engage in any other school activities, into embracing the god of the Pharisees. They’re engaging in constitutionally-protected intimidation techniques. A kinder, gentler — physically, at least — Inquisition.
Forcing the government to give money to support religious schools? That’s not…well, okay, there’s no way to sugarcoat this one. That really is helping establish a religious school, because some of those schools might not survive without our tax dollars. And, even if they would, giving them our tax dollars conscripts those of us who do not support their religion into supporting their religion.
And, I don’t know about you, but I would not willingly give my money to a religious school.
Hence, SCCOTUS crusades against me, and others like me, driven by their Catholic faith, and the government’s guns.
Why Limited Government Matters
The founders — the creators, since most people don’t know what a “founder” is — established the United States of America as a limited form of government. In a way, that was a little bit of a cheat, also. (Not as bad as the cheats that have dialed that back, but it was a cheat.)
They wanted to establish a single, free, country. One that would protect all of us from tyrants externally, and provide that we would live in freedom and peace internally. The idea was for this to be the situation from the creation of the United States, going forward.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
— Preamble to the Constitution of the United States (1787)
But people who love power hate freedom. They do not want you to be able to choose your own way. You might choose a way that differs from what they think is “the right way.” That is, their way.
A limited government would not have the power to tell women what they could, and could not, do with their bodies. A limited government would not be able to say that schools must allow Pharisees to co-opt their football teams to inculcate kids who wanted to play with christi-inanity. They would not allow them to pray, as the hypocrites do, performing their “acts of righteousness” before men, to be seen by them. See that fucking Bible, you idiots, you pretenders, you hypocrites!, at Matthew 6, verse 1.
And a limited government would not have the power to take my money, and give it to religious schools I disapprove of, so that they can teach more American citizens to be the kind of hypocritical asswipes who currently sit on the Supreme Catholic Church of the United States.
That is why the founders created a limited government. That is why limited government matters.
Limited governments cannot sustain theocracies.
Further evidence that the “justices” of the United States Supreme Court lied to achieve their religious goal: https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/07/19/1792-case-reveals-that-key-founders-saw-abortion-private-matter/