I wonder about this. Wouldn’t there be a better chance of cases going our way with one less right wing nut on the Court? It certainly can’t hurt!
Fighting Religious Privilege at the Supreme Court after the Death of Scalia
All eyes are on the Supreme Court following the death on February 13 of Justice Antonin Scalia, a deeply religious and conservative jurist if ever there was one. His absence on the court, as well as the utter deadlock over replacing him, will have enormous implications for many of the issues of great importance to the freethought community, most immediately on the issue of reproductive rights (more on that in a moment).
CFI President Ronald A. Lindsay considers the overarching judicial philosophy of Scalia, “originalism," and hopes that it is “laid to rest" along with the late justice. Writing at Huffington Post, Ron says, “The more fundamental flaw [with originalism] is to assume that the Founders wanted us to use detailed historical research, or perhaps necromancy, to discern the specific things they were thinking of at the time they wrote the Constitution." CFI’s Council for Secular Humanism also republished a 2014 piece by Michael B. Paulkovich from The American Rationalist on Scalia’s “Bible-based agenda."
Days after the death of Justice Scalia, the Center for Inquiry joined with American Atheists to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on the case of Zubik v. Burwell. A sort of Hobby Lobby-ad absurdum, religious nonprofits are claiming that the mere act of declaring their intention to opt out of the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act constitutes a violation of their religious freedom. Simply signing a paper would be an offense against their conscience.
In our press release about the brief, CFI Legal Director Nick Little says, “This ludicrous case is a transparent attempt to legislate from the pulpit. It showcases the intolerable consequences of RFRA, a bad law that has predictably been twisted into a scattershot weapon used by those who want to see their narrow religious beliefs imposed on everyone else. It is religious privilege at its worst." CFI’s new CEO Robyn Blumner gets to the heart of the matter, saying, “This is about religious employers unconstitutionally inflicting their faith tenets on female employees."
In January, CFI assembled a coalition of prominent scientists and scholars to weigh in on the deeply controversial Texas abortion case ofWhole Woman’s Health v. Cole.CFI argues that the so-called “experts" who had been brought in during the trial of the case to give testimony in favor of the draconian over-regulation of abortion providers were peddling pseudoscience and outright falsehoods and that Supreme Court justices should not uphold regulations based on partisan ideology masquerading as science.
How the death of Justice Scalia will impact these cases is yet to be known.
Even before the Death of Scalia, conservative groups have been planning on attempting the marriage ruling from this past June, too. I wonder if there is any real chance of it going back to the Supreme Court?
I think that the Constitution consistently refers to the President as “he”. An originalist interpretation might therefore preclude the eligibility of a woman to be President. (The original writers probably didn’t conceive of the possibility that a woman could become President, or maybe it was simply unthinkable.)
By “originalist” what Scalia and the others really meant is that the Constitution was written by a group of ultra-conservatives and was the final word. This is, and always has been, absurd.
If they were truly “originalists”, they would accept that the Constitution was created by a long list of compromises. The so-called “Founding Fathers” realized that wiser heads may prevail in the future and provided an amendment process to make these corrections when necessary. One would have to be utterly stupid, in my opinion, to say that the so-called “Founding Fathers” thought that they had had the final say in all matters.
Unfortunately the Conservatives who are slaves to the religious right have always tried to insert religion into politics, when the two are incompatible. The Constitution set us up to be run based upon compromises between two (or more) political parties. Under that type of system, no one will ever be totally satisfied. When religion is interjected into the process, it is no longer politics, but rather dogma. There can only be one correct answer (in the mind of the religious advocate) and compromise is at an end.
In other words, to incorporate any religious matters into the political is in contradiction to the “original” intent and as anti-Constitution and anti-American as you can get.