Alito recently spoke at the Federalist Societies annual National Lawyer’s Convention where he lamented the infringement on the rights of religious and right-wing people, WHILE ALSO lamenting about gay people being given any rights at all. It seems that religious people can’t exercise their right to free speech to show disdain for gay people without other people ALSO exercising THEIR OWN rights to free speech and calling them bigots. Now because gay people have something approaching “equal” rights he feels less comfortable being a bigot…I mean, himself. That is so sad. The Constitution specifically spells out that right-wing religious bigots have the absolute right to always feel superior and comfortable in their bigotry. I forget which amendment that was, but don’t bother looking it up because it’s definitely in there!
Reading the article on it I just got more and more annoyed by the constant, unending whining. How the hell does someone get appointed as a Supreme Court Justice and not know the difference between “rights” and “feeling comfortable when subjugating others”? He talked about gay marriage as if it shouldn’t be a right (which his ruling says he believes), but talked about stating that opinion without other people stating an opposing opinion while expressing distaste for your opinion somehow actually used to be some kind of right that he doesn’t have any more? And he lamented over Kim Davis losing her Supreme Court case because he didn’t think that, specifically, Christians should be accountable to perform all of the duties of their job if they disagreed with them for purely religious reasons.
I find it simply astonishing that a Supreme Court Justice does not understand that there is not, nor has there ever been any such thing as “Christian rights”. They’re just “rights” and they apply to everyone equally. If you say, “A person does not have to perform duties which go against their religious beliefs” what you are really, actually saying is “A person does not have to perform duties which go against their beliefs”, whether those beliefs be religious or not. Does he not realize how many “not my job” type people exist in the world? If I run for sheriff do I not have to do any actual work if I “believed” that the job was just about telling other people what to do and when to do it? How about if I “believe” that’s the way it should be? And I somehow have the inexplicable right to not be called a “lazy asshole” by other people? What an idiotic concept. A right cannot infringe on the rights of other people. My right to free speech in no way curtails your free speech rights. If I want to say something stupid racist or homophobic or misogynistic, that is my right. But it is also your right to call me a racist, homophobic, woman hating, wife beating, hillbilly, bigoted really good argument for abortion when I do. This isn’t new. The only thing which is new(ish) is that America is more accepting of gay rights, so people are more likely to call you a bigot when you do or say the kinds of things a bigot would do or say.
What he was really saying, in conservative code, was “I don’t like that my religious views are losing the respect of the people and, as they do, I am no longer able to openly subjugate people who don’t agree with me, nor even express an opinion that I should be able to without someone calling me an asshole”. And that is EXACTLY the kind of thing an asshole would say.