Two months ago, Samuel Alito was approached at a gala by a woman who suggested America’s cultural rifts and ideological chasms are too deep and wide to bridge. That indeed, compromise between liberals and conservatives is a lost cause best abandoned.
Alito agreed. “One side or the other is going to win,” he told the woman. Maybe Americans can find “a way of living together peacefully,” but it’ll be hard, he said. “There are [fundamental] differences that really can’t be compromised.”
As it turns out, Alito wasn’t talking to a concerned conservative citizen. He was talking to Lauren Windsor, “a liberal activist who has turned a hidden camera, a Tennessee drawl and a knack for disarming her targets with words of sympathetic conservatism into a loaded political weapon,” as The New York Times put it, in a 2023 profile.
If you missed it, do yourself a favor. Take a moment. Listen to Alito’s remarks:
Note that Alito enthusiastically agreed with Windsor when she said people of faith should fight “to return our country to a place of godliness.” That’s disconcerting, to put it politely. In the developed world, church and state are separate and judges aren’t clerics. In a perfect world, there’s no place for religion, nor religious people, on the bench.
I’m not especially charitable when it comes to religion, particularly organized religion. Throughout human history, countless millions have been subjected to the worst kinds of suffering in the name of make-believe deities. Humans have a very long track record of indulging their animal instincts — murder, genocide and the rest — on the excuse some God, Goddess, gods or goddesses said it was ok. If you’re inclined to mistake books of fairy tales for historical records of fact, the idea that deities countenance the use of extreme violence is actually quite plausible. After all, the Old Testament God was a jealous, vengeful, bad-tempered tyrant quick to smite, burn and drown people for the slightest infraction.
Beyond serving as a justification for violence, religion keeps men (and women) in a childlike mental state: If you need to lean on fairy tales as a crutch to avoid coming to terms with the realities of life (i.e., that it’s pointless) and death (i.e., that it’s nothingness), there’s a very real sense in which you haven’t matured. To take holy books literally and to believe in the existence of prophets and gods as overseers of the tragicomedy that is the human soap opera, is to exhibit a kind of mental underdevelopment. Or to be crazy. Either way, it’s not something we want in the people charged with meting out justice. In the US, those people are leveraging their position in the service of “moral” social engineering and wielding judicial review (which isn’t in the Constitution, by the way) to the same delusional end.
Currently, the Supreme Court’s beholden to Alito who, I’d argue, wields more sway than Chief Justice John Roberts. To many observers, Alito’s a fanatic who wants to turn America into a de facto theocracy. In this vision, the US would morph into a kind of bizarro, Christian Iran, where individual rights are suppressed by religious authoritarians when the exercising of those rights is deemed heretical or threatening to the nation’s “natural” ethnic caste system, but otherwise guarded zealously as divine dictates in their own right, the Bill of Rights being almost as holy as the 10 Commandments.
It’s only fitting in this context that some in the media have described Donald Trump in 2024 as a kind of MAGA Ayatollah — a mystic and a spiritual leader who, even as he leaves the specifics of policy to other people, retains something like a Supreme Leader’s unquestioned authority to set the overarching agenda. Trump says he knows nothing about Project 2025 (which, among other things, demands the Department of Health and Human Services “maintain a biblically-based… definition of marriage and family), but it was devised with him in mind, and you can be absolutely sure he’d have the final say over each and every agenda item during the implementation process.
In an Op-Ed published on Monday, outgoing US president Joe Biden (remember him?) detailed his plan to reform the Supreme Court before it’s too late. He reminded Americans, as he’s wont to do, that nobody knows more about this issue than he does, not because he’s a scholar, but rather because he’s been in government since the Madison administration (give or take). “I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today,” Biden wrote. “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms.”
Biden’s right, of course. What’s happening on the Supreme Court is nothing short of terrifying. It’s not just the religious character of the decisions and the extent to which religion’s doubtlessly a factor in the court’s reasoning. It’s also the appearance of overt (indeed, it’s almost slapstick) corruption and the readily apparent fealty to one man, which manifested last month in a wildly dangerous decision to grant presidents immunity for crimes, a ruling transparently tailored to Trump. As though the court’s completely unconcerned with the longer-term ramifications of its decisions, and only cares about this election.
Biden on Monday called for a series of common sense reforms. He wants a constitutional amendment stipulating that no one, including presidents, is immune for crimes, he wants term limits for SCOTUS justices and he wants the court to be subjected to a binding code of conduct.
None of that should be controversial. At all. But it is. So much so, in fact, that those reforms have no hope of being implemented, least of all the first one. The bar to amend the constitution in America is prohibitively (ludicrously, some argue) high and Republicans won’t support an amendment that unequivocally holds presidents to the same legal standards as everybody else. (What does that tell you about the GOP?)
In the same recorded remarks to Lauren Windsor, Roberts was overheard pushing back against Alito’s sentiments. When Windsor — again, posing as a Catholic conservative — suggested the court rule proactively to put America on a road back to traditional Christian morality, Roberts chafed. “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” he asked, rhetorically. “That’s for people we elect.”
Late last week, at a Turning Point Action Believers’ event in Florida, Trump exhorted the crowd to “Get out and vote just this time.” “You won’t have to do it anymore,” he said. “[In] four more years it will be fixed. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
I think it was Dan Savage who used to refer to the Christian right as the “American Taliban”.
I’m impressed with Windsor, I’ve always said that you really have no grounds to have an opinion unless you can express the opposing side’s opinion in terms that they themselves would agree with, and she obviously understands very clearly how conservatives see themselves.
I’ve been through an interesting personal evolution on religion. I was a fairly strong believer until my late teenage years, Craig regularly, until my belief and empiricism got the best of me. I came very quickly to be very opposed To organized religion, and to religion in most forms — I just have a hard time with the idea that this many adults go through life placing stock in an imaginary friend. Later on, as he has went by I happened to be friend), independently, a number of devoutly religious people, everyone of them are truly wonderful human beings, and many of whom actually share my opinions about a lot of things, and I came to see you and some of them that among a lot of the rank and file, religious belief isn’t per se unreasonable, it’s just faith, it has nothing to do with reason either way, it doesn’t agree with reason nor is it counter to it. They just made a choice to put their faith in something. Reason has nothing to do with it and they know that. So for a long time I softened my views a bit, at least towards individuals who held it as a private choice and didn’t try and force it on everybody around them. And I still maintain that every single one of those individuals, themselves, are in many ways some of the best people I know. I do understand, also, the aspects of human nature that might make religious belief so comforting that some people just need it. I believe it was Alan Watts who pointed out that life is lonely and sad and ever-changing, so we have course cook up a fantasy about something that is all-loving and happy and eternally unchanging to deal with it. I don’t need that fantasy myself, but I’m not gonna blame somebody for needing a crutch.
But these last couple of years, the Christian hegemonists—the American Taliban—are really making me return to my former deeply-felt revulsion towards these people, as a group, with their insistence that we all have to live by what they choose to believe (I am in the camp that says religion is a lifestyle choice, not something religious people are born with) their imaginary friend told them. The same people who scream the loudest about liberty also scream that we all must live under the dominion of a being nobody can see, who, coincidentally, only they can convey orders from. And it’s beginning to negatively bias my opinions of all of them again, even the ones who don’t actively try to force it on anyone else, as I see they still subscribe to the same fallacies that enable so many people to do so much wrong with a clear conscience.
Dammit, Siri! My kingdom for an edit button on comments in this section. That was “prayed regularly” not “Craig regularly”. And “belief in empiricism“ should have been “understanding of empiricism”. I’m sure I don’t need to explain here that science and empiricism aren’t belief systems, in fact they’re exactly the opposite.
And it’s “as time went by I happened to be friend“.
Oh cripes, as I read this, Siri just made total hash of my dictation in a bunch of places. Please just ignore any sentences that don’t make sense.
Yeah, I went through a similar evolution – grew up in a very religious area and started to realize that it didn’t add up, but have definitely softened my general view of people who choose to believe.
That being said, it is scary when we see these people adopt a Christian Nationalist mindset. In addition to installing these people in the Supreme Court, it’s the marriage of these Christian Nationalists with the “libertarian” tech/crypto billionaires like Thiel and Musk that really scares me. I didn’t realize until recently that Thiel is an evangelical Christian who describes orthodox Christians as the most independent thinkers in the country. Then you hear Trump courting the “libertarian” techie crypto crowd who somehow think bitcoin will be worth something when the world goes to hell and you’re just left wondering what in the world are these people smoking?
I think we need to turn the clock on tech back to the 90s and just freeze things there. Maybe the machines in the Matrix had it right after all when they set their simulation to 1999…
Agreed on all points. I didn’t know that about Thiel. Just when I thought I couldn’t like him any less. The doublethink these people manage to engage in is astounding. Yeah, I can see “Christians are the most independent thinkers”, coming from the same minds that produce, “nobody is as oppressed as Christians in America”. It must be easy today, now that words don’t mean anything anymore, and you can change the truth by downvoting it on Reddit. We have increased the chocolate ration to 20 grammes.
The funny thing is, these people in absolutely no way resemble the handful of Christians who I know and (despite our vast differences in some chosen beliefs) like in my day-to-day life. Although on consideration that may be more a function of who I choose to actually let in, not because I haven’t met them. I do remember seeing on Facebook a friend’s ex posting that a local billboard calling religion “mythology” was “hate speech”, shortly before I blocked her.
Musk… Mr “according to noted authority Prof Suggon deeznuts”… I feel like this country somehow wound up with a bunch of 12-year-old-boys-in-men’s-bodies pulling the strings. These fucking people.
I miss when ‘one side or the other’ meant Russia or the United States. Now almost half of the United States would gleefully turn the country over to Putin, before letting Joe have another term.
Freedom of religion should be reenforced as freedom FROM religion. Religion is not the same as belief.
A person can believe in a higher power, preferably one that doesn’t look like an old white guy, or even a human, since that is incredibly arrogant.
While, religion is a cult that got too big, so it’s not socially acceptable to keep calling it a cult. The planet has lots of those and they’re generally more trouble than they’re worth.
“ As though the court’s completely unconcerned with the longer-term ramifications of its decisions, and only cares about this election.”
The amusing thing to me is they have handed that power to Biden right now. He could throw all 12 of them in Guantánamo the day after the election.
I see no reason for them to wait until November. Let the waterboarding begin!
I agree. Really good idea. That would cause Trump to go completely round the bend. Made my day. Throw the bad boys in the hole as terrorists … now.
If only we lived in a world where Democrats were willing to do what it took.
Rather than a world where we have an actual presidential candidate who actually posted and praised explicit “White Power” supporters on Twitter and made a big show of having dinner with leading national antisemitic trolls, among so many other things, and the Democrats are so cowardly and careful not point it out during an election that the Democratic candidate calling him “weird” seems like a bold strategy.
Firmly in the light switch camp, when your time comes to an end the light goes off and that’s it.
What? You don’t believe that when you turn the light switch off, the light simply goes to a secret, hidden light Heaven? But, but, but, how can it just be GONE?
At least admit that at some point in the future it must come back as different light.
Been calling it political religion since young Bush won a while back, the Christian Coalition steped aside, joined Bush. It has only gotten worse, and it will continue. You cannot organize masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths – Harari. Christianity is a fiction. Period. My view.
It’s almost as if once upon a time the church and the political state realized they were in the same business, and suddenly you had the “Holy” Roman Empire and “Roman” Catholic Church. That experiment seemed to be something of a success.
Thank you, sir, for your rational sentiments, shared by our forefathers, explicitly, in our Constitution. Our European ancestors, the ones who came to these shores, especially, mostly did so to establish themselves as our masters through their religions. In Europe in the 15-18th Centuries most countries were bound by their state religions and the laws of primogeniture. People who did didn’t go to church on Sunday were literally dragged from their houses to the local church and then whipped and given two weeks in the stocks for their sins. Start with the Scarlet Letter and read on in American literature to see what our world was like then. The Inquisition was no joke. Jefferson and Franklin knew these things and thoughtfully included protection from them in the laws on our country. But the Roundheads are still among us chafing to get a new king once more. What could be done to us now by the likes of Alito and his ilk is horrendous compared to the good old days of the 1600s.
Not until that Monty Python episode, anyway.