For This Supreme Court, Justice Isn’t Blind. Faith Is

One hears constant claims by Christofascists that Christians are being persecuted.  What this really translates to is that these modern day Pharisees are facing resistance to their efforts to persecute others, be they gays, non-Christians or those who have walked away from religion thanks largely to the hypocrisy and down right meanness and cruelty of the "godly folk."  Disturbingly. the extremist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is more than eager to erase the separation of church and state and aid Christofascist in inflicting their beliefs - most of which have nothing to do with the message of the New Testament - on the rest of society.   The ruling striking down Roe v. Wade was but one of the extremist majority on the Court's effort to give special privileges to right wing Christians to the detriment of the religious freedom of the rest of us.   As an earlier post today notes, abortion is just the beginning of the Christofascists and the Court's majority to role back individual freedoms and make America's laws reflect to most cruel aspects of Christofascis beliefs while steamrolling the rights of the majority of Americans.   A column in the New York Times looks at another of the Court's hideously wrongly decided ruling durng the just ended term of the Court.  Here are column excerpts:

Imagine your boss fervently proclaiming his religious beliefs at the end of a companywide meeting, inviting everyone on the team who shares those beliefs to join in. You’re surrounded by colleagues and other higher-ups. Everyone is watching to see who participates and who holds back, knowing that whatever each of you does could make or break your job and even your career, whether you share his convictions or not. But hey, totally up to you!

That’s what Joseph Kennedy, a former assistant coach in Kitsap County, Wash., did with his team — only he did it with public-school students at a high-school football game. When the superintendent made clear that by actively inviting players to join him at the 50-yard line for postgame Christian prayers, he was violating school policy and, by the way, the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, Kennedy took to the media, turning a small town’s school sporting event into a three-ring circus and ugly social media sideshow, with students effectively forced to perform or suffer the consequences.

Naming the single worst decision of the Supreme Court’s disgraceful 2021-22 term is a tough call. But the one that best captures the majority’s brazen efforts to inflict its political and religious agenda on the rest of the country may well be Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which ruled that the coach had a constitutional right to pray on the field. Overturning precedent and in a cynical elision of fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for a 6-to-3 majority, affirmed Kennedy’s assertion that his proselytizing on government property during a public-school function was “private,” “personal” and “quiet.”

It was nothing of the kind. In easily observable fact, Kennedy’s religious display was public, vocal and coercive, as demonstrated by testimony from football players and other community members and by video and photographs of the coach surrounded by crowds of people on bent knee. According to an amicus brief filed by one of Kennedy’s football players and seven other members of the community on behalf of the school district, participation in Kennedy’s prayers was “expected.”

But this court’s right-wing majority is following the dictum of our Trumpian age: Objective truth doesn’t matter. Subjective belief — specifically the beliefs of the court’s religious-right majority — does. The Kennedy decision wasn’t based on the facts but on belief in the face of facts. Moreover, those six justices are determined to foist their beliefs on the rest of the country.

In allowing for greater “religious expression,” the court curtailed the liberty of those whose prayers take other forms, Americans who practice non-Christian faiths and people who do not practice religion at all.

Students who walked off the field rather than take part in Kennedy’s prayers may have risked losing playing time and perhaps a path to a football scholarship. No athlete on a public-school team should have to pray to play.

“Kennedy v. Bremerton opens the door for so much more government promotion of religion and a great deal of religious favoritism by government officials,” Daniel Mach, director of the A.C.L.U.’s program on freedom of religion and belief, told me. “I think we are likely to see a lot more blatant religious favoritism by school officials who feel emboldened by the decision.”

This comes at a moment when, for the first time, a minority of Americans belong to a church, synagogue or mosque — only 47 percent in 2020, down from 70 percent in 1999. The number of nonbelievers is on the rise, with roughly one in four Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

This trend is surely part of what drives the resurgent Christian right, and it may well even be on the minds of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court . . . . . With their brand of religious dogma losing its purchase, they’re imposing it on the country themselves.

They target a vulnerable population. One atheist student on Kennedy’s team reported feeling coerced to participate. He described feeling “uncomfortable and unsafe” during a chaotic scene in which over 500 people stormed the field to join in Kennedy’s prayers. This deprived the player not only of his free-exercise rights, but also, according to the brief, of “his love for football, lasting friendships with his teammates and the respect he otherwise earned from his coaches.”

Those who objected to Kennedy’s behavior similarly faced harassment in their communities and on social media. When Jennifer Chamberlin, a teacher in the school district, came out publicly in favor of her employer, she became, in her words, “a social pariah.”

Such intolerance mirrors the strong-arming intentions of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Unhappy with what much of the country believes, the court’s right wing chooses to believe what it would like and foists the results on the rest of us. Just like Coach Kennedy, they’re out to proselytize.

One has to wonder when the majority will belatedly rise up and say "enough!"