When Conservative Supreme Justices Revolt

CNN has been carrying pieces looking at the the just finished term of the U.S. Supreme Court and the manner in which two justices, Gorsuch and Roberts delivered decisions that will prove to be on the right side of morality and history but which caused apoplexy among Christofascists and others in the far right. Gorsuch's majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County which extended non-discrimination protectons to the LGBT community is perhaps the best example.  A piece in The Atlantic looks further into the failure of conservative justices to rule as demanded by Der Trumpenfurhrer and those demanding special rights for far right Christians.   While defeats at the Court may not lessen evangelical ardor for Trump on a wide scale - further proof of their moral bankruptcy - the just ended term must have a few believing they were betrayed by Trump's appointees.  Here are article excerpts:

Until two months ago, Leonard Leo was among the unambiguous winners of the Trump era. The bookish lawyer and architect of the conservative legal movement has spent the past three and a half years executing his decades-long vision of remaking the federal judiciary—he was instrumental in the Supreme Court appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch. But during the Court’s term this summer, an old conservative nightmare recurred: Republican-appointed justices, including Gorsuch, aligned with their liberal colleagues on big, consequential decisions about immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ protections.

In recent decades, conservative justices have consistently moved to the left once reaching the bench: Anthony Kennedy, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan, routinely cast the deciding vote against social conservatives on gay rights. Conservative-movement stalwarts have never forgiven David Souter, the George H. W. Bush appointee, for voting to uphold the constitutional right to abortion in the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, or for siding with his liberal colleagues in the battle over the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore. Leo spent his career building a conservative legal machine in Washington that would forestall this kind of leftward drift among Supreme Court justices. But this summer, the machine began to sputter.

Leo’s greatest strategic success, perhaps, has been convincing Donald Trump of his methodology: He helped Trump craft a list of potential Supreme Court nominees during the 2016 presidential campaign, which Trump widely advertised to demonstrate his conservative bona fides, and, in less than four years, Leo has shepherded 200 judges to their confirmation on the federal bench. But the president—and his supporters—made a pact premised on results. If even Leo can’t guarantee conservatives the rulings they crave, can Trump?

Conservative-movement activists were frustrated by setbacks at the Court this term, even going so far as to question Trump’s judicial vetting process. But Leo is taking the long view, arguing that his movement’s philosophical overhaul of the judiciary will yield dividends for years to come.

As they did for Trump’s other Supreme Court prospects, Leo and his team reviewed Gorsuch’s record for what they saw as independence and fearlessness. “His judicial record demonstrates a faithful commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said at Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing. “He has refused to litigate his own policy preferences from the bench.” In mid-June, however, Gorsuch shocked conservatives by writing the opinion in one of the biggest cases of the term, consolidated under Bostock v. Clayton County, arguing that federal civil-rights law protects LGBTQ employees from discriminatory practices. . . . . Backed by Chief Justice John Roberts and all four of the Court’s liberals, Gorsuch wrote that he reached his decision in favor of LGBTQ rights using textualism, the conservative judicial philosophy. “It’s no contest,” he wrote. “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”

Leading conservative lawyers in Washington were shocked. . . . . Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who wrote a glowing CNN op-ed in support of Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court, decried Bostock on the Senate floor as a flashing sign of danger for religious conservatives, who fear that extending civil-rights protections to LGBTQ people will threaten their freedom of conscience. “If this case makes anything clear, it is that the bargain that has been offered to religious conservatives for years now is a bad one,” Hawley said. In exchange for going along with the conservative establishment, religious voters are promised judges who will protect their rights, he said, but those judges consistently fall short.

Bostock was just the beginning of bruising conservative defeats during this term. In June Medical Services v. Russo, the Court’s first big case on abortion since Trump was elected, Roberts cast the deciding vote to strike down a Louisiana law that regulated abortion providers. This was a “disaster,” Hawley tweeted. “It is a big-time wake up call to religious conservatives.

As the term produced one defeat after another—on abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, and tribal affairs, conservative justices leading the way each time—the sniping from conservative commentators grew more pronounced. If these are the conclusions a majority-conservative Court comes to, they asked, is the conservative legal machine really as effective as Leo and his allies have claimed?

Trump has spent the past month making the case that religious conservatives need him to protect their legal rights. “If the Radical Left Democrats assume power, your Second Amendment, Right to Life, Secure Borders, and … Religious Liberty, among many other things, are OVER and GONE!” he tweeted. He promised to release a new list of potential Supreme Court nominees by September 1, and added the current justices to a long list of his political enemies: “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” he tweeted. Like [Trump] the president they support, religious conservatives are likely discontent with this term at the nation’s high court. And yet, their defeats may only redouble their commitment to supporting [Trump] the president.

Evangelicals Sold Their Souls and Have Little to Show for It

The vast majority of white evangelicals sold their souls and have backed Donald Trump, thus bear a large responsibility for putting the most immoral and incompetent individual ever in the White House.  In the process, evangelicals have shown their hypocrisy and own moral bankruptcy writ large and have helped drive the younger generations away from religion entirely and have thoroughly discredited the Christian brand.  Now, when I hear someone who supports Trump espousing their claimed religious beliefs, I immediately think of two words: liar and hypocrite.  the term modern day Pharisee also springs to mind.  I am hardly alone in this reaction.  So what have evangelicals received in return for prostituting themselves and destroying the Christian brand?  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out, not so much.  The ultimate irony is that their man Neil Gorsuch wrote the Supreme Court decision that extended non-discrimination protections to LGBT Americans.  Talk about a kick in the ass. Here are article highlights that lay out the little received in exchange for the moral degradation that evangelicals embraced:  

The closest thing social conservatives and evangelical supporters of President Donald Trump had to a conversation stopper, when pressed about their support for a president who is so manifestly corrupt, cruel, mendacious, and psychologically unwell, was a simple phrase: “But Gorsuch.”

Those two words were shorthand for their belief that their reverential devotion to Trump would result in great advances for their priorities and their policy agenda, and no priority was more important than the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump may be a flawed character, they argued, but at least he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

And then came Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. That is the case decided in mid-June in which the majority opinion, written by Justice Gorsuch, protected gay and transgender individuals from workplace discrimination, handing the LGBTQ movement a historic victory.

It was a crushing blow for the religious right, and it must have dawned on more than a few of Trump’s evangelical supporters that if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, the outcome of the case would have been the same; the only difference is that the margin probably would have been 7–2.

The Bostock case was not the only major legal setback for social conservatives and evangelical Christians. By a 5–4 margin, the Court—in June Medical Services v. Russo—delivered a significant defeat to the pro-life movement, striking down as unconstitutional a Louisiana law that could have left the state with only a single abortion clinic. This dashed the hopes of those who were counting on Trump’s appointees to lead the Court in overturning Roe v. Wade. (Both of Trump’s Supreme Court choices were in the minority.)

Social conservatives can point to some important religious-liberty victories. But overall, this term was a judicial gut punch for the president’s evangelical supporters. The “but Gorsuch” argument has not been destroyed, but it has been substantially weakened.

Legislatively, Trump, compared with other presidents, has not achieved all that much for the pro-life cause and religious-liberties protection. . . . . Elsewhere, Trump has engaged in a bromance with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the worst persecutor of Christians in the world, and established more intimate and admiring relationships with many of the world’s despots than with leaders of America’s traditional allies. And on issues that have traditionally concerned conservative evangelicals, such as fiscal responsibility and limited government, Trump has been awful: The deficit and the debt exploded under his watch, even pre-pandemic.

Based strictly on the standard of advancing causes that conservative evangelicals most care about, a fair-minded assessment of the Trump record is that some important things were achieved, especially in appointing federal judges. That clearly would not have happened in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But in virtually every other area, including the outcome of several key Supreme Court decisions, Trump has fallen short of the promises and expectations.

Now think about what the cost has been of the uncritical support given to Trump by evangelical Christians. For now, focus just on this: Christians who are supporters of the president have braided themselves to a man who in just the past few days and weeks tweeted a video of a supporter shouting “white power” (he later deleted it but has yet to denounce it); attacked NASCAR’s only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, while also criticizing the decision by NASCAR to ban Confederate flags from its races; threatened to veto this year’s annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases honoring Confederate military leaders; referred to COVID-19 as “kung flu” during a speech at a church in Phoenix; and blasted two sports teams, the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, for considering name changes because of concerns by supporters of those franchises that those team names give undue offense.

The white supremacist Richard Spencer, describing the neo-Nazi and white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, told The Atlantic, “There is no question that Charlottesville wouldn’t have occurred without Trump.

For his whole life, before and since becoming president, Trump has exploited racial divisions and appealed to racial resentments. The president is now doing so more, not less, than in the past, despite the fact—and probably because of the fact—that America is in the grips of a pandemic that he and his administration have badly bungled and that has claimed more than 130,000 American lives.

As The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out on July 6, “Almost every day in the last two weeks, Mr. Trump has sought to stoke white fear and resentment.”

White evangelicals are the core of Trump’s political support, and while the overwhelming number of the president’s evangelical supporters may not be racist, they are willing to back a man who openly attempts to divide people by race. That would be enough of an indictment, but the situation is actually a good deal worse than that, since Trump’s eagerness to inflame ugly passions is only one thread in his depraved moral tapestry.

My hunch is that at the beginning of this Faustian bargain, most evangelicals didn’t imagine it would come to this, with them defending the indefensible, tarnishing their reputations, and doing incalculable damage to their causes.

The Trump presidency, which has produced few significant legislative or governing achievements, has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement. . . . . Much of the evangelical movement, in aligning itself with Donald Trump, has shown itself to be graceless and joyless, seized by fear, hypocritical, censorious, and filled with grievances.

One pastor of a large church on the Pacific Coast told me: “There are many reasons why young people are turning away from the Church, but my observation is, Trump has vastly accelerated that trend. He’s put it into hyperdrive.” . . . . Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

In the midst of the wreckage, Trump’s evangelical supporters will undoubtedly comfort themselves with this thought: They got Gorsuch.

Mary Trump's Tell All Book

While the public may not know the details of Donald Trump's tax returns until after the November, 2020, election, the Supreme Court rulings yesterday mean that eventually the New York prosecutors will have access to them and they could well help lay a basis for prosecutions against Trump and/or his businesses. Meanwhile, Trump's niece's  book will hit the shelves a week ahead of schedule and will give a further look into the soulless man who currently occupies the White House.  Some of what is revealed is already known, but the family details and the malignant picture of Trump are telling and come just as Trump is already sinking in the polls - largely do to his own incompetence and dishonesty. A column in the Washington Post by Trump's nemesis, George Conway looks at the convergence of the book's details and the Supreme Court ruling.  Here are highlights:

What do a gripping family tell-all book and a momentous Supreme Court decision have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out.

The book, to be published next week, comes from Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist who happens also to be niece of Donald Trump, the president of the United States. It describes how Donald Trump has been protected by institutions his entire life.

Trump v. Vance, the Supreme Court case decided Thursday, illustrates how the president has pushed those protections to the limit — and how they’re about to end.

Mary Trump’s ”Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” tells a remarkable story, the broad strokes of which many already knew. Mary Trump offers a tale of what she calls “malignant” family dysfunction, and how it produced a malignantly dysfunctional president.

It’s an unsparing and relentlessly detailed account. Her professional judgments about the president’s indisputable narcissism and, perhaps, sociopathy dovetail with those that other experts have reached before. Yet it’s not the possible diagnoses that give Mary Trump’s book its punch. It’s the factual detail — detail that only a family member could provide.

According to the book, Donald Trump paid someone to take the SAT for him. He also tried to trick his mentally declining father into signing a codicil that would have stripped his siblings of their inheritances. Her specifics all lead to the same brutal conclusions: “the sum total of who my uncle is,” she says, consists of “lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications.” He’s “incapable of growing, learning, or evolving.” He lacks true competence, his “real skills” being “self-aggrandizement, lying, and sleight of hand.” His own sister, a former federal appellate judge, thinks of her brother as a “clown,” unsuited for office. (Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, called ”Too Much and Never Enough” “a book of falsehoods.”)

Above all, Mary Trump’s point is that her uncle has spent his life being protected from the consequences of his actions and shortcomings. It’s as though “Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life,” she writes, “so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” Far from being the virtually self-made man he has always pretended to be, Donald Trump was the “vanity project” of his father, whose money he used “to prop up an illusion” of success. When sales of assets of his father’s estate weren’t enough to clean up his finances, a television producer, through artful editing and image-making, “presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon” — something he never managed to be.

[Trump] has sought the ultimate institutional protection by invoking the presidency to serve his ends. For Donald Trump, the office has served as a bully pulpit from which he could lie and self-promote, with aides to solve, deflect or cover up his self-inflicted problems. In Vance, Trump tried to leverage the presidency for his personal benefit to an unprecedented extreme: His lawyers argued that the presidency should protect not just him from the legal consequences of his conduct — but his businesses, too.

The case, ironically, came about partly because of Mary Trump. As her book explains, she became a principal confidential source for a New York Times exposé that described how the Trump Organization, over many years, may have dodged taxes. Those allegations became part of the predicate for a New York state criminal investigation that the president sued to curtail. Trump argued that, because he’s president, not even his accountants had to respond to the district attorney’s subpoena.

The Supreme Court would have none of it. Its decision rejected Trump’s narcissistic vision of the presidency. “In our judicial system,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the court, “the public has a right to every man’s evidence.” And that includes a president’s evidence. Just as other presidents have “uniformly” given evidence when required of them, the court held, so, too will Donald Trump and his businesses and accountants. . . . . As Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion aptly put, “no one is above the law.”

[F]or Donald Trump personally, his niece’s book and the Supreme Court’s decision may someday be remembered as the beginning of the end of his institutional protections. And not just in a legal sense. Much of the power of the presidency comes from the perception of it, and that perception is now waning as the president bleeds out in the polls. As that power ebbs, more Mary Trumps and John Boltons will tell their stories, or give their evidence to investigators, with ever less fear.

As Mary Trump puts it in her book, “the walls” of her uncle’s “very expensive and well-guarded padded cell are starting to disintegrate.” Come January, they should be gone for good.

Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Bid to End DACA

This week has not been a good week for Donald Trump and his racist/Christofascist base. On a number of fronts - especially LGBT rights and today the so-called Dreamers - the Supreme Court has handed Trump and his Department of Justice that reminds one of 1930's Germany major loses.  Frankly, defeat could not happen to more deserving people.  In both rulings, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the so-called liberal Justices to hand Trump defeat - suggesting to me that Roberts cares more about his place in history and the legitimacy of the Court in the eyes of a majority of Americans than her cares about pleasing the ugliest elements of today's Republican Party - including the horrific occupant of the White House. The sad truth is that Trump's actions were motivated by his hatred of non-whites and his desire to pander to the white supremacist/Christofascist base of his support.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at today's ruling.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the program protecting undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, a reprieve for nearly 650,000 recipients known as “dreamers.”

The 5-to-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., stunned President Trump, who said in a tweet that it and a ruling earlier this week that federal law protects LGBTQ workers were “shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives.”

Roberts was in the majority in both cases, and Thursday’s ruling showed once again the pivotal role he now plays at the center of the court.

His low-key ruling was technical — the administration had not provided proper legal justification, he said, for ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program implemented by President Barack Obama eight years ago. It allows qualified enrollees to work, study and remain in the United States on a renewable permit.

Trump has often suggested the conservative-leaning Supreme Court would protect him against adverse rulings from lower-court judges. But Roberts has at times joined the court’s liberal members — as happened Thursday — to make clear for [Trump] the president that his administration does not make the rules.

Whether this pattern continues over the coming weeks will frame what already has proved to be one of the court’s most controversial terms in years.

Still to come: decisions on Trump’s long-running legal battle to shield his private financial records from Congress and a New York prosecutor; several cases involving the separation of church and state; and the court’s first reexamination of abortion rights since Trump’s nominees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, ascended to the bench.

Politicians on the other side of the issue were elated, even if they were as stunned as Trump seemed to be.

“I cannot — the Supreme Court, who would’ve thought, would have so many good decisions in one week, who would’ve thought . . . wow,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), seemingly overcome with emotion.

Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, advised the new administration to end it, saying it was illegal.

But lower courts found that directive questionable. At any rate, they said, the Department of Homeland Security did not properly weigh how ending the program would affect those who had come to rely on its protections against deportation, and the ability to work legally. Roberts agreed.

He added: “We address only whether the [Department of Homeland Security] complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”

“Since 2012, DACA recipients have enrolled in degree programs, embarked on careers, started businesses, purchased homes, and even married and had children, all in reliance” on the DACA program, Roberts wrote, quoting from briefs in the case.

“The consequences of the rescission, [advocates] emphasize, would ‘radiate outward’ to DACA recipients’ families, including their 200,000 U.S.-citizen children, to the schools where DACA recipients study and teach, and to the employers who have invested time and money in training them. . . . In addition, excluding DACA recipients from the lawful labor force may, they tell us, result in the loss of $215 billion in economic activity and an associated $60 billion in federal tax revenue over the next ten years.”

Immigration advocates were euphoric over the court’s actions.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), who led a coalition of 20 states and the District of Columbia in bringing the challenge, said in a statement that ending DACA “would have been cruel to the hundreds of thousands of Dreamers who call America home, and it would have been bad for our nation’s health.”

Nearly 800,000 people over the years have taken part in the program. More than 90 percent are employed and 45 percent are in school, according to one government study. Advocates recently told the Supreme Court that nearly 30,000 work in health care and that their work is necessary to fighting the coronavirus.

While the program does not provide a direct path to citizenship, it provides a temporary status that shields them from deportation and allows them to work. The status lasts for two years and can be renewed.

Technically, the Trump administration could restart the process and provide the justification the court’s majority said was required. But the process is long, and there is no evidence Congress would want to pass legislation that would end the program.

In fact, it is quite popular with the public. A Pew Research survey conducted this month found that 74 percent of Americans favored granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came illegally to the United States when they were children, while 24 percent opposed.

Trump is so sick that he may try to restart the process.  Hopefully, Americans will throw him out of office in November and end his reign of hate, bigotry and misogyny.

Is It Time to Claim Victory in the Gay Rights Struggle?

Since I came out in mid-life, the changes in the legal rights for LGBT Americans have been stunning.  When I first came out, in Virginia a same sex relationship could land one with a felony convictions, you could be thrown out of the military for being LGBT, same sex couples could not marry and you could be fired at will by bigoted employers - as I was.  In a piece in New York Magazine gay conservative (and former Republican) Andrew Sullivan looks at the changes, starting with this week's stunning U.S. Supreme Court ruling which granted employment non-discrimination protections to LGBT Americans nationwide. I believe that Sullivan's inclination to declare victory is premature for three reasons: (i) contrary to Sullivan's statement, public accommodation protections remain missing in the majority of states - in Virginia we will have them starting July 1st - (ii) there will be years of lawsuits against employers who ignore the new scope of Article VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and (iii) Christofascists will continue to strive to use alleged religious belief as an excuse for ignoring the law. That said, the wins have been immense and many LGBT rights organizations will find the focus of their efforts much more circumscribed - already Equality Virginia seems largely focused on transgender rights.  Here are highlights from Sullivan's column:

The last major obstacle to civil equality for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people was toppled this week — by another Republican-appointed justice, Neil Gorsuch. (It will surely be one of the ironies of this period that gay equality in America has been judicially delivered by white cis straight men nominated by, respectively, Ronald Reagan and Donald J. Trump). Gorsuch’s reasoning was far more constrained than Anthony Kennedy’s in Obergfell — which guaranteed gays and lesbians the right to civil marriage — and was, in many ways, a punt. He used the “sex” discrimination aspect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to retroactively grandfather in gay men, lesbians, and trans people. 

I don’t buy Gorsuch’s stated logic for an instant, of course. Rather, the ruling is a way to give gay and transgender people practical protection from discrimination in all states, without creating a new, explicit standard. And it doesn’t even pass Gorsuch’s own standard for textualism.

Gorsuch relies on a very simple idea to counter that point: that “sex” in the 1964 Act meant discrimination on the basis of being male or female, and that because gay men are penalized for having relations with men, rather than women, lesbians with women rather than men, and transgender people because they may no longer be the sex they started out as, it’s all a form of sex discrimination. It makes sense from that semantic point of view — but it’s a stretch on the substance. It dodges the core question of civil rights specifically for gay and transgender people, by subsuming us under the rubric of an existing category, sex. And it does so by mere textual reading of a statute, invoking no grander constitutional principles.

Nonetheless, its impact is immediate and transformative. Every single goal the gay-rights movement set out to achieve in my lifetime has now been won. Gays can marry; we can serve our country openly with pride; we are categorically protected from discrimination in employment [except] and public accommodations in every state.

[T]he remaining business: a battle between religious freedom and gay and transgender equality.

With any luck, we’ll reach a deal in Washington, D.C., rather like that achieved in Utah, where, in a very Mormon compromise, key measures against discrimination against gays were balanced with strong protections for religious freedom. . . . . . if Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics decide to die on the hill of firing gay people, they will experience a brutal defeat, and tarnish what credibility they still have. The Gospels are not about shunning sinners, or pharisaical puritanism. They are about the imperative to see in everyone the image of God.

But this comprehensive victory obviously presents the major institutions of the gay-rights movement with a dilemma: What do they exist for after this?

If current trends are any indication, these groups will simply merge into the broader intersectional left and become as concerned with, say, the rights of immigrants or racial minorities as they are with gay rights. In the political climate on the left at the moment, singling out gays as a separate category is increasingly impermissible.

None of this means that we live in a world where homophobia has ceased to exist, where discrimination is unknown, or where visceral fear of and disgust toward trans people does not endure. In fact, prejudice and discrimination against the unknown or different are part of human nature, and partly because of that, young trans people of color are very much at risk. So we can try to keep shifting the culture — and man, has it shifted — in order to lessen the prevalence of irrational prejudice. And we can ensure equality of opportunity and protections against discrimination in employment . . . . .
As Eleanor Roosevelt is believed to have said: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

One of the remarkable truths of gay history is how so many, under social and legal pressures exponentially greater than today, were able to withhold that consent. They were objectively victims, but subjectively free. It took real imagination, courage, and vision for these heroes and heroines of our past — and that past stretches for centuries before Stonewall — to live lives of authenticity and integrity. Now that the formal and legal obstacles to gay and transgender equality have been entirely removed, let’s follow their example, and forge a future that requires the consent and approval of no one but ourselves.

I like the last sentiment.  Part of being a self-accepting LGBT individual is gaining a mindset where you need no one else's approval for who you are.

With Luck, the Supreme Court’s Bostock Ruling May Destroy the GOP Coalition

With luck evangelicals will come to the realization that the current Republican Party has never cared for them or embraced their causes beyond lip service and the pandering of Donald Trump.  The GOP's real interest has always been focused on corporate America and what benefits corporate America.  In the amicus briefs filed in the combined cases under Bostock v. Clayton County, corporate America sought a ruling in support of LGBT Americans that would curb legalized religious based discrimination that interfered with both corporate America's recruiting/hiring efforts and  the sensibilities of wealthy, educated CEO's.  Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered for gays and for corporate America in his majority opinion and left evangelicals and the scamvangelists who routinely fleece them reeling and engaging in spittle flecked rants.  Gorsuch's ruling was right under the wording of Title VII, right under moral standards - no one is more immoral than evangelicals - and on the right side of history.  As we move into the 2020 elections, with luck evangelicals will defect from the GOP which has always viewed them as useful idiot. A piece in the Washington Post looks at this possibliity.  Here are highlights:

President Trump won the presidency in part because he rallied religious voters with his promise to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death with someone who would protect their values. It is thus ironic that the opinion of Scalia’s replacement, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, in Monday’s decision holding that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employment discrimination against LGBTQ Americans, may start the unraveling of the coalition behind Trump — and the Republican Party.

Strongly religious voters have gravitated toward the Republican Party for some time now, but it wasn’t always this way. . . . . Clinton won the white Catholic vote, and Reagan won it in his two races by roughly the same margins that he won overall. Catholics did not tilt Republican in the 1980s or 1990s, and the evangelical GOP tilt was significantly less than it is today.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows this started to change in 2000, as the culture war led religious voters to increasingly back Republicans. In 2000, Bush won white Catholics by seven points while losing the national vote by about half a point. That difference between the white Catholic vote and the national vote grew with each succeeding election, rising to 11 points in 2004, 12 points in 2008, and 23 points in 2012. Evangelical voters made a similar shift. . . . The inference is clear: The more that secular elements within the Democratic Party successfully pushed their cultural agenda, the more religious voters moved to Republicans.

Trump moved these figures to new, astronomical heights. He won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote and 60 percent of the white Catholic vote even while losing the national popular vote by 2 percentage points. White evangelicals voted 67 points more Republican than the nation as a whole, while white Catholics voted 25 points more Republican than the nation.

Concern about the Supreme Court’s role in the culture wars clearly impacted this dramatic shift. The 2016 exit poll found that 21 percent of all voters said Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their vote; Trump carried them by a 56 to 41 percent margin. It’s clear that fear of a culturally liberal court drove a crucial number of normally Democratic-supporting white voters to back Trump.

Gorsuch’s decision Monday could throw all of this into the political dustbin. Regardless of the decision’s legal merits, religious voters clearly expected Gorsuch and his fellow Trump appointee, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, to oppose progressive attempts to advance their cultural agenda through the courts. “But Gorsuch” was a common phrase used to justify continued support for Trump among religiously motivated voters throughout 2017 and 2018. Now that Gorsuch has proved himself untrustworthy in their eyes, they would be right to question whether Republican assurances meant anything at all. Indeed, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), has already said as much on the Senate floor.

Even a small reduction in the Republican margin among the devout will destroy any hope Trump will be reelected. Evangelical voters made up between 21 and 38 percent of the vote in the key Southern states of Florida, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina in 2016.

If his margins among this demographic fell by only 10 points this year, he would lose Florida and North Carolina based on his 2016 result and would even lose Georgia and Texas if the 2018 election returns are a better measure of those states’ current partisan breakdowns.

Trump’s hold on the Midwestern “blue wall” is also imperiled by erosion in religious voters’ support.

Republicans and Trump will need to confront this challenge sooner rather than later. Trump will need to spend more time shoring up his support among religious voters than he might like, likely stressing religious liberty and pro-life measures. Congressional Republicans would also be well advised to demonstrate their support for measures important to these voters. None of this, however, can fully replace what these voters’ faith in Republicans ability to appoint the right people to the Supreme Court provided. For these voters, Trump and the GOP were tested and found wanting.

Let's hope evangelicals belatedly wake up to the fact that congressional Republicans never really cared about  evangelicals' litmus test issues.

The Supreme Court’s LGBT Ruling Will Extend Far Beyond Employment Law

Justices Gorsuch and Roberts: targets of Christofascist venom.

Yesterday's much welcomed U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County was limited to Article VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and focused on employment discrimination.  However, the spill over effect will likely spread much farther and impact the application of other statutes that bar discrimination based on sex.  One likely victim of the ruling - even though court challenges will likely be required - is the Trump/Pence regimes efforts to roll back Obama era rules that bar discrimination in the health care realm. Applying the reasoning of Bostock, the Department of Health and Human Service's re-write of the rules runs head on into what the Court just ruled is illegal discrimination. Yes, the Christofascists are indeed seething because Bostock now provides a further weapon against their demands that the have a license to discriminate. A piece in Mother Jones looks at the likely spill over effects.  The irony, of course, is that a Trump appointee wrote the ruling,  Here are highlights:

On Monday, the Supreme Court handed LGBTQ Americans one of their biggest civil rights victories yet. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that gender identity and sexual orientation were protected under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on sex discrimination in employment. The decision means LBGTQ folks can no longer lose their jobs simply for being queer. 

“In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” writes Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, in the majority opinion. “There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

The ruling provides some much-needed clarity for lower courts and state officials, who are currently working with a hodgepodge of different (and sometimes conflicting) nondiscrimination policies.  

And though the case was specific to employment discrimination, the implications beyond the workplace are huge. The ruling won’t directly overturn discriminatory policies outside the realm of employment, says Sharon McGowan, Legal Director for Lambda Legal—which argued one of the Title VII cases before the Second Circuit Court—but it does set a precedent that makes it incredibly difficult to exclude gay and transgender people from other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. 

Take, for example, the Fair Housing Act. In 1974, the act was amended to prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of sex, but to date, only 24 states interpret that to include LGBTQ people (or have passed state legislation that explicitly includes them). One additional state, Wisconsin, prohibits discrimination against gay people, but not transgender people. Through the years, studies have shown that LGBTQ renters and home owners have been overcharged, less likely to secure rental housing or even evicted because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Experts say the Supreme Court ruling could also effect things like Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972—which prohibits sex discrimination in education and has recently been weaponized against transgender student athletes—and health care nondiscrimination policies. 

Just last week, Trump’s Health and Human Services Department released a prepublication version of a rule change that would roll back protections for transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act. The change is meant to undo an Obama-era policy that barred providers and insurance from rejecting care based on gender identity.

“There is still a chance for HHS to see the error of their ways and pull the rule back and fix their mistake, which I hope they will do,” McGowan says. “But assuming that they’re going to continue to forge ahead, they basically have put forth a rule that says ‘we, in the federal government, think that sex discrimination doesn’t mean the things that the Supreme Court has just said sex discrimination means.’

But now, the bad news: Monday’s Supreme Court ruling does nothing for laws that don’t include sex in their nondiscrimination policies—and unfortunately there are more of them than you might think. Federal law prohibits discrimination in public accommodations (e.g. restaurants, retail businesses, parks, libraries) based on race, color, religion and national origin only. The same is true of discrimination prohibitions in certain federally funded programs. 

“I remain more optimistic than I’ve ever been, that we will continue to succeed in rooting out discrimination in all of its forms,” says McGowan. “But I do think that there are going to be issues that that many courts—particularly courts that are hostile to the underlying pinnings of these rulings—may try to find wiggle room maybe where it doesn’t exist. We know that our work is going to continue.”

The struggle for full equality under the law continues.

"Religious Liberty" - The Christofascists' Euphemism for the Mistreatment of Others

Aided by the Trump/Pence regime Christofascists have worked to conflate the terms "religious liberty" and "religious freedom" as part of their demand that they have special rights and privileges, not the least of which is carte blanche to discriminate against and to mistreat others.  Sadly, much of the mainstream media has given cover for such self-centered hate merchants by using these two terms and failing to describe the Christofascists' agenda for what it is: the right to discriminate at will and to be above the laws that govern the rest of us.  The same holds true for referring to these people as "Christian conservatives" rather than as bigots or those who embrace ignorance in the face of modern knowledge.  Today's Supreme Court ruling will hopefully shine a spotlight on the dis-ingenuousness of the Christofascists' word game and their continued demand that they be put above the law - something the Founders never contemplated. A piece in the Washington Post looks at more of this Christofascist effort to conflate religious freedom with unvarnished bigotry and often outright hatred of others.  Here are article excerpts:

In a landmark decision on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal law barring employment discrimination on the basis of sex also applies to sexuality and gender identity.

The decision was also met with alarm by several religious conservatives who fear what it could eventually mean for their [right to discriminate] religious freedom and how it could affect faith-based employers, including religious health-care providers, religious schools and social services operated by religious groups.

Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote that the ruling will make it harder for employers to operate according to their sincerely held beliefs.

The court’s 6-to-3 decision, written by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, was met with surprise because Gorsuch’s appointment by President Trump had spurred delight among social conservatives.

Some, including Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Andrew Walker and conservative commentator Erick Erickson, argued that Monday’s decision undercuts an argument from some Trump supporters that religious conservatives will vote for him based on his Supreme Court picks.

However, the court did not settle religious liberty questions in its Monday decision.

But worries about how Title VII may intersect with religious liberty are nothing new; they even predate the statute’s passage,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.

The court combined two cases to consider whether gay workers are protected under the law. Attorneys for the two employers involved in Monday’s decision were not arguing the cases on religious grounds. In one of the cases, the owner of a Michigan funeral home had argued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in a lower court but lost. It did not raise that argument in the appeal to the Supreme Court.

In 2012, the Supreme Court protected religious organizations from discrimination lawsuits brought by certain employees who are considered “ministers” of the faith. Two cases pending before the court concern whether teachers at parochial schools who do not primarily teach religion are among those who can’t sue.

While religious conservatives voiced concern, progressive faith leaders expressed support for the LGBT workers who won the case.

“Too often employers overstep the boundaries of personal religious freedom — the right to believe as we choose — to impose their beliefs on others through staffing decisions and workplace culture,” Katy Joseph, director of policy and advocacy at Interfaith Alliance, wrote in a statement. “Turning away LGBTQ+ job applicants and employees, or terminating their employment due to their identity, isn’t religious freedom — it’s discrimination.”

The Fairness for All Act, introduced last year in Congress, tried to reconcile nondiscrimination protections for people who are LGBT with protections for people of faith. It had the backing of groups such as the National Association of Evangelicals and the American Unity Fund.

Monday’s decision could kill those legislative efforts, said Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School.

“This will end all legislative bargaining over religious liberty in the gay-rights context,” Laycock wrote in an email. “There is no longer a deal to be had in which Congress passes a gay-rights law with religious exemptions; the religious side has nothing left to offer.”

Supreme Court: Yes to Gays, Clean Water and Sanctuary Cities, No to Trump/Pence

Today was a wonderful day for LGBT Americans as the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County ruled that existing civil rights non-discrimination laws regarding sex applied to LGBT citizens, thereby effectively making employment discrimination and other forms of anti-LGBT discrimination illegal nationwide. It was also a good day for California which saw the Court reject the Trump/Pence regime attack on so-called sanctuary cities   It was also a good day for environmental activists as the Court left the Clean Water Act intact.  The big loser was the Trump/Pence regime which was on the opposite side of the issue in all three cases.  The other big losers were white evangelical Christofascists who sought to have their bigotry and hatred placed above the law so that they could discriminate against LGBT citizens at will.  Indeed, some of the usually suspect in the Christofascist world are shrieking as if the world was ending - and also attacking Trump for his Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion.   As a gay man, it is hard to describe my feelings.  Had this decision been handed down almost 20 years earlier, I might have been spared a financial nightmare when I was forced from a law firm for being gay.  At the time, I had zero employment non-discrimination protections.  I am SO happy that in the future LGBT individuals may be spared the experience that befell me. A piece at SCOTUS Blog explains the importance and impact of this ruling:

In affirming that Title VII’s broad scope prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the Supreme Court immediately ended a form of stigmatic injury suffered by millions of citizens who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. The question whether the phrase “because of … sex” means what it says in the context of employer actions prohibited by Title VII has been definitively answered—it does. That is, because sexual orientation and gender identity cannot be explained as traits that someone has without making reference to the sex of the person, discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is also because of an individual’s sex. The Supreme Court also once again concluded that it makes no difference under the text of Title VII whether an employer intended also to discriminate based on an additional reason, like motherhood or the identity of one’s spouse, if sex is a basis for the decision.

With that legal uncertainty removed, gone too is the practical uncertainty faced by real individuals weighing questions of whether to make career moves, geographic moves or moves to reveal aspects of their personal lives by openly sharing their authentic selves at work.

The opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County fulfills the best promises of textualism. The Supreme Court’s confirmation that all people have the right to be given the full measure of protection afforded to them by laws having meaning anchored in the written word is a powerful statement about the enduring power of people-led movements.

Maryland, along with 20 other states and the District of Columbia, expressly prohibits employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity through statute or regulation. Title VII now definitively joins these statutes in prohibiting all forms of discrimination based on sex, including discrimination based on traits like sexual orientation and gender identity that cannot be separated from an individual’s sex. The Bostock decision affirms that citizens may rely on the achievement of broad legislative protections against discrimination to provide long-lasting victory.

Importantly, the confirmation of Title VII’s sweep immediately cements protections for federal government workers, no matter their state of residency, and for individuals who work in states that have not yet specifically prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In those states, LGBT workers facing discrimination may now bring complaints under Title VII to directly improve their own working conditions.

Other benefits will accrue over time. As Maryland and the 20 states and District of Columbia set forth in their amicus brief, discrimination is expensive. Reducing salary disparities, health care instability and increased health care costs due to the mental health effects of stigmatic discrimination will immediately benefit individuals and the states that care for them. There is also a body of evidence demonstrating that private industry benefits from reducing discrimination because of the increased creativity and productivity LGBT people bring to the workplace when they are included and when they are freed from the health effects of stigmatization. LGBT individuals and their families benefit from better working conditions, and so do states, which experience decreased use of their public benefits system and increased tax revenue as a result of increased innovation and productivity.

Indeed, everyone benefits except religious extremists - think Trump's evangelical base - motivated by hatred and a sick need to have others to denigrate so that they can feel a sense superiority.  

But, as noted, LBGT Americans were not the only winners today.  In its opinion in County of Maui v. Hawaiʻi Wildlife Fund the Court (including Justice Kavanaugh) sided with clean water advocates that point source discharges to navigable waters through groundwater are regulated under the Clean Water Act.   The Supreme Court also rejected the Trump administration’s effort to blow a big hole in the Clean Water Act’s protections for rivers, lakes, and oceans. As explained here these were defeats for the Trump/Pence regime:

In other words, the Clean Water Act prohibits unpermitted discharge of pollution “into navigable waters, or when the discharge reaches the same result through roughly similar means.” In doing so, the Court rejected the Trump administration’s polluter-friendly position in the clearest of terms: “We do not see how Congress could have intended to create such a large and obvious loophole in one of the key regulatory innovations of the Clean Water Act.”

Lastly, the Court also ended Trump's war on blue states that include so-call sanctuary cities.  A column in the Los Angeles Times looks at the Court's action (it is noteworthy that both of Trump's appointees ruled against his regime): 

Since his inauguration in 2017, President Trump has waged a mean-spirited, costly and unnecessary war against undocumented immigrants — many of whom have been living in this country for years and have been hard-working, law-abiding members of the their communities. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed Monday that states and cities can’t be forced to support that pernicious effort.

California has been a regular target of Trump’s anger and frustration, particularly after the state passed a so-called sanctuary law in 2017 that limits how state and local law enforcement agencies cooperate with federal immigration agents. Former Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions sued to overturn the state’s restrictions, complaining that California was trying to secede from federal law.

The Supreme Court brought that lawsuit to a halt Monday when it sided with California and rejected the Trump administration’s challenge. Notably, even Trump’s two appointees on the court — Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — refused to hear the administration’s appeal.

At least for now, my faith in the Court is somewhat restored.  It would seem that with Trump's decline in the polls, even his appointees to the Court have decided to put the law first and Trump's whims and misogyny last. 

The Supreme Court Is on the Brink

While the Supreme Court made the right call late last Friday in rejecting a church challenge to California's shutdown order involving church services, what is disturbing is that four of the justices (two are Trump appointees) put right wing ideology and a preference to grant special rights to far right christian groups - I use a small "c" because many are Christian in name only - ahead of public safety and religious freedom for all citizens. But for Chief Justice Roberts' shift to vote with the so-called "liberals," gubernatorial orders across the nation would have been struck down.  These four justices exemplify the extremists and ideologues that Trump and his Senate Republican enablers are appointing to life time positions on the federal bench.  The harm being done will last literally for decades.  Should Trump get to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court, the damage could be irreparable during the lifetimes of anyone over 40 years of age.  It is yet another reason Trump must be defeated in November.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the politicizing of the Court by Trump and the far right.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court made the indisputably right call last week when it refused to block California from limiting attendance at religious services in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.

Given the obvious difference between walking through a store and sitting among fellow worshipers for an hour or more, as well as the documented spread of the virus through church attendance in such places as Sacramento (71 cases), Seattle (32 cases) and South Korea (over 5,000 cases traced to one person at a religious service), California’s limits are both sensitive and sensible, hardly the basis for constitutional outrage or judicial second-guessing.

So why did the court’s order, issued as midnight approached on Friday night, fill me with dread rather than relief?

It was because in a ruling that should have been unanimous, the vote was 5 to 4. And it was because of who the four dissenters were: the four most conservative justices, two of them appointed by the president who a couple of months ago was demanding that churches be allowed to open by Easter and who, even before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was openly encouraging protests in the capitals of states not reopening as quickly as he would like.

As an astonished country witnessed on Monday night, as he [Trump] held a Bible in front of a church near the White House after demonstrators were violently cleared from his path, Donald Trump is using religion as a cultural wedge to deflect attention from the consequences of his own ineptitude. The recognition that four Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — would have invoked the court’s power to undermine fact-based public policy in the name of a misbegotten claim of religious discrimination was beyond depressing. It was terrifying.

Take a look at Justice Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion. “California’s latest safety guidelines discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses,” he wrote. “Such discrimination violates the First Amendment.”

It’s interesting that while Justices Gorsuch and Thomas signed Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion, Justice Alito did not. Perhaps he’s just too good a lawyer to subscribe to the flimsy analysis underlying this opinion. . . . . but he evidently couldn’t be bothered to explain his own dissenting vote. And no less than his fellow dissenters, he obviously inhaled the unfounded claim of religious discrimination that the president has injected into an atmosphere already saturated with polarizing rhetoric.

The concept of discrimination, properly understood, simply doesn’t fit this case. California is not subjecting things that are alike to treatment that’s different. Churches are not like the retail stores or “cannabis dispensaries” in Justice Kavanaugh’s list of “comparable secular businesses.” Sitting in communal worship for an hour or more is not like picking up a prescription, or a pizza, or an ounce of marijuana. You don’t need a degree in either law or public health to figure that out. If anything, California is giving churches preferential treatment, since other places where people gather in large numbers like lecture halls and theaters are still off limits.

So what was the dissenters’ problem?

Last weekend was also Shavuot, a major Jewish holiday. But it’s the Christian calendar about which recently appointed federal judges seem exclusively concerned. In April, Judge Justin Walker of the Federal District Court in Louisville, Ky., blocked that city from enforcing a ban on drive-in church services. “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter,” his overheated opinion began.

The only other opinion filed in this case was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, explaining why the court was denying the church’s request. I am willing to bet that he never intended to write anything; orders denying applications of this sort are typically issued without explanation.

But he must have concluded that the Kavanaugh dissent couldn’t go unrebuted. Writing just for himself in five paragraphs devoid of rhetoric and labeled “concurring in denial of application for injunctive relief,” he offered a sober explanation of the obvious. He noted that “similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time.” The California rule, he observed, “exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks, and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”

After noting the severity of the pandemic and the “dynamic and fact-intensive” question of how to respond to it, Chief Justice Roberts said that the politically accountable state officials charged with answering that question were entitled to act within “broad limits” and “should not be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

Predictably, the chief justice was excoriated on the political right, in recognition that his vote was the one that mattered, just as in the Obamacare case eight years ago, for which the right has never forgiven him.

Everyone who cares about the Supreme Court is busy looking for signs of how John Roberts will navigate the political thicket in which the court finds itself, how he will reconcile his conservative heart and his institution- and history-minded head.

Justice Kavanaugh might have chosen to observe the norm, casting his vote without issuing an opinion that served only to raise the political temperature. Instead of that unspoken gesture toward collegiality, he gave us more proof that the polarization roiling the country has the Supreme Court in its grip. The court can’t save us; that much is clear. It can’t even save itself.

Supreme Court Rejects Church's Challenge To Coronavirus Rules

I have followed extreme right wing "Christian" organizations and related "family values" groups for over a quarter of a century now and several things are a common theme with them: (i) they view themselves above the law, (ii) they want their toxic version of Christianity to be the established religion in America, (iii) their followers seemingly hate almost everyone, but especially gays, who don't embrace their ugly beliefs, and (iv) most have very strong white supremacist overtones and some groups, like The Family Foundation here in Virginia, traces their roots back to strident segregationists.  Simply put, they are NOT nice people and they hold constitutional democracy in contempt unless they are in control and can discriminate and harm those they dislike - which is most of the nation's population.  

In June, 2016, the leaders of these groups - some of which are certified hate groups - made a pact with Donald Trump where they agreed to support a man who embodies the seven deadly sins if he gave them special rights. They bear a huge responsibility for Trump being in the White House and for his part Trump has delivered in the form of reactionary ideologues being appointed to the federal courts, the undoing of Obama administration policies that protected gays and other minorities, and supporting the myth that they are being persecuted when in reality what they face is a majority of Americans saying they are tired of the hate and bigotry that these false Christians represent.  

Enter the Covid-19 pandemic and many of the right wing churches have objected to social distancing and shutdown orders implemented to control the spread of the virus.  Some filed federal lawsuits challenging such orders and claiming they "discriminated against religion (a church in Virginia among them).  Late Friday, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court  rejected their self-centered and selfish claims and ruled against a church in California and several others.  The ruling should be dispositive of the Virginia lawsuit as well.  NPR looks at this welcome ruling that clearly states these people are not above the law.  Here are story excerpts:

The Supreme Court has rejected a California church's attempt to overturn the state's coronavirus restrictions on in-person religious services.

In a 5-4 decision issued late Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court's liberal bloc in upholding the state's right to impose limits on congregations in order to slow the spread of COVID-19.

"Although California's guidelines place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment," Roberts said, in an opinion that denied a request by the South Bay United Pentecostal Church for relief from the rules.

The Chula Vista-based house of worship sued Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, over an order limiting congregations to 25% capacity or 100 attendees, whichever is lower. The plaintiffs told the court its services typically attract 200 to 300 congregants.

Worship services and nonessential retail were halted for more than two months in California, which has recorded nearly 107,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and more than 4,000 deaths.

During the lawsuit's path through the lower courts, the state issued guidelines earlier this week allowing for a limited reopening — but that did not satisfy the plaintiffs, who felt the eased restrictions remained unconstitutional.

In rejecting that challenge, Roberts wrote that the Constitution generally grants broad leeway to state leaders in circumstances of medical uncertainty. In particular, the chief justice found that Newsom's order was consistent in limiting not just religious services, but also various kinds of activities "where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time."

"The notion that it is 'indisputably clear' that the Government's limitations are unconstitutional seems quite improbable," wrote Roberts.

The court's four reliably conservative justices — Samuel Alito Jr., Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas — dissented. Kavanaugh said the guidelines violate the First Amendment because they "discriminate against places of worship and in favor of comparable secular businesses."

In a separate case, the court also rejected a lawsuit from two churches in Illinois seeking to block Gov. J.B. Pritzker's rule limiting religious services to just 10 worshipers. Pritzker later modified the order to allow for up to 100 people at services, and the court denied the churches' request for relief without a noted dissent.

The limits on church services have been a flashpoint in the national conversation surrounding the coronavirus, with President Trump wading into the controversy earlier this month to push for churches' right to reopen. Even as many states — such as California and Illinois — have moved to loosen their restrictions in recent weeks, critics continue to argue that the rules on houses of worship are discriminatory. 

“The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic,” Roberts declared, “is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement.” The Constitution leaves such decisions “to the politically accountable officials of the state,” whose decisions “should not be subject to second-guessing” by judges who lack “background, competence, and expertise to assess public health.” Multiple coronavirus outbreaks in California have been traced back to religious services. California has good reason to treat churches more like concerts—where people “congregate in large groups” and “remain in close proximity for extended periods”—than grocery stores, where they can social distance. For courts, that should be the end of the matter.

But Kavanaugh’s assertion that California treats churches and “comparable secular businesses” differently begs the question: what is a comparable secular business? When it comes to the spread of infectious disease, is a church really just like a grocery store, where people spend as little time as possible, separated by aisles and shopping carts, rarely speaking to one another? Or is it more like a concert, where people congregate for lengthy periods, shoulder to shoulder, often speaking or singing and thereby spreading droplets that may contain the coronavirus?
 What is genuinely shocking about Kavanaugh’s dissent is that he does not even address this question. The dispute lies at the heart of the case, and Kavanaugh ignores it. He simply takes it as a given that churches are “comparable” to grocery stores when it comes to risk of spreading COVID-19. By warping the facts, Kavanaugh paints California’s rules as irrationally discriminatory, when in fact they are based on medical advice Newsom has right now. If the justice wants to override public health measures during a pandemic, shouldn’t he at least admit that he’s substituting his own scientific judgment for that of a democratically elected lawmaker’s?

Roberts seems to think so. His opinion ends with a clear swipe at Kavanaugh: “The notion that it is ‘indisputably clear’ that the Government’s limitations are unconstitutional,” the chief justice wrote, “seems quite improbable.” Roberts went out of his way to telegraph his displeasure with the raft of lawsuits contesting COVID-19 restrictions as unconstitutional burdens on religious liberty. Even in borderline cases, he suggested, courts must defer to the people’s representatives if they decide the health crisis requires limitations on public assemblies.

Kudos to Roberts for putting science and medical knowledge above myths and superstition.  Let the charlatans in pulpits and scamvangelist - who put money ahead of public safety - continue to lose money as their flocks stay home.