Christian Privilege Is Spreading Like a Virus

With the Covid-19 pandemic and the exemption of churches from bans on large gatherings in some states, we have seen something underscored that has been part of the Trump/GOP agenda all along and which played a key role in Trump's election: granting right wing Christians special rights and attacking Obama administration policies which protected the Christofascists' favorite targets: Gays, women seeking abortions, and non-Christians.  Combined with this, Trump has pandered to the charlatans who comprise leading figures in the so-called It's the reason evangelicals continue to support Trump, the living embodiment of the seven deadly sins.  What is equally disturbing is the effort to grant large amounts of taxpayer funds given to "Christian" organizations who them discriminate against the recipients of their allegedly charitable operations be they adoption/foster care services to or healthcare services.  All of these things make a mockery of the First Amendment's ban on an established religion.  Like it or not, America now has a de facto established religion: fundamentalist Christianity.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this dangerous trend.  Here are excerpts:

At the end of March, President Trump attempted to reassure Americans who are feeling the stress of the coronavirus pandemic by inviting Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, to speak at his daily press briefing.

Calling America a “nation [that] had turned his back on God,” Mr. Lindell encouraged people to “use this time at home to get back in the Word, read our Bibles, and spend time with our families.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, a Christian organization called Samaritan's Purse, led by notoriously anti-LGBTQ Christian supremacist Franklin Graham, has set up a field hospital in Central Park to treat overflow patients in cooperation with Mt. Sinai Hospital from nearby hospitals. Even during this pandemic, this organization requires volunteers and health care workers to sign a statement of faith, proclaiming that marriage is defined as "exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female" and that unbelievers are sentenced to "everlasting punishment in hell.” The group is well known for using its social services to proselytize. Last year, the organization received $39 million in government support. 

“Christian privilege” is the term atheists and nonreligious people frequently use to describe how Christian viewpoints, particularly conservative evangelical ones like those expressed by Lindell and Graham, are favored over nonreligious viewpoints in our law and culture. If you ask most Americans, they believe that the separation of church and state enshrined in the U.S. Constitution should apply to everyone and prevent the government from giving taxpayer dollars or special favoritism to churches. Sadly, this is less and less true.

Using their nearly unlimited wealth, access to powerful politicians like Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and increasing control over the court system, a tiny minority of Christian supremacists have done everything they can to establish special rights for religious organizations. These extremist groups are indeed achieving their goal: guaranteed government funding, free of oversight and exempt from nondiscrimination rules, to allow them to advance their religious mission as they see fit.

And there is evidence that this failure to live up to our constitutional precepts is having a significantly negative impact on those groups most reviled by Christian supremacists: LGBTQ people, religious minorities, and yes, atheists and nonreligious people.

Here is a bit of a preview: when it comes to health care, the tens of thousands of nonreligious people surveyed painted a bleak picture. One in ten (10.7 percent) faced discrimination in health care because of their nonreligious beliefs within the past three years, and in areas of specialized health such as mental health (17.7 percent) and substance abuse services (15.2 percent), the numbers were even higher.

I don’t trust Graham’s organization to offer unbiased services, and I don’t know why any nonreligious or LGBTQ person would. Perhaps more importantly, like many people, I would never choose to receive services from such a discriminatory organization, and it violates my right to religious freedom for the government to force me to do so by providing essential social services through these organizations.

If our constitutional protections are to mean anything, they must apply equally to everyone, even during emergencies. It is incumbent on all of us to not allow Christian privilege to overcome the rule of law.

Fox News: First Amendment Protects Lies and Untruths

Faced with a lawsuit alleging consumer fraud, Fox News is defending the lies and falsities it disseminated as protected free speech, exhibiting no concern for the lives it may have jeopardized both among its viewers and members of the larger public that they may infect with Covid-19.  In its court filing, Fox News basically conceded that it had disseminated falsehoods but said that the false nature of its "news" and lies of its anchors did not matter under the First Amendment's protection of free speech whether that speech is false or not. Indeed, the lack of any social conscience is stunning.  A piece in Salon looks at Fox News' defense of its false propaganda.  Here are highlights:

Fox News has moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Washington state group accusing the network of "deceptive" coronavirus coverage by arguing that the First Amendment protects "false" and "outrageous" speech.

The network's lawyers said in a motion seeking to dismiss the lawsuit that the "First Amendment does not permit censoring this type of speech based on the theory that it is 'false' or 'outrageous.' Nor does the law of the State of Washington."

The Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) filed a lawsuit in King County earlier this month seeking a court order barring the network from "interfering with reasonable and necessary measures to contain the virus by publishing further false and deceptive content."

The suit accused the network of violating the state's Consumer Protection Act by "falsely and deceptively disseminating 'news' via cable news contracts that the coronavirus was a 'hoax' and that it was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety."

The suit specifically cited Fox News host Sean Hannity and former Fox Business host Trish Regan for having "acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel coronavirus."

Hannity downplayed the threat of the coronavirus and argued it was less dangerous than the flu. Regan was fired shortly after accusing Democrats of pushing a "coronavirus impeachment scam." "It's Constitutional Law 101: the First Amendment protects our right to speak openly and freely on matters of public concern," Fox News Media general counsel Lily Fu Claffee said in a statement. "If WASHLITE doesn't like what we said, it can criticize us, but it can't silence us with a lawsuit." The network's lawyers argued that Hannity and Regan simply took part in an "intense public debate" over "how serious of a threat" the virus posed, . . . . Legal experts largely agreed with the network's position that the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed.

Catherine Clark, an attorney for WASHLITE, vowed to respond to the motion and told Variety that the suit "was not about prohibiting free speech, but making sure that news organizations convey accurate information."

Legal culpability aside, media analysts have widely criticized Fox News for putting their viewers at risk by downplaying the threat posed by the virus, which has now killed 26,000 people in the United States.

"Fox failed its viewers and the broader public in ways both revealing and potentially lethal," wrote New York Times columnist Ben Smith.

A letter signed by more than 70 journalism professors around the country criticized Fox News for spreading "misinformation" about the virus.

Reflections on the Wrongly Decided Masterpiece Cakeshop Ruling

While Christofascists and parasitic "professional Christians" are heralding the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop as a huge victory, the case is no such thing and was very narrowly decided - and in my view, wrongly decided at that. The anti-gay baker should have been handed a full blown defeat.  The Court's sole basis for reversing the ruling of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission came down to finding that the Commission had exhibited "hostility to religion." The sad truth is that religion receives far, far more deference than it deserves in America.  Rather than being a positive good, religion - especially evangelical Christianity - sows hatred of others and exhibits rank hypocrisy and dishonesty virtually on a daily basis. Evangelical support of Donald Trump, an individual who is the antithesis of what evangelicals - the least educated of any religious group - claim to believe underscores the reality that their beliefs are selective and used as weapons against others. Under the First Amendment, people a free to believe the earth is flat, but that doesn't mean their belief is worthy of respect or deference by the rest of society. Moreover, religious belief is a choice and not an immutable characteristic like race, national origin, age, or sexual orientation. A column in the Washington Post looks at the limited nature of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling which does not afford Christofascists the victory they claim they won.  Here are column excerpts:

In law, as in less civil arenas of conflict, you can lose a battle but win the war. That’s what happened in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the case pitting a Christian baker against a gay couple who sought to buy a wedding cake on the same terms as any other customers.

The court ruled Monday in favor of the baker, but on the exceedingly narrow ground that the state civil rights commission’s consideration was biased by hostility toward religion. Importantly, the court declined to adopt the baker’s principal argument — and the only argument made by the Trump administration — that “expressive” businesses that object to gay and lesbian weddings have a First Amendment right to discriminate. On the contrary, the court reaffirmed our main point: that there is no general First Amendment exception to laws protecting LGBT customers from discrimination. When bakery owner Jack Phillips learned that they were going to use the cake to celebrate their wedding, he turned them away, claiming that his religion barred him from making a cake for a same-sex couple, even though he routinely made such cakes for opposite-sex couples.

The ACLU filed a complaint on behalf of the couple, claiming that Phillips’ actions violated Colorado’s public accommodations law, which forbids businesses that serve the public from denying service on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation and the like. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and next the Colorado Court of Appeals, ruled in our favor.

In the Supreme Court, the baker won, but not on the ground he principally advanced. His main argument was that where a business offers expressive products, the First Amendment prohibition on “compelled speech” bars the government from requiring the business to provide that product when it objects to doing so. The Trump administration backed that argument, . . . . [that] the First Amendment bars states from requiring them to provide them to gay and lesbian customers on the same terms as heterosexual customers.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, could not have been more clear in rejecting the argument that there is a First Amendment right to discriminate. He wrote that “it is a general rule that [religious and philosophical] objections do not allow business owners . . . to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.”

Kennedy acknowledged that a minister (who is not, of course, a business open to the public) could not be compelled to perform a same-sex wedding if his religious scruples prohibited it, but warned that “if that exception were not confined, then a long list of persons who provide goods and services for marriages and weddings might refuse to do so for gay persons, thus resulting in a community-wide stigma inconsistent with the history and dynamics of civil rights laws that ensure equal access to goods, services, and public accommodations.”

Why, then, did the baker win? The court  . . . cited a commissioner who said that “it is one of the most despicable piece of rhetoric that people can use to — to use their religion to hurt others.” It cited another commissioner saying that Phillips can believe “what he wants to believe,” but cannot act on that belief “if he decides to do business in the state.” 

That aspect of the ruling is wrong. “Despicable” was an unfortunate choice of words, but the commissioner’s statement that one cannot invoke religion to harm others is actually black-letter constitutional law, as is the notion that one cannot invoke religion to avoid complying with a general rule requiring businesses not to discriminate.

But what’s critical is that this reasoning is a one-time ruling for this case only. The court made clear that states are free to require businesses, including bakers, to serve gay and lesbian customers equally, including in the provision of wedding cakes. In fact, Charlie Craig and David Mullins could go right back into Masterpiece Cakeshop today and request a cake to celebrate their wedding anniversary — and if Jack Phillips refused them, he would have no First Amendment right to turn them away.

Sadly, Christofascists are now bellowing that religion deserves deference when that is NOT what the court ruled. Their behavior is not surprising given that over the course of the 25+ years that I have tracked Christian "family values" organizations, they are among the most dishonest groups one can find (outside of perhaps the Trump White House)and the only safe assumption is that, if their lips are moving, odds are strong that they are lying.  So much for "Christian" values. 

Perverting the First Amendment in Order to Limit the Rights of Others

When the Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to state (i) that there would be no established church - e.g., no government sponsored/preferred church - , and (ii) freedom of religion, that had concrete things in mind.  Prior to American independence, in many of the American colonies, the Church of England was the state church which meant that EVERY taxpayer paid toward the maintenance of the Church of England and its properties and that for marriages to be legal, that had to be confirmed by the Church of England regardless of one's religious affiliation (such was the case in Virginia).   Secondly, prior to independence, one could suffer legal repercussions and civil disabilities if one did not belong to the right denomination. These are the things the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent.  Now, Christofascists are seeking to pervert this original intent and secure Christian extremists the right to ignore non-discrimination laws if the targets of their discrimination offend their "religious beliefs."  Stated another way, these extremists want special rights to discriminate against others based on the targets' religious beliefs or failure to adhere to Christofascist dogma.  It is an utter travesty.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this perverse effort and some of its proponents, including the farcically named Alliance Defending Freedom which only wants rights and freedom for Christofascists.  The Times piece fails to note that Alliance Defending Freedom is a certified hate group.  Here are article excerpts:

The details were spare when the event appeared this summer on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s public schedule. He would speak on religious liberty to a group called Alliance Defending Freedom. No exact location was specified. No news media would be allowed in.

Only after an outcry over such secrecy — and the anti-gay rights positions of its sponsor — did a transcript of Mr. Sessions’s remarks emerge on a conservative website. “Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack,” he told the gathering in Orange County, Calif. “The challenges our nation faces today concerning our historic First Amendment right to the ‘free exercise’ of our faith have become acute.”

Mr. Sessions’s focus was not an accident. The First Amendment has become the most powerful weapon of social conservatives fighting to limit the separation of church and state and to roll back laws on same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

Few groups have done more to advance this body of legal thinking than the Alliance Defending Freedom. It has a larger footprint than most, with more than 3,000 lawyers working on behalf of its causes around the world. And it is better financed, bringing in $51.5 million in revenue for the 2015-16 tax year, more than the American Civil Liberties Union.

[I]t hopes to carve out an even wider sphere of protected religious expression this term when the justices are to hear two more of its cases, one a challenge to a California law that requires “crisis pregnancy centers,” which are run by abortion opponents, to provide women with information on how to obtain an abortion, and another in which it represents a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.

[T]he Colorado baker’s case, which the court will hear next month, will test whether groups like the alliance can persuade the court to similarly blunt the sweep of Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that enshrined same-sex marriage into law, as well as the anti-discrimination laws protecting gay men and lesbians.

If there is a battle somewhere to restrict protections for gay men, lesbians or transgender people, chances are the alliance is there fighting it. . . . . It has tried to stop a Charlotte, N.C., law that gave transgender people the right to use the bathroom of their choice. It backed the failed attempt by the Arizona legislature in 2014 to allow businesses to cite religious freedom in turning away same-sex couples.

But civil liberties groups and gay rights advocates say that Alliance Defending Freedom’s arguments about religious liberty and free expression mask another motivation: a deep-seated belief that gay people are immoral and that no one should be forced to recognize them as ordinary members of society.

“They are a very powerful part of this broader movement, which is trying to bring a very particular biblical worldview into dominance at all levels of government and society,” said Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group.
 “They’ve got some very big, very clear goals,” said Mr. Montgomery, who has studied Alliance Defending Freedom since the group’s founding in 1994. . . .  One of those goals was to defend laws that criminalized gay and lesbian sexual conduct.

In a brief the alliance filed urging the Supreme Court not to overturn a Texas law that made homosexual activity illegal, its lawyers described gay men as diseased and as public health risks. The court decided 6 to 3 that the law was unconstitutional.

The United States is not the only place the group has been active. Before Belize’s highest court struck down a law last year that banned “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” the group sent activists there to work with local lawyers who were trying to keep the prohibition in place. In India, an Alliance Defending Freedom-affiliated lawyer was part of the legal team that has defended a similar law in the country’s Supreme Court.

How the alliance is approaching the case of the Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, is an illustration of its evolving public relations strategy. Gone are the fiery denunciations of gay men and lesbians as sinners and reprobates.  A sophisticated multimedia campaign, called “Justice for Jack,” portrays Mr. Phillips as the victim of heavy-handed state bureaucrats.

Gay rights advocates acknowledge what they are up against. “They know those are messages that work better, and they are no longer leading with the messages they used to, which are ‘gay people are pedophiles and we need to keep them away from our kids,’” said James Esseks, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who focuses on gender identity and sexual orientation issues. “It’s a very intentional shift, a very strategic shift.”

Back in Washington, the alliance’s close connections with Mr. Sessions’s Justice Department seem to be deepening. In September, the department filed a brief arguing that Mr. Phillips should not be forced to violate his faith.  There is no clear line between his speech and his clients,’” it said. “He is giving effect to their message by crafting a unique product with his own two hands.”

Today the Christofascists are targeting gays.  Tomorrow it could be Muslims, non-Christians in general, and, if the strong white supremacist element prevails, racial minorities.  These efforts need to be stopped.  One way of doing this is for the larger society to begin to understand that evangelical Christians are NOT nice, decent, moral people.  They are motivated by hatred, they are self-centered, they lie incessantly in the political arena, and they seek to force their beliefs on all - just like the established church in pre-American Revolution days which the Founders sought to prevent in the new nation.

The Case for Taxing Churches

Joel Osteen's taxpayer subsidized mansion

The myth behind the tax-exempt status of churches is that in theory they perform charitable works. The sad reality is that many do not or certainly not to those outside their home parishes/congregations.  Instead far to many, especially those espousing the prosperity gospel, provide obscenely plush lifestyles for their con-artist leaders pastors .  Worse yet, many engage in political action directly in opposition to applicable IRS rules.  Through out it all, every single American by default is forced to indirectly subsidized such hypocrisy filled churches and their operations - even as many of these churches work directly against the interest of taxpayers forced to subsidize their activities.  I have long advocated that churches should lose their tax-exempt status across the board except in specific instances where they provide a 100% charitable service open to ALL citizens.  Blogger friend Bob Felton shares this belief even more strongly.  He has put together  an indictment of tax-exempt statues for churches that can be found here.  The following are some brief excerpts please read the entire piece):

When Dylann Roof massacred 9-worshippers at a South Carolina church in the summer of 2015, the subsequently-discovered images of him draped in a confederate flag irrevocably linked the flag to the racism that drove him; one could no longer plausibly claim that display of the flag is an expression of respect for southern chivalry; magnolia and honeysuckle; velvet, genteel dusks and mint juleps.

Even so, when at its 2016 annual meeting the Southern Baptists considered a resolution discouraging display of the flag, the flag’s supporters were incensed. In short order the discussion digressed into a discussion of loyalties, and on that subject Southern Baptists on both sides of the discussion were agreed.

Here is the text of some typical tweets:
  “I am a Christian first and an American second.”
  “Following Christ will always trump being an American.”
  “If I ever have to choose between the cross and the American flag, I will choose the cross every time.”

Well … that’s their right. But what right have they to expect their fellow Americans to subsidize their America Second loyalties?

So, too, the Followers of Christ, a small Christian denomination headquartered in Oregon. They rely on verses such as James 5:15 to justify denying medical care to their children – and they have a cemetery with lots of little coffins to demonstrate their sincerity.

Similarly, following the massacre of 49-patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, there was no shortage of preachers eager to condemn the dead — to complain, even, that some of the victims survived.

We subsidize all of them, too.

Religious institutions have for so long enjoyed freedom from taxes that the privileged status of churches and clergy is part of our civic scenery: of course that megachurch can’t be expected to pay for its police and fire protection, for the construction and wear of the roads which service it, or taxes on the desirable property it occupies.

Why not?

And who knows that this presumption upon the public purse – now conservatively estimated at more than $70-billion a year, or $220 per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States — was debated even before the adoption of the Constitution, or that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were all firmly opposed to it?

The tax privileges enjoyed by churches – and synagogues, mosques, temples, seminaries, on and on – are incontestably contrary to the Founders’ intent.

Set aside for a moment the Constitutional intent, and ask yourself a simple, straightforward question: Why should any American citizen be obliged, against his will, to subsidize beliefs which he considers untrue and an engine of human misery, and which are clearly unrelated to any public purpose?

I should add, too, that I reject without qualification the claim that churches (et cetera) provide a community benefit whose value exceeds their cost to the community. If that were so, churches would not so strenuously resist completing and making available for public inspection the IRS-990 form, as all other non-profits are obliged to do.

They resist because the public accounting expected of Goodwill or The American Red Cross, say, would reveal that the claim is a lie. They resist because it would be difficult to explain why Pastor Steven Furtick lives in the largest privately-owned home in North Carolina. They resist because it would be difficult to explain how the expenditure by Mark Driscoll’s church to purchase enough copies of his book to make him a New York Timesbest-selling author serves the public interest.
  When the First Amendment is used to argue that churches cannot be expected to pay taxes, it is dispositive evidence that the speaker has given the matter no serious thought whatever.

It is time then, once for all, to end the tax privileges enjoyed by religion and to stop imposing upon American citizens a compulsory duty to support institutions innately opposed to reason, hostile to American ideals, morally responsible for Niagaras of bloodshed, and destructive of national unity.

Scalia Was an Intellectual Phony and a Bigot

Some say that is it bad form to speak ill of the dead.  I take the position that it is even poorer form to lie and speak well of those who don't deserve to be lauded simply because they are no longer among the living.  This latter concept is lost on those gushing with kind words for the late Antonin Scalia who, contrary to what one is hearing now, wasn't a brilliant jurist.  He was instead a pompous bigot in love with his own perceived but non-existent brilliance.  The constitutional rights of the many took a back seat to Scalia's own racial and religious prejudices and a number of his positions have lead to some of America's current problems, such as the horrific Citizens United decision and the unrestrained gun rights now pushing deaths by gun violence to exceed automobile accident deaths.  Americans should be giving a shy of relief with the man gone. A piece in Salon looks at the truth about Scalia's less than brilliant career.  A second piece looks at Scalia's undisguised animus toward LGBT Americans.  First, these highlights from Salon:

 Scalia was not a great judge: he was a bad one.  And his badness consisted precisely in his contempt for the rule of law, if by “the rule of law” one means the consistent application of legal principles, without regard to the political consequences of applying those principles in a consistent way.

One of Scalia’s many obnoxious qualities as a jurist was his remarkably pompous, pedantic, and obsessive insistence that the legal principles he (supposedly) preferred – textualism in statutory interpretation, originalism when reading the Constitution, and judicial restraint when dealing with democratically-enacted legal rules – were not merely his preferences, but simply “the law.”

Given that those principles are and always have been controversial among American judges, lawyers, and politicians, insisting that they ought to control judicial interpretation as a matter of definition makes about as much sense as arguing for the desirability of, say, a particular income tax rate by claiming that the advocate’s preferred rate simply is the “true” rate (in other words it’s a nonsensical argument on its face).

But this kind of question-begging nonsense was the least of Scalia’s judicial faults.  For the truth is that, far more than the average judge, Scalia had no real fidelity to the legal principles he claimed were synonymous with a faithful interpretation of the law.  Over and over during Scalia’s three decades on the Supreme Court, if one of his cherished interpretive principles got in the way of his political preferences, that principle got thrown overboard in a New York minute.

I will give just three out of many possible examples.  In affirmative action cases, Scalia insisted over and over again that the 14th Amendment required the government to follow color-blind policies.  There is no basis for this claim in either the text or history of the amendment.  Indeed Scalia simply ignored a rich historical record that reveals, among other things, that at the time the amendment was ratified, the federal government passed several laws granting special benefits to African-Americans, and only African-Americans.

No honest originalist reading of the Constitution would conclude that it prohibits affirmative action programs, but Justice Scalia was only interested in originalism to the extent that it advanced his political preferences.

Similarly, the men who drafted and ratified the First Amendment would, it’s safe to say, been shocked out of their wits if someone had told them they were granting the same free speech rights to corporations they were giving to persons.   Again as a historical matter, this idea is an almost wholly modern invention: indeed it would be hard to come up with a purer example of treating the Constitution as a “living document,” the meaning of which changes as social circumstances change.  In other words, it would be difficult to formulate a clearer violation of Scalia’s claim that the Constitution should be treated as if it is “dead dead dead.”

Finally, and most disgracefully, Justice Scalia played a key role in the judicial theft of the 2000 presidential election.  He was one of five justices who didn’t bother to come up with something resembling a coherent legal argument for intervening in Florida’s electoral process.  A bare majority of the Court handed the election to George W. Bush, and the judges making up that majority did so while trampling on the precise legal principles Justice Scalia, in particular, claimed to hold so dear: judicial restraint, originalist interpretation, and respect for states’ rights.

These examples are not rare deviations from an otherwise principled adherence to Scalia’s own conception of the rule of law: they were the standard operating procedure for the most over-rated justice in the history of the United States Supreme Court.

As for the piece looking at Scalia's animus toward LGBT citizens, here are excerpts:

It’s a blessed thing for a great many that Scalia is off our high court, though even in death, he continues to bring harm to many who may be silently thankful for his departure.

Our nation is home to an estimated 16 million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, an estimate based on a conservative 5 percent of the current U.S. population of 319 million. Scalia targeted, marginalized and slurred our community so often and so routinely, his hatred of LGBT Americans became something of a caricature.  But for us, it was no joke.

It’s important to understand that his bigotry was not only deeply felt, but had the ability to dramatically impact those who were its target.

Had Scalia had his way, for instance, laws criminalizing consensual homosexual sex in the privacy of the homes of consenting adults would still be in force in many states. See his ugly dissent in Lawrence v. Texas for proof, where he compares homosexuality to prostitution, bestiality, heroin use and incest.

To Scalia, such progress not only represented bad law, he didn’t consider LGBT Americans worthy of legal recognition or protection. He thought it entirely appropriate that Americans and their governments be allowed to discriminate against gays and lesbians, that the “moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct,” as he called it, was just and right. Expressing animus toward LGBT individuals and conduct was perfectly fair, to Scalia.

Given that, he saw no problem in denigrating our relationships and lifetime commitments, describing them as no different than roommate situations. He thought laws banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity amounted to undeserved “special rights.”

And he argued that “deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex” deserved no protection under the law, that states were well within their rights to make such relations illegal and to arrest and prosecute those engaging in such sexual activity.

Rather than mellowing with age, Scalia and his anti-gay bigotry seemed only to sharpen over the years. 

Simply put, America is a far better place with Antonin Scalia no longer among the living.  If there is a Hell, I suspect Scalia is now occupying his reserved seat.