Get ready to see nasty little piece of work, Caiden Cowger, turned into the latest "Christian martyr" by the far right hate industry. As you will recall Cowger - who not surprisingly hails from West Virginia - said among other things that "homosexuality is a "belief," and that he is disgusted by it," that "The person is not born that way, no matter what Lady Gaga says," and that "he used to be friends with several peers who came out as gay, and that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are responsible for making his peers gay." The backlash has been loud and furious and the organization that broadcasted Cowger's batshitery has taken Cowger off the air for engaging in hate speech. Would that more media organizations would cease giving platforms to hate merchants. Here are some highlights:
There's no more show for the teenager who generated an outsized firestorm online by claiming President Obama had turned his friends gay.
The recording service Spreaker has shut down Caiden Cowger's online radio show after deeming it hate speech, but it will let him continue as a user of the site.
"We’re really sorry, but the show The Caiden Cowger Program is not available," a message says instead. "Spreaker has deleted this show due to offensive contents."
“While we not only support free speech, we help it find its way to more people faster and easier with our service that is the audio equivalent of YouTube, but like them, we cannot and will not condone hate speech," said Spreaker CEO Francesco Baschieri in a statement. "Consequently, we have pulled down audio content from Caiden Cowgar, whose recent gay-bashing clearly crosses the line from free — to hate — speech.”
Cowger has been defended by CNN contributor Dana Loesch, who has a radio show called The Dana Show. Loesch at first said on Twitter that Cowger was just being "a conservative teen" and deserved praise for "civic participation." But then Loesch clarified that she not only hadn't listen to what Cowger said but also didn't necessarily agree with him. Instead, she claims it's Cowger who is the victim of bullying.
While some black pastors and black professional flim flam artists - I mean professional Christians - continue to be roiled by Barack Obama's endorsement of same sex marriage equality, rank and file members of the black community seem to be making a sea change in their views on civil gay marriage. First polls in Maryland showed a flip in support for marriage equality from a majority against to now a majority in support among black voters. Now, a poll in Florida indicates that a dramatic shift has occurred in black support for same sex marriage. Obviously, the anti-gay elements in the GOP and white professional Christian organizations that have long expected the black community to be their water carriers in the marriage wars cannot be happy. A piece in The Advocate looks at the Florida situation. Here are excerpts:
What a polling firm calls "the Obama effect" continues among black voters; this time, with a dramatic 48-point swing in Florida.
In September, Public Policy Polling found just 23% of Florida black voters supported marriage equality. Now not only do black voters support marriage equality, they favor it by a wide margin, 49% to 31%. It wasn't enough, though, to turn the entire state in favor of marriage with voters as a whole still opposed 45% to 42%.
PPP has identified a national trend of support shifting at the state level. First in North Carolina, 44% of African-Americans supported either marriage or civil unions just before a vote in May on Amendment One. That number shot up to 55% with opposition also falling drastically just days after President Obama announced his support.
Then in Maryland PPP pollster Tom Jensen said the firm had found a “major shift in opinion” among African-American voters, who a poll in May showed support the state's marriage equality law by 55% to 36%. The numbers had essentially flipped since March.
The white supremacist loving Tony Perkins must truly have his panties in a wad.
A post on Andrew Sullivan's blog links to a New York Times piece that looks at an interesting question: how racist are Barack Obama's detractors and the GOP base? The answer is quite racist. As the Times piece notes, by checking Google searches it possible to identify racist areas of the country. The winners? West Virginia and southern Mississippi. But even in supposedly progressive states one finds areas of stark racism. As a former Republican, I believe that there has always been an undercurrent of racism in some quarters of the GOP. Now, however, the racists within the Party don't even feel that they need to make an effort to hide their bigotry. Ironically - or perhaps not - the increased racism has corresponded with the growing power of the Christianists within the GOP. A coincidence? I think not. Here are highlights from the Times piece:
Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008 and 365 electoral votes, 95 more than he needed. Many naturally concluded that prejudice was not a major factor against a black presidential candidate in modern America. My research, a comparison of Americans’ Google searches and their voting patterns, found otherwise. If my results are correct, racial animus cost Mr. Obama many more votes than we may have realized.
Quantifying the effects of racial prejudice on voting is notoriously problematic. Few people admit bias in surveys. So I used a new tool, Google Insights, which tells researchers how often words are searched in different parts of the United States.
Can we really quantify racial prejudice in different parts of the country based solely on how often certain words are used on Google? Not perfectly, but remarkably well. Google, aggregating information from billions of searches, has an uncanny ability to reveal meaningful social patterns. “God” is Googled more often in the Bible Belt, “Lakers” in Los Angeles.
The conditions under which people use Google — online, most likely alone, not participating in an official survey — are ideal for capturing what they are really thinking and feeling.
And many Americans use Google to find racially charged material. I performed the somewhat unpleasant task of ranking states and media markets in the United States based on the proportion of their Google searches that included the word “nigger(s).”
The state with the highest racially charged search rate in the country was West Virginia. Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi.
Once I figured out which parts of the country had the highest racially charged search rates, I could test whether Mr. Obama underperformed in these areas. I predicted how many votes Mr. Obama should have received based on how many votes John Kerry received in 2004 plus the average gain achieved by other 2008 Democratic Congressional candidates. The results were striking: The higher the racially charged search rate in an area, the worse Mr. Obama did.
If my findings are correct, race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012. Most modern presidential elections are close. Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third. And prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.
In 2008, Mr. Obama rode an unusually strong tail wind. The economy was collapsing. The Iraq war was unpopular. Republicans took most of the blame. He was able to overcome the major obstacle of continuing racial prejudice in the United States. In 2012, the tail wind is gone; the obstacle likely remains.
Yep, the self-styled party of God and patriotism is also the party of racists and bigots. Am I surprised? Not at all. And it's another reason I could not remain a Republican.
I hope Maggie Gallagher, Tony Perkins, Pope Benedict XVI and their fellow anti-gay hate mongers are happy. Yet another gay teen has taken his own life to escape the Christianist approved and and sustained anti-gay bullying. Few prejudices and forms of bigotry continue to survive with church supported campaigns of hate, but anti-gay hate and prejudice is one of them. And even as young lives are needlessly ended, the self-congratulatory modern day Pharisees continue to pat themselves on the back and revel in their message of hate and bigotry. It sickens me beyond words and is one of the principal reasons I've more or less walked away from Christianity. Yes, there are "gay accepting" churches but they remain largely silent when it comes to openly and loudly challenging and condemning the hate merchants who have stolen control of the Christian moniker. Here are highlights from KFOX-TV 14 in El Paso:
EL PASO, Texas — An Andres High School student, Brandon Elizares, 16, took his own life on Saturday, according to his family and friends. KFOX14 News spoke Elizares's friends and mother, Zachalyn Elizares, at her Northeast home on Friday, and she said that her son was bullied at school for two years because he did not want to hide the fact that he was gay.
Elizares said that Brandon's friends told her that there was an incident on Friday at school where someone insulted her son and planned to fight him the next week.
Saturday, Elizares was running errands and came home to discover her son's body.
While speaking with KFOX14, Elizares tried to stay strong and hold back her tears as long as she could. But the thought of careless words and hateful threats brought on the tears.
"My son had every right to live his live the way that he wanted to, without having to fear that people would call him names or threaten to beat him up," Elizares said.
EPISD could not comment on this specific case, but did want to remind students that bullying needs to be reported.
"What a bully is looking for is to try to scare you not to report it, so that nothing is done," said Debra Carden, EPISD's bullying committee leader.
Religious based hate and prejudice is a cancer that needs to be removed from the face of the earth. Once again we see that at bottom, religion is a pervasive evil. It needs to be recognized as such and stripped of all its special rights and privileges.
It seems that the bitter old queens in dresses at the Vatican can't do anything right. Their program of deliberately hiding the rampant sexual abuse of children and youths by priests blew up in their face a decade ago and continues to explode literally daily somewhere around the world, costing the Church billions of dollars in the process. Lately, the Nazi Pope cannot even keep his private correspondence private and the hierarchy finds itself in a political war with the President of the United States. And then there's the issue of the troublesome, uppity American nuns who refuse to conform to the Vatican's version of keeping women barefoot and pregnant. Now, because of the Vatican's condemnation, an obscure book by an American nun on sexual ethics - which doesn't conform to the Vatican's own sick obsession with sex and anything pleasurable - has become a best seller. It couldn't happen to a group more deserving of humiliation and exposure as hypocrites. A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the Vatican's disastrous attack on Sr. Margaret A. Farley’s book. Here are some highlights:
If Margaret A. Farley’s fine theo-ethical work causes “grave harm to the faithful,” Catholics live very graced lives. War, poverty, ecocide, racism, colonialism, sex and gender injustices of all sorts come to mind in the “grave harm” category. But not in the wildest imagination of anyone other than a Vatican bureaucrat would Dr. Farley’s sexual ethics qualify.
Recent attention to her work only serves to deepen her impact and broaden her audience; 24 hours after news broke of the Vatican censure the book was propelled from an Amazon ranking of 142,982 to 16.
The June 4th Notification from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) [formerly known as the Inquisition] titled “Regarding the Book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” left many scandalized by the intellectually embarrassing and morally tawdry work of a group that obviously needs a permanent vacation. William Cardinal Levada and company at the CDF are simply out of their league theologically when it takes them 6 years (the book was published in 2006) to comment on an important work—and they still get it wrong.
A first-year graduate student could have handled the analysis in a week. S/he would have figured out that Dr. Farley was dealing with ethical method—how we frame and approach moral questions—not defending the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Vatican interlocutors, who obviously have no clue about such matters, only embarrass themselves by publishing their ignorance in six languages. They leave the distinct impression that they are oblivious to the fact that postmodern ethical analysis emerges from multi-disciplinary, multi-religious discussions grounded in concrete actions for justice.
A scholar of Margaret Farley’s stature must terrify the staff of the CDF. She is, after all, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School; a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America which gave her its highest award in 1992; as well as a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics.
Rather than embrace her project and explore, as she does, the range of ways that good people try to love—with an emphasis on the demands of justice in every intimate relationship—the CDF theologians boiled down her opus into five cherry-picked nuggets on sex and marriage that reflect their priorities, not hers. They missed the forest for the trees. Their statement is deeply insulting, not to mention morally suspect, in that such a stellar scholar’s reputation is impugned. As my mother would say, “Consider the source.”
The Roman men are hell-bent on reining in American nuns, if only to prove that they can rein in somebody in a world that pays them increasingly little heed. They fear that such intellectually powerful and theologically persuasive women, who identify with the institutional Roman Catholic Church through their membership in canonical communities, will trump them in the public arena.
The Notification’s 5 little points need no rehearsal. Her critics simply miss the fact that Margaret Farley does not do ethics the way that they do. She does not share their ethical priorities on what Catholic moral theologian Daniel C. Maguire calls matters of the “pelvic zone.” . . . . But the fact that they would dwell on it speaks volumes about their ethics and their rapidly eroding power. Sexual power is power, and more and more women have it. Apparently the struggle to wrest it back is high on the agenda of those who live on the 110 acres called the Vatican.
The impact of Margaret Farley’s work will be measured in many ways, but none will be more accurate than an assessment of her long-term commitment to women who live with HIV/AIDS in Africa. . . . .
The result was practical, not theoretical—the founding of a now-flourishing NGO, All-Africa Conference: Sister to Sister, with support from Margaret’s community, the Sisters of Mercy. She still makes regular visits to Uganda and Cameroon to teach and learn as a collaborator.
The organization “brings together women religious so that they may address the crisis of HIV and AIDS by listening to, learning from and empowering one another to collaborate in strategies for prevention and care in response to the pandemic.
Long after the Vatican’s Notification has been forgotten, generations will recognize that the HIV/AIDS pandemic occasioned a seismic shift in moral theology. Real world experience drives the discussion. Margaret Farley’s name will forever be associated with Catholic moral theology that does justice.
The psychological and emotional sickness of the bitter men at the Vatican - and in bishoprics around the world - is becoming more and more obvious to both Catholics and non-Catholics and is why more and more Americans chose to ignore the pontificating of the morally bankrupt old men in Rome. The irony is that as they strive to "protect the Church" they are the ones who are killing it long term.
It appears that the tactics of Paul Cameron are alive and well in conservative circles when it comes to cooking the data to get the result that one wants. This study seeks to prove that children of raised in homes with same sex couples do not fair as well as those in the homes of heterosexual couple homes. Never mind, of course, that a happy heterosexual headed home isn't an option for millions of children. With a $695,000 grant from the Witherspoon Institute and a supplemental $90,000 grant from the Bradley Foundation, ultra-conservative Mark Regnerus has produced a made to order study for the Christofascists to further denigrate gay and lesbian parents. As Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin notes, there are many methodological problems with the study even when puts aside the likely agenda of the study's author and financiers. Moreover, while the study gushes over the "elevated stability and benefits of a heterosexual households" it ignores the decreased stability of same sex households that stems directly from the strenuous efforts to deny gays and lesbian legal protections taken for granted in the straight world. Nor does it look at the consequences faced by children who constantly hear their parents maligned and described as perverts, would be child molesters or worse.
Not surprisingly, the folks at NOM are in near orgasm over the studies anti-gay findings as is the Mormon Church owned Deseret News (The New Civil Rights Movement looks at this disgust rejoicing) . Frankly, it's more of the same old blame the victim for the adverse consequences of the tormentor. Here are highlights from Jim Burroway's review of the problems with the study:
Problem #1: Identifying a Same-Sex Relationship Doesn’t Tell Us Anything About the Nature of the Relationship. But this is where we run into the first problem with this study. Identifying a parent who has had a same-sex relationship is not the same as identifying a parent who is gay, lesbian or bisexual in a functional relationship. . . . . What criteria does he use to judge whether those relationships are “gay or lesbian in content”? We don’t know. I can’t find any indication that the duration of the relationship played any factor in its identification.
[Y]ou can see where this is headed, can’t you? We will be asked to accept as legitimate the comparison of children raised by parents in those less stable and unenduring situations with stable, longtime married heterosexual parents without knowing the answers to those question. So already, Regnerus puts that comparison in starkly unequal footing.
Problem #2: Arbitrary Decisions in Dealing with Overlaps Between Categories Make the LM [lesbian mother] and GF [gay father] Categories Heterogeneous While the Other Categories Remain Relatively Homogeneous.
Regnerus’s decision to arbitrarily force his sample into non-overlapping categories results in a method is based solely on a desire to increase the size of the smaller group, a goal which has nothing to do with the study’s larger goal of comparing children of gay and lesbian parents to those of intact biological families. In fact, he makes choices which, by their very nature, run explicitly counter to that goal. With each transfer of a subject from the Divorced, Step Families, Single Parent or “All Others” categories into LM or GF, the less those LM and GF groups are designed to look like intact biological families.
I understand Regnerus’s problem with having a sample of lesbian mothers and gay fathers that is too small to make statistical comparisons with the control group. But the proper solution to that problem would have been to go back to Knowledge Networks for another round of sample recruitment. Then perhaps he could have compared children of gay and lesbian parents who had been brought up in a stable environment with children of heterosexual parents in a stable environment. He could have also compared children of gay and lesbian parents in unstable environments with their heterosexual counterparts.
But instead, he undertakes a manipulation which I believe represents the fatal flaw of this study. If one wanted to intentionally create Lesbian Mothers and Gay Fathers groups which were least likely to look like an intact biological family, I can’t imagine a better way to do so than to take the steps Regnerus has taken here.
And now having done this, he’s about to compare two deliberately heterogeneous categories (LM and GF) to a deliberately homogeneous category. Well of course there will be differences once you do that! Problem #3: It Doesn’t Study Children Who Grew Up In Gay- or Lesbian-Led Households.Marriage equality proponents will trumpet this study as proof that children raised by loving, committed, married same-sex couples will have more problems than those who are raised by both biological parents in a heterosexual household. But the samples that Regnerus put together to compare to the ideal heterosexual household cannot make such a claim because it says almost nothing about committed same-sex couples who, together, decide to become parents via adoption, in-vitro fertilization or surrogacy.
[T]o have a legitimate comparison, you’d have to look at children whose experience in that same-sex family was, for all intents and purposes, in place for their entire or almost entire childhoods. After all, that is the experience of children from intact biological heterosexual families. But in this study, only 57% said they had lived with their mother and her partner for at least four months before the age of 18, and only 23% reported living with their father and his partner for the same length of time. Only 23% of LM children and 2% of GF children reported living with their parents and their parents’ same-sex partners for three years or more.
Problem #4: This Study Makes The Wrong Comparison. When you look at the data, the study’s real findings become obvious. Children of parents who have had a same-sex relationship — a group that includes very large numbers of children of divorced parents, single parents, adopted parents, step-parents and “other” family structures — have developmental outcomes which are remarkably similar to children of divorced, single, adopted, step-, and “other” family structures overall when compared to intact, non-adoptive heterosexual families. Regnerus designed his study to show this result by constructing samples which mimicked these characteristics. By constructing his LM and GF samples the way he did, the only legitimate comparison he could make would be to children of divorced, single, adopted, step-, and “other” family structures. But that’s not the comparison he made. He focused the study on making the wrong comparison, and then concluded that children of gay and lesbian parents have more negative outcomes than children of straight parents in intact households.
Instead of making an apples to apples comparison, he compared apples to elephants and concluded that there was a difference. To which anyone with a minimal understanding of design of experiments would answer, Duh!
But when you make the right comparison — compare children of divorced gay parents to children of divorced straight parents, compare children of single gay parents to children of single gay parents, compare children of long-term committed gay parents to children of long-term straight parents — there is nothing in this study to suggest that children of gay parents are at any disadvantage whatsoever to children of straight parents. And when you make the right comparison, the study goes much further toward confirming that conclusion than the one Regnerus arrives at.
Once again, I find myself stunned by the deliberate dishonesty of Christianist enemies of LGBT individuals and our families. They gush about their religiosity and piety but in the end prove themselves to be pathological liars who make the Pharisees in the Bible look like pillars of righteousness. These people truly make me physically sick. And then there's this on the financing for the "study":
I made a brief mention of the huge amount of money that was spent on this study, a sum that comes to $785,000. The lion’s share came from the Witherspoon Institute, a think tank in Princeton, New Jersey (and not affiliated with Princeton University). Members of the Institute include Robert P. George, who drafted the Manhattan Declaration and whose recent paper in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy on same-sex marriage was critiqued at length by BTB’s Rob Tisinai. The Withersoon Institute reportedly has close associations with such organizations as the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, and the secretive Catholic order Opus Dei. George also sits on the board of directors for the Bradley Foundation, which also provided funds for this study. The Bradley Foundation is considered one of the country’s largest and most influential right-wing foundations, although its contribution to this study is “only” $90,000.
This is like having the KKK finance a study on African Americans that - surprise, surprise - finds blacks are inferior. One can only hope that this study is quickly ripped apart and totally discredited.
A new survey says some unpleasant things about the justices of the U. S. Supreme Court. While there's lots of blame to go around, much of the criticism focuses on the justices blatant injection of their own political and personal beliefs into their decisions. The chief offenders? The far right ideologues like Scalia, Thomas and Alito who do not even make an attempt to appear open minded and unbiased. Indeed, some 75% 0f the survey respondents accused the justices of a lack of impartiality. And the problem is getting worse with the GOP members/conservatives on the Court, especially as the justices age and become more out of touch with the changing demographics and social mores of the nation. Like it or not, it is not possible to turn the clock back to 1950 no matter how much Scalia and the "Uncle Tom" like Clarence Thomas strive to do so. Yet these justices refuse to protect the rights of minorities and the powerless. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the Court's growing credibility problem and diminishing prestige. Here are highlights:
You know the definition of a federal judge? It's someone who went to law school with his or her senator. Yes, many judges are very smart people, but they don’t get appointed to the federal bench because they have the greatest legal minds. They get to be judges because they are competent and well connected.
So the New York Times–CBS News poll released Friday—finding that three out of four Americans believe Supreme Court justices have their decisions influenced by their personal and political beliefs—should come as no surprise.
This has been true for more than 200 years, but clearly something new has happened. A generation ago, two thirds of Americans approved of the way the court was doing its job. Today, according to the Times poll, the figure is 44 percent. A 23-point drop in an approval rating over 25 years doesn't just happen spontaneously—something causes it.
Two connected factors help explain the court's precipitous plunge. The first is that this is the most entrenched court in American history. The average tenure of the five most senior Justices—Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Ginsburg and Breyer—is more than 21 years. This is the highest number ever recorded. Put another way, these five justices have served on average longer than five presidential terms.
This is important because justices, like all human beings, are products of their generation. It's one thing for a Justice's personal views to influence his or her decisions, but we have a court dominated by life-tenured justices whose views were shaped during a time when nearly a quarter of our population was not yet born.
The generation gap becomes clearer every day. For example, there is great anticipation as to whether the Supreme Court will weigh in on the question of gay marriage. But for most of the youngest quarter of Americans, this is not an issue at all. It is as obvious to today’s young Americans that gays should have the right to marry as it was to young Americans in 1960 that blacks and whites should be treated equally.
Which brings us to the second factor responsible for the court's loss of prestige. Over the past decade, the court has stopped doing its job, and the people have noticed. There has always been a debate over the appropriateness of judicial review. In a democracy, how can we justify a decision by a group of unelected judges to strike down a law supported by the majority?
Implicit in this question is that the most troubling thing about judicial review is that judges are interfering with the will of the people. But what has happened over the past decade is that rather than protecting the minority, the Supreme Court instead safeguards the interests of the rich and powerful.
In the course of American history, the most infamous Supreme Court decisions have been those where the justices have sided with the economically and politically powerful to squash the hopes and aspirations of the comparatively weak. In the 19th century, for example, the court upheld racial segregation, denied blacks the right even to invoke the judicial process, and permitted states to prevent women from practicing law. In the twentieth century, it nullified efforts to protect the economically vulnerable and upheld internment of the Japanese during World War II. Each of these decisions now stands as embarrassment.
Beginning in the middle of the last century, however, the court began to safeguard the rights of the least powerful. In this sense, unlike the current court, the Justices were protecting the rights and interests of citizens who were not from their same economic or social class.
Over the past decade, this orientation has been stood on its head, and the court has taken to safeguarding the interests of its own social class. The court has backtracked on abortion, saying it needs to protect women from themselves. It has prevented states from rectifying the injuries caused by centuries of racial discrimination. It has shielded pharmaceutical companies from having to pay damages to people who have been grievously injured by their products. And it has helped destroy the political process by making it possible for corporations and wealthy Americans to talk so loudly that they drown out everyone else.
Friday’s poll doesn’t reveal the existence of a new phenomenon, but the fact that people are now noticing an old phenomenon. And what this in turn reveals is simply that the justices are out of touch.
Over the past decade, this orientation has been stood on its head, and the court has taken to safeguarding the interests of its own social class. The court has backtracked on abortion, saying it needs to protect women from themselves. It has prevented states from rectifying the injuries caused by centuries of racial discrimination. It has shielded pharmaceutical companies from having to pay damages to people who have been grievously injured by their products. And it has helped destroy the political process by making it possible for corporations and wealthy Americans to talk so loudly that they drown out everyone else.
The health-care law provides the perfect illustration of this turnaround. According to recent polls, more than half of all Americans support complete or partial repeal of the mandated care act. If those polls are accurate, then there is no need for the Supreme Court to strike down the law. Come November, those people who want it repealed can do what they’ve always had the right to do—go to the polls and choose elected officials who share their views.
As for the court, proposals for reform go back well beyond FDR’s failed effort to pack the court in the 1930s. Ideas have included increasing the number of justices, so that young Americans have some representation; establishing term limits for justices; restricting the types of cases the Supreme Court can review; and even (heaven forbid) impeachment.
Justices have always had their decisions influenced by their beliefs and politics. But when most everyone shares the same cluster of political beliefs, that fact is invisible. Friday’s poll doesn’t reveal the existence of a new phenomenon, but the fact that people are now noticing an old phenomenon. And what this in turn reveals is simply that the justices are out of touch.
Candidly, as an attorney, I have almost zero respect for the far right justices. They are turning the concept of justice upside down and gutting the constitutional rights of minorities and favoring the rich and powerful and those who are increasingly religious extremists when compared to society as a whole.
