Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the devout Catholic conservative who has long warned of animus against religion in America, says in a new book that he believes the court’s landmark decision extending marriage rights to same-sex couples was “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty.”
Alito, who dissented sharply in the 2015 case, made the claim at Catholic University of America three years after Obergefell v Hodges in a speech that was not open to the public or widely covered at the time. The remarks were published this month in “So Ordered,” a collection of Alito speeches that he says reflect his judicial philosophy and outlook on the country.
Religious Freedom means you have the right to your religion, yourself.
Calling religious supremacism your “freedom”, … is called gaslighting.
Alito is at least being authentic in his gaslighting.
🙏
Religious people do not understand the depth of accomodation we provide them as a society. We already go around tolerating an insane collective delusion in our personal interactions with them, and they’ve leveraged that good will into an attempt to force that delusion onto everyone else.
Personally I think that’s where the social contract ends. The second you attempt to legislate your religion, my duty to tolerate it in any form ends.
Xtians believe that they deserve special privileges. They don’t recognize that as such, they just think it’s the natural order of the universe. They expect their chosen lifestyle of their special book club to be put up on a pedestal and never even have the precepts questioned.
The minute any of that unwarranted privilege is eroded in even the tiniest way, they view that as “but mah rights are being trampled!”
Alito has a personal right to belittle, mock, and object to same-sex and same-gender marriage. Just as he also has a personal right to belittle, mock, and object to interracial, inter-reliigous, and childless marriage.
And we have the same personal right to belittle, mock, and object to his ideas as idiotic bigotry.
What Alito shouldn’t have is a right to use his personal animus to shape public policy. Except he does, because when the court recognized the constitutional right to abortion back when Alito was a 23-year old kid the whole US right wing gave up on the constitution and decided to try a judicial coup.
Alito’s entire professional life is pretending that he isnt a proxy for this coup. I’d almost feel sorry for him if his malfeasance hadn’t led to pregnant women dying of eminently preventable complications. (Not to mention W and Trump’s presidencies and all the death and destruction that might have been avoided if we had actually applied the rules.)
That has nothing to do with gaslighting, but it is stupid and wrong.