If there’s any silver lining in the atrocious decision on abortion the Supreme Court appears ready to make official in the next few weeks, it’s this: the Court has at last revealed its true self. Far from being the objective, high-minded arbiter of great national questions, impartially balancing the scales of justice with fairness to all, it’s shown itself to be just another politicized branch of government, absorbed in pursuing partisan objectives and inculcating a preconceived ideology. In so doing, the Court has destroyed not only the myth of its evenhandedness but also its legitimacy.
I’m speaking here of the conservative majority, of course. Over the past quarter-century, the philosophically tilted Court has reverted to being what it’s been for most of its history, a right-leaning institution; the steadily shrinking liberal (or centrist) minority has been reduced to issuing futile dissents, as successive waves of Republican-appointed justices reshape the nation’s briefly expansive post-New Deal jurisprudence into a right-wing catechism.
Some prominent examples: Bush v. Gore, 2000 (no to democracy); Citizens United, 2010 (yes to corporate power); Holder, 2013 (no to voting rights); Hobby Lobby, 2014 (yes to religious prerogatives); Janus, 2018 (no to union representation); and, finally, the pending decision negating Roe v. Wade (no to reproductive rights).
There are clear patterns here; the Court has consistently come down (in these and other cases that could be cited) on the side of limiting democracy and expanding the role of religion, specifically conservative Christianity, in the public sphere. A secondary pattern consists of a transparent effort to use the law to empower private corporations and disempower organized labor, fulfilling an economic agenda in keeping with a narrow set of radical free-market beliefs not shared by most Americans.
To accomplish these ends, the current Supreme Court majority has dispensed with any respect whatsoever for established legal precedent (what’s called stare decisis), if it stands in the way of their arbitrary intentions. No matter how long a law has been on the books and accepted as constitutional, it can be instantly wiped away by merely applying the radical-right Court’s newly established principle of “originalism;” that is, nothing not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution by the original Founders has any legal bearing.
Applying this suddenly inviolable test (a concept of the late right-wing judicial icon Antonin Scalia), Justice Samuel Alito, author of the leaked draft invalidating Roe v. Wade (1973) and a subsequent reaffirming decision, justifies that judgment on the grounds “the Constitution makes no references to abortion.” The 18th-century framers of the Constitution also included no references to Social Security, Medicare, the federal income tax, unemployment insurance, and a host of other post-1789 innovations covered under the “general welfare” clause (Art. I, sec. 8); nevertheless, based on Alito’s reasoning, these could eventually be on the chopping block as well.
For now, however, the conservative Court majority, urged on by America’s autocratic-minded neofascists (the Trump Republicans), who disdain democracy, and its puritanical religious extremists (the conservative evangelicals), who obsess over sexual matters, will apparently focus their legal attentions accordingly; they will approve partisan gerrymandering and voter restrictions on behalf of the former and perhaps add limits on contraception and nontraditional marriage to the abortion ban for the latter.
There is a contemporary tie-in, which is actually worldwide, between antidemocratic authoritarianism and right-wing Christianity — a merging of dogmatic church and dictatorial state. You can see it in America’s Republican Party politics at this very moment. Reporters for the New York Times (4/7/22), covering recent rallies on behalf of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and his presumed 2024 presidential candidacy, observed a melding of Trumpist politics and white evangelical or charismatic Christianity.
The rallies, resembling in spirit long-ago Bible Belt fundamentalist revivals, included prayer-filled paeans to Trump and his divinely inspired but satanically persecuted (“the steal”) candidacy, for which 2024 will be the Second Coming. These events, many of them outdoor extravaganzas, went further, calling forth attacks on vaccine mandates, COVID restrictions, critical race theory, abortion, and separation of church and state. (This mindset has even found its way into the 2022 Maine Republican Party platform, which suggests the right to keep and bear arms comes directly from God.)
The authors of the Times piece reported that attendees at the Republican MAGA rallies envision a national “reawakening” in which spiritual and political activism coalesce to create a government based on Christian morality. More than that, participants visualize building a country dedicated to promoting a narrow set of Christian beliefs, namely, their own.
That such attitudes might be reflected on the US Supreme Court should surprise no one; its Republican majority, after all, includes at least one charismatic Catholic, Amy Coney Barrett, whose position against abortion was well known before her confirmation. In addition, the politically conservative majority’s five other Catholic members, it can safely be assumed, also align with the conservative, antiabortion wing of their church.
If the leaked Alito draft accurately represents the majority’s hard-line position, as it apparently does (with the possible exception of Chief Justice John Roberts, who also opposes abortion rights, but favors a more incremental approach), the Court’s political conservatives are voting their conservative religious beliefs as well. This is an awkward stance in a pluralistic, multicultural society, but it’s something that doesn’t evidently trouble the insulated, lifetime-appointed justices in the least.
The alliance between conservative religion and conservative politics is not an exclusively American phenomenon; it’s part of the international cultural-values clash between the forces of Western democracy and the forces of antidemocratic neofascism now playing out most directly and violently in the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion has enthusiastic official support from the conservative leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose chief prelate considers it essentially a sacred holy war to cleanse the world of such diabolical Western influences as homosexuality. He and his doctrinally right-wing followers regard Putin in much the same way American evangelicals regard Donald Trump — as a miraculous gift from God.
America’s non-shooting holy war, declared by its evangelical sects, pits the only sizeable religious group that opposes reproductive rights and supports the Supreme Court’s tentative abortion decision against the rest of the country. For both the Court and the Christian right, the issue is less about “choice” or “life” and more about forcing one’s religious views on other people.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us