Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. – The Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment 1, enacted 1791, up for virtual repeal, Fall 2020.
Our Constitution is supposed to be the supreme law of our land, yet the above paragraph has never carried the full weight of law, certainly not as written. That’s a shame, as these 45 words are very specific, clear-cut, and quite elegant. They mean we can’t pass laws that favor individual religious philosophies, no matter how unpopular they may be, or laws that obstruct other religious philosophies, no matter how popular.
Freedom of religion always means freedom from somebody else’s religion: your right to exercise your religious beliefs ends where the next person’s religious rights begin, and so on to all 332,000,000 Americans. It does not say “except for Mormons, Santerians, Scientologists, Muslims, Jews, and whomever else offends the beliefs of those who run things.” Marginalizing them as “cults” is bigotry.
Therefore, Supreme Court designate Amy Coney Barrett is, arguably, the most unAmerican and most dangerous person in the nation today.
This is not because Ms. Barrett is conservative. Some of my best friends, as they say, are conservative. It is because she is fully committed to ramming her specific religious predilections down everybody else’s throats. According to the New York Times, she is a member of the People of Praise group and is accountable to a personal adviser, called a “head” if male and a “handmaid” if female. Husbands are the heads of their wives and therefore run the family. Current and former members say that these advisers direct all important decisions, including who its followers can date or marry, where they can live, whether to take a job, and how to raise their children.
While you’re thinking that one over, let’s take a quick look at some of her views. She’s opposed to abortion, meaning she’s ramming her religion down the throats of two-thirds of all Americans (source: CBS News survey, June 2020). She’s opposed to the Affordable Care Act, even though Americans support it by a five-point margin – and that’s according to a Gallop poll conducted before the first Covid death was reported in America.
Covid is a pre-existing condition, you know. For that matter, so is pregnancy.
She’s good news to those who do not know how to read. She has a very extreme view of the Second Amendment, so if you’ve got a hankering to buy some tactical nuclear weapons, keep a pleasant thought. Her stand on the humanity of those in the LGBTQ communities is equally clear: she does not believe that Title IX protections extend to the transgendered, and we’re about to find out in no uncertain terms her position of whether homosexuals should be allowed to adopt children.
She’s certainly not keen on desegregation. According to the Alliance for Justice: “In 2017, Coney Barrett refused to rehear a case that was decided against a Black Autozone employee who faced racial segregation when he was laterally transferred from one Autozone location to another based on Autozone’s Chicago policy of ‘segregating employees and intentionally assigning members of different races to different stores.’”
Amy Coney Barrett is evil, a scourge upon the values that make America great. Now don’t go saying my comments about Ms. Barrett are anti-Catholic; the views I noted above enjoy broad support among American Catholics. However, I am opposed to those zealots who force their faith structure onto those who do not share their beliefs, no matter what label they assign to themselves or to those they loathe. To my experience, once you get south of Fundamentalism in all faiths, no two people fully share the same exact religious views.
She will be rammed down America’s throat, and she will bring her anti-American beliefs with her. The zealots finally figured out how to game the system… but systems always can be gamed. She will do a lot of damage during the brief time she and her self-righteous ilk maintain control. Freedom does not only apply to Fundamentalists; the inherent limitation of freedom is that one does not have the moral right to capriciously deny others those same freedoms.
Amy Coney Barrett is on the record as saying “It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law.” We about to find out if she is a lying, bigoted piece of shit, just like the jackals who appointed her.
