gracchusdixit

The present conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States may be the most destructive, subversive, and incompetent in our history.  That is saying a lot, since we have at various times had Court majorities that upheld slavery, defended segregation, and denied women the right to vote.  Harsh as it may sound, the characterization nonetheless seems just, given this Court’s general record and, particularly, given the decision it made a week ago.

In finding for the owners of Hobby Lobby against the federal government, the Court gave corporations, for the first time in our history, the religious protections hitherto provided only to individuals.  The majority opinion, written by Samuel Alito, is a travesty, which violates both simple logic and the very Constitutional protection it purports to uphold.  Invoking the 1992 “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” and the clause in the  First Amendment which forbids Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” Alito made three spurious and absurd arguments.

First, he drew no distinction between the religious freedoms of individuals and corporations.  On the contrary, he denied that such a distinction exists, although the Constitution speaks only of persons, never of “corporations,” let alone of corporate “rights.”

Second, he concerned himself entirely with protecting the religious beliefs of Hobby Lobby’s owners, who purport to equate contraception with abortion.  He had nothing to say about protecting the religious freedom of Hobby Lobby’s female employees whose beliefs may point in an entirely different direction.

Finally, he accepted the “sincerity” of Hobby Lobby’s owners on face value, without question or challenge, stating: “The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients.”  The fact that the owners of Hobby Lobby “believe” something does not make it so.  None of the four contraceptive methods “at issue” is defined by any credible medical source as an “abortifacient.”  What is more, Hobby Lobby has invested heavily in pharmaceutical companies that manufacture drugs that are, indisputably, abortifacient.  What is really “at issue” is the sincerity and truthfulness, not only of Hobby Lobby’s owners, but of Justice Alito himself.

Hobby Lobby is merely the latest in a long series of disturbing—and duplicitous—decisions by the conservative majority on the Court.  These decisions share a common ideology and a consistent flaw: a clear preference for one kind of freedom over another, for one class or category of people over another.

In Heller, the Court overturned a century of law, invented a new interpretation of the Second Amendment, and declared gun ownership to be an individual right.  Under the guise of the “right to bear arms,” the Court decided that the interests of gun manufacturers and the NRA trumped the rights of many more Americans whose lives are endangered by rampant gun violence.

In Citizen’s United, the Court declared, for the first time, that corporations have the same First Amendment protection which the Constitution gives to individuals. In McCutcheon, it went even further, declaring “money” and “speech” to be identical.  Under the guise of “free speech,” it upheld the interests or corporations and the wealthy over the rights of ordinary citizens.

In Holder, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, asserting that laws which prohibit racial discrimination at the polls are not only obsolete but themselves a form of racial discrimination.  Using language and arguments that would have been very much at home in the antebellum South, it invoked “states’ rights” over the rights of historically disenfranchised and oppressed minorities.

Whenever this Court has faced a choice between one kind of freedom and another,  between one class and another, it has chosen freedom for the powerful, the privileged and the bigoted.  Once upon a time, we looked to the Supreme Court of the United States as the court of last resort, as the one voice in the land that could be counted on to preserve and protect the freedom of every American.  That day is gone.