gracchusdixit

Less than a week ago, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an icon of free thinking and a fierce advocate for the independence and dignity of women in a world dominated for millennia by men, was replaced on the Supreme Court of the United States by another woman, whose view of the world could not be more different.  Despite all the praise heaped upon Amy Coney Barrett by Republicans, Donald Trump’s choice to replace “the notorious RBG” is a moral and intellectual monstrosity—a throwback to an earlier age in which women, minorities, and anyone who wasn’t sexually “straight” was supposed to know his or her place and stay tucked away in a closet or a jail cell, the door of which would remain forever locked. 

In their hypocritical, unseemly, and utterly anti-democratic haste to rush Barrett onto the court before an election that is just days away, Republicans all but dared their Democratic counterparts in the Senate to raise the question of Barrett’s beliefs during her confirmation hearings, hoping to accuse them of being anti-religious.  Having been warned to avoid this rhetorical trap by countless political observers, not to mention their own Congressional leaders, Democrats did not take the bait.  Even the most aggressive of those who interrogated Barrett didn’t utter a word about her religion, let alone question whether her beliefs might compromise her obligation to interpret the Constitution with neutrality and fairness. 

This decision may have been politically expedient, it may even have been shrewd, but it was a profound disservice to the nation.  For the truth of the matter is that Amy Coney Barrett’s extreme religious beliefs, far from being out of bounds, should be central to the question of whether she is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court of a democratic nation.  

Having been confirmed by slimmest of margins in a Republican-controlled Senate, Barrett will join a like-minded clique of radically conservative Catholics, ensuring their stranglehold on the life of the nation for at least a generation.  This tyrannical cabal includes Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Chief Justice himself, John Roberts.  Neil Gorsuch would also qualify, were it not for the fact that he has been cagey about his religious beliefs, a sleight of hand that allows him to blur the reality that he is no less radical than his right-wing confrères on the bench.

The moral worldview of these people is at odds with the sentiments of the vast majority of Americans.  In fact, it is at odds with, and hostile to, democracy itself.  The conservative coven Barrett is about to join believes in restricting voting rights, overturning affirmative action, criminalizing the reproductive decisions of women, upholding the absurd notion that individual gun ownership is a fundamental right on a par with life and liberty, and giving corporations the same privileges and protections that belong to citizens.  Worst of all, they twist the “religious freedom” guaranteed by our constitution to mean the freedom of one religious group to impose its beliefs upon others, discriminating against heretical non-believers in the workplace and the marketplace. 

This toxic religiosity would be bad enough if it were limited to the conservatives on the Supreme Court.  But it is not.  William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States, is no less a zealot.  Like Amy Coney Barrett, who once wrote that “abortion is always immoral” no matter the circumstances, Barr is a take-no-prisoners absolutist, who would be quite comfortable fighting in the ranks of the Counter-Reformation.  He thinks that the ailments of the modern world are the result of “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system,” and he would have us believe that a “transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law” is the foundation stone of our republic, that anyone who does not accept this “transcendent moral order” is an “apostate,” unworthy of citizenship or any rights at all.

This fallacious fairy tale is a willful and malicious misrepresentation of history, designed to give a particular religious creed a dominant place in our public life that it does not deserve.  The misrepresentation is two-fold.

To begin with, the notion of a “Judeo-Christian tradition,” moral or otherwise, is a creation of the 20th, not the 18th, century.  The very idea of such a thing would have been alien and incomprehensible to the men of the Enlightenment who wrote the Constitution of the United States.

What’s more, neither the Declaration of Independence, nor the Constitution, nor the Federalist Papers that were intended to explain and justify the adoption of the Constitution, mentions a “Judeo-Christian tradition”—or a “Judeo-Christian” anything.  Indeed, these founding documents of our nation are strikingly devoid of religiosity.  The word “Jesus” never appears.  The word “god” appears eight times, and seven of these occurrences refer to the pagan gods of the classical world.  The word “Christianity” appears only once, in the Federalist Papers, during a discussion of ancient Gaul and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne.  If the founders truly believed in a “transcendent moral order which flows from God’s eternal law,” they had plenty of opportunity to say so.  That they did not, says it all.

Christian conservatives have the right to believe whatever they wish.  They do not, however, have a right to distort history by claiming that their beliefs are fundamental to what it means to be an American.  Nor do they have a right to assert that “Judeo-Christian” beliefs constitute a “moral order” to which the rest of us must submit.   This assertion is itself both immoral and fundamentally un-American.

If it seems that I have singled out conservative Catholics for opprobrium, that was not my purpose.  There are countless evangelical Protestants, whose beliefs are no less extreme and just as crazy.  Not the least of these is the current Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence.

The fact remains that radically conservative Catholics are far more dangerous—because they are far better educated and more intellectually nimble than their Protestant counterparts.  While the Mike Pence’s of the world can recite the Ten Commandments and babble on about the rapture, Barr and Barrett can cite Aristotle and Aquinas.  It is tempting to call such intellectual and political skill Jesuitical, but I have too much respect for the learned Jesuits to slander them with such a comparison.  Suffice it to say that zealous bigots like Barr and Barrett, Alito and Thomas, Kavanaugh and Roberts, are a mortal threat to our democracy, and it is the “R” word that makes them so.