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      Pat Robertson obituary

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      Although the concept of separation of church and state is entrenched in the US constitution, the influence of churchmen in political affairs is an American tradition dating back to the colonial era. Indeed, modern media has made the voice of contemporary evangelists every bit as powerful as Cotton Mather’s sermons were to the early Puritans. Pat Robertson, who has died aged 93, rode the growth of cable television, and a shrewd sense of the economics of the business, to become the most overtly political, and arguably the most influential, of them all.When Robertson appeared on the front of Time magazine in 1986, the cover line read Gospel TV: Religion, Politics and Money. The melding of those three strands of his career was not always seamless, though in American fundamentalism, material wealth is usually seen as a visible sign of God’s blessing. Through his Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), he progressed from televised faith healing to a serious run at the US presidency in 1988, and made a fortune in the process.Robertson started that campaign for the Republican nomination with a petition, and contributions, from 3 million viewers, and finished second in the Iowa caucuses, ahead of the then vice-president George HW Bush. But voters gave him little support in the Republican primaries, and Bush of course went on to the presidency.Robertson, who had handed control of CBN to his son Tim, then founded the Christian Coalition of America. Having failed to take over the Republican party, his “rainbow coalition” of fundamentalists would attempt to steer the party in its ideological direction.The coalition’s lobbying exerted immense influence, helping spearhead the right’s assault on President Bill Clinton, and provided both a fundraising and ideological template for Bush. Although the coalition was censured and fined for coordinating its campaigns directly with the Republican party, and for improper aid delivered to then-House majority leader Newt Gingrich and the Virginia senatorial candidate Oliver North, its success spurred on Robertson’s indulgence in another grand tradition of American evangelical preachers, the hubris that found him courting constant controversy, and frequent financial scandal.Controversy became inevitable with the shift from mainstream politics to the Christian Coalition. Preaching to the converted meant the restraints on expressing his true beliefs were lifted. The framework for those beliefs was set out in his 1991 bestseller The New World Order, an amalgam of historical conspiracy theories, which posited an alliance of Masons and Jewish bankers who controlled the world.Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. He predicted that the staging of “gay days” at Disney World would result in God’s retribution through earthquakes, tornados, terrorist bombings or meteors.Asked to be “nice” about rival Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalians, Presbyterians or Methodists, he said: “I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the antichrist.” He described leftwing academics as “racists, murderers, sexual deviants, and supporters of al-Qaida”.In 2005 he called for the assassination of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and explained Ariel Sharon’s 2006 stroke as God’s retribution for giving land back to Palestinians. He later apologised to Sharon’s family and claimed to have been misquoted.That followed Robertson’s standard pattern, of making wild accusations that pleased his core audience, then claiming to have been misquoted by an anti-Christian mainstream media. Most notoriously, on his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”. After the ensuing uproar, he claimed that due to a malfunctioning earpiece he had not actually heard what Falwell was saying when he agreed with it.Robertson came by his political ambitions naturally, being related through the family of his mother, Gladys (nee Willis), to two presidents, the Harrisons, William Henry and Benjamin, while his father, Willis Robertson, was a US Senator from Virginia, one of the conservative segregationist southern Democrats dubbed “Dixiecrats”. He was born in Lexington, Virginia, and christened Marion Robertson, but was nicknamed Pat, because his older brother, Willis Jr, would say “pat, pat, pat” while patting baby Marion’s cheeks.Pat was educated at two military academies: McDonogh, near Baltimore, and McCallie, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Washington and Lee University in his home town. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Marines, but his claims to have seen combat with the First Marine Division in Korea came back to haunt him during his run for the presidential nomination.His Republican rival, Congressman Pete McCloskey, who had served with Robertson, said Robertson’s father had used influence to keep him out of combat, and that his primary responsibility had been to keep the officers’ clubs stocked with liquor. Robertson denounced this, and allegations by fellow Marines that he had consorted with prostitutes, as attempts to discredit him.Robertson returned home to gain a law degree in 1955 from Yale, but failed the bar exam. Soon afterwards, he was converted by the Dutch missionary Cornelius Vanderbreggen. By the time he was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1961, he had bought his first television station, in Portsmouth, Virginia, and established the Christian Broadcasting Network. He gave Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker their first break, doing a children’s programme, and started the breakfast-time show The 700 Club, its title taken from a fundraising drive for 700 subscribers.Robertson’s early success was based on televised faith healing. Critics pointed out that God seemed to speak through Robertson while taking programme cues from the director. His style, with fixed smile and narrow eyes, could seem almost a caricature of a snake-oil salesman, but its appeal was unquestionable, as CBN eventually claimed an audience in 180 countries. It functioned as a network of affiliated stations subscribing to its programming, but in 1977 Robertson started his own cable channel, CBN Cable, offering mainstream entertainment bookended by The 700 Club.Renamed the Family Channel, its profits eventually threatened CBN’s religious non-profit status, so Robertson set up International Family Entertainment, with himself and Tim as its heads, and sold the Family Channel to it. In 1992 he took IFE public, making $90m on the launch. In 1997, IFE sold the Family Channel to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network for $1.9bn. Fox has since sold it on to Disney, but as a condition of the original sale, the channel, now called Freeform, is still required to broadcast The 700 Club, hosted by Pat’s son Gordon, president of CBN, twice a day.Evangelists including Oral Roberts and Bob Jones had founded their own colleges, and Robertson’s television success spawned CBN University, now called Regent University, at the CBN headquarters in Virginia Beach, the city where Robertson lived in a hilltop mansion with its own landing strip. On a number of occasions he credited his public prayers for steering hurricanes away from Virginia Beach, though he was unsuccessful with Hurricane Isabel in 2003.More controversial than Regent was his international humanitarian charity Operation Blessing. In 1994, it was claimed in his local newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, that Robertson’s impassioned fundraising for Operation Blessing’s refugee airlift in Rwanda and Zaire was at least partly a cover for the use of his aircraft to transport diamond-mining equipment for the Robertson-owned African Development Corporation. A long investigation by Virginia’s Office of Consumer Affairs recommended Robertson be prosecuted for fraud, but the state’s attorney general, Mark Earley, brought no charges against him. The George W Bush administration made Operation Blessing the second-largest recipient of federal relief funds in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which was seen in some quarters as payback for Robertson’s support.In 2003, Robertson used The 700 Club as a platform to argue on behalf of the Liberian president Charles Taylor, who had been indicted by the UN for war crimes. It emerged that Robertson had an investment in a Liberian gold mine, which he claimed was intended to help pay for Operation Blessing’s humanitarian efforts in the country, but which was allowed to go bankrupt after Taylor’s departure from office.Other business enterprises included the Ice Capades, a pyramid sales scheme, and a financial services venture with the Bank of Scotland, which was cancelled after Robertson called Scotland “a dark land overrun by homosexuals”. No matter how outrageous his statements, Robertson never alienated his core audience, and could count on the committed support of born-again Christians who felt the Lord spoke through him, and rewarded him for passing on his message, as did countless politicians hungry for his endorsement.He married Dede (Adelia) Elmer in 1954. She died in 2022 and Robertson is survived by their sons, Tim and Gordon, and daughters, Elizabeth and Ann, 14 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren. More

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      Republican bill requiring display of Ten Commandments in Texas schools fails

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      Republicans in Texas failed to pass legislation that would have required the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in every public school classroom.The controversial bill, authored by the Republican state senator Phil King, would have required schools to display the Old Testament text “in a conspicuous place in each classroom”, in a durable poster or frame.Passed by the Texas senate last week, the bill failed in the house. But it represented another sign of just how far to the right the conservative-majority Texas legislature is willing to go.Civil rights groups condemned the bill as an assault on religious freedom and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the US constitution.In a statement, the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties of Union said: “Parents should be able to decide what religious materials their child should learn.”Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a non-profit advocacy group, told the New York Times: “Forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments is part of the Christian nationalist crusade to compel all of us to live by their beliefs.”The bill is far from the first attempt by far-right Texas lawmakers to embed Christianity in public education.In 2021, a Texas law came into effect requiring schools to display any donated “In God We Trust” signs, so long as they were in English.More recently, a bill was passed in the Texas legislature that would allow religious chaplains to act as school counselors as soon as the next school year.Another bill would allow public schools to observe a moment of prayer and hear a reading from a religious text, such as the Bible.In 2005, as Texas attorney general, the current Republican governor, Greg Abbott, won a case over attempts to display the Ten Commandments on a monument on the grounds of the state capitol building. More

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      Muslim mayor turned away from White House Eid event: ‘There is a secret list’

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      The US Secret Service denied security clearance for Mohamed Khairullah, the longest-serving Muslim mayor in New Jersey, and prevented him from attending a White House Eid al-Fitr event on Monday afternoon marking the end of Ramadan.Khairullah, who was critical of the Trump administration’s travel ban in 2017 that restricted entry to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries, received the call from the Secret Service while he was en route to the White House. President Joe Biden revoked that ban in 2021.“It’s disappointing and it’s shocking that this continues to happen under our constitution which provides that everyone is innocent unless proven guilty,” Khairullah, 47, told NewJersey.com. “I honestly don’t know what my charge, if you want to put it that way, is at this point, to be treated in such a manner.”In a statement to the newspaper, United States Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi confirmed that Khairullah was denied entry to the event on Monday night, regretting “any inconvenience this may have caused” and noting that they were unable to “comment further on the specific protective means and methods used to conduct our security operations at the White House”.Two days earlier, Khairullah, who has been mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, a small town of 6,000 people, for more than 17 years, appeared alongside the state’s governor, Phil Murphy, at the gubernatorial mansion for an Eid celebration.Khairullah, who was born in Syria before fleeing persecution as a teenager and moving to the United States with his parents in the 1990s, served as a volunteer firefighter and delivered humanitarian aid to refugees in Syria and Bangladesh for the Syrian American Medical Society and the Watan Foundation. In 2019, Khairullah had been detained for three hours at John F Kennedy international airport after he returned from a trip to Turkey with his family.Khairullah told NewJersey.com that he sought out more information from federal officials on why he was detained but they would not disclose their reasoning. After he informed the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of what happened, the group reviewed a leaked copy of the federal terrorist screening dataset, which contains details on more than 1 million people suspected of being involved in terrorist activities, and informed him that his name and birthdate appeared in it.The Council on American-Islamic Relations has criticized the list for containing “almost entirely lists of Arabic and Muslim names” and called on the Biden administration to stop the FBI from spreading information from that terrorism dataset. Representatives for the group condemned the White House’s denial of entry to Khairullah, with the New Jersey chapter’s executive director, Selaedin Maksut, describing it as “wholly unacceptable and insulting”.“If these such incidents are happening to high-profile and well-respected American-Muslim figures like Mayor Khairullah, this then begs the question: what is happening to Muslims who do not have the access and visibility that the mayor has?” Maksut told the local New Jersey news outlet.Khairullah lamented that he could not enter the “People’s House”, telling NewJersey.com that “there is a secret list I can’t clear my name from and it still haunts me and follows me where I go”.“It’s not a matter of ‘I didn’t get to go to a party.’ It’s why I did not go. And it’s a list that has targeted me because of my identity,” Khairullah added to Al Jazeera. “And I don’t think the highest office in the United States should be down with such profiling.” More

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      The pro-Trump pastors embracing ‘overt white Christian nationalism’

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      A far-right religious group with ties to Donald Trump loyalists Roger Stone and retired Army Lt Gen Michael Flynn, is planning events with pastors in swing state churches in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere to spur more evangelical backing for the former US president’s 2024 campaign.But the group, Pastors for Trump, is drawing sharp rebukes from mainstream Christian leaders for being extremist, distorting Christian teachings and endangering American democracy, by fueling the spread of Christian nationalism.The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based evangelical pastor and businessman Jackson Lahmeyer leads the fledgling Pastors for Trump organization. Lahmeyer told the Guardian it boasts over 7,000 pastors as members and that he will unveil details about its plans on 11 May at the Trump National Doral in Miami, an event Trump will be invited to attend.Stone, a self styled “dirty trickster” who Trump pardoned after he was convicted of lying to Congress, is slated to join Lahmeyer in speaking on 11 May according to the pastor. Lahmeyer added he will talk more about his pro Trump group at a ReAwaken America evangelical gathering on 12 and 13 May at the Doral.Lahmeyer said the pastors group intends to sponsor a “freedom tour” with evening church meetings in key swing states this summer, an effort that could help Trump win more backing from this key Republican voting bloc which could prove crucial to his winning the GOP nomination again.Lahmeyer described the genesis of Pastors for Trump in dark and apocalyptic rhetoric that has echoes of Trump’s own bombast. “We’re going down a very evil path in this country,” he said. “Our economy is being destroyed. It’s China, the deep state and globalists.“China interfered in our 2020 elections,” he added. “This is biblical what’s happening. This is a spiritual battle.’But those ominous beliefs have drawn sharp criticism.“This kind of overt embrace of white Christian nationalism continues to pose a growing threat to the witness of the church and the health of our democracy,” said Adam Russell Taylor, the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners.“This pastor and this effort are trying to impose a Christian theocracy. It’s imperative that Christian leaders of all backgrounds including conservative ones speak out about this effort as a threat to our democracy and to the church.”Other religious leaders warn of dangers that Pastors for Trump poses by marrying Christian nationalism with political vitriol and election lies.“For years, Trump has tried to co-opt religious leaders to serve his campaign, even attempting to change long-standing tax law to allow dark money to flow through houses of worship,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.“Tragically, far too many pastors have confused political power with religious authority and have thrown their lot in with Trump, no matter the cost to their ministry. Pastors for Trump is the next step in this unholy alliance, mixing Christian nationalism, election lies and vitriolic language in a gross distortion of Christianity.”There’s ample evidence that Lahmeyer has embraced religious and political views replete with extremist positions.Lahmeyer has previously attacked former House speaker Nancy Pelosi as a “demon”, and former Covid 19 adviser Anthony Fauci “a mass murdering Luciferian”. To Lahmeyer, the attack on the Capitol on January 6 by a mob of pro Trump supporters was an “FBI Inside Job”.Besides his apocalyptic rhetoric, Lahmeyer’s effort has echoes of the two-year-old ReAwaken America tour that has combined election denialism with Christian Nationalism and regularly featured Flynn at its two day revival style meetings.In 2021, Flynn provided strong and early backing for Lahmeyer in an abortive primary campaign by the pastor to gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat from Oklahoma.Flynn, who worked to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden by pushing bogus claims of election fraud and who Trump pardoned after he pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russians before briefly serving as Trump’s national security adviser, is a real hero in Lahmeyer’s eyes.“Flynn is a leader and general,” Lahmeyer told the Guardian. “I trust him and I have come to love him. He’s been like a father to me.”Those bonds were reinforced in early 2021 when Lahmeyer introduced Flynn to Clay Clark, an Oklahoma entrepreneur and a member of his church, who teamed up with Flynn to host some twenty ReAwaken revival-like gatherings over the last two years nationwide, all of which Lahmeyer said he’s attended.Late last year, Lahmeyer unveiled Pastors for Trump on Stone’s eponymous Stone Zone podcast, a relationship that was forged in 2021 when Stone served as a key paid consultant to Lahmeyer’s primary campaign.Pastors for Trump is “interwoven” with the Trump campaign, “but we’re a separate grassroots group”, Lahmeyer said, indicating it is a 501(c)(4) non profit social welfare, which is awaiting IRS tax status approval.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo date, the pastors group has created a two person board that includes South Carolina pastor Mark Burns, a key Trump campaign religious adviser who backed Trump’s 2016 run and who told the Guardian that he’s a “spiritual adviser” to Trump.Lahmeyer said his group hopes to arrange an event in Las Vegas in August to coincide with a ReAwaken America gathering that’s scheduled there, and that he expects to start fundraising to increase his group’s membership and activism.Asked if Stone and Flynn may participate in the various swing state church gatherings, Lahmeyer said: “I’d be dumb not to ask them. Stone and General Flynn are huge supporters.”To push the group’s pro-Trump messages, Lahmeyer has arranged a few prayer calls in recent months that have included Stone, Flynn and ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, all of whom promoted bogus claims of election fraud in 2020 and tried to help Trump overturn his loss to Joe Biden.One call that included a segment with Trump in late March which Lahmeyer hosted and that Stone and Flynn participated in, went badly awry when the sound quality was interrupted for several minutes with Trump on the line.Lahmeyer told the Stone Zone the next day that trolls had infiltrated the “backstage” of the platform they were using, while Trump fingered the “radical left” for hacking his phone when he tried to join the call.The launch of Pastors for Trump came not long after an uptick in public criticism of Trump from some evangelical leaders that suggested waning support among evangelicals.Dr Everett Piper, the ex president of a Christian university, in November wrote an op-ed entitled “It’s time for the GOP to say it: Donald Trump is hurting us, not helping us.” Piper wrote that in the 2022 midterms Trump “hindered rather than helped the much-anticipated ‘red wave’”.Likewise, the Iowa based president and CEO of the Family Leader Bob Vander Plaats, has tweeted about Trump that “It’s time to turn the page. America must move on. Walk off the stage with class.”Little wonder that in January, Trump blasted evangelical leaders who publicly criticized his new campaign for their “disloyalty”.Some scholars and recent polls, however, suggest Trump still has very significant support in the evangelical circles, and that he should garner hefty support again from evangelical voters in the primaries if he’s the nominee.“Trump’s enduring appeal to evangelicals is the greatest single triumph of identity politics in modern American history,” David Hollinger, an emeritus history professor at Berkeley and the author of Christianity’s American Fate, told the Guardian. “The evangelicals who flocked to Trump have good reason to stay with him.”Still, Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee is alarmed at the Pastors for Trump campaign.“Most clergy avoid endorsing political candidates, even in their personal capacity, because they know the polarizing impact it would have on their congregations and the distractions it would cause from their calling and the mission of the church.”Similarly, Taylor of Sojourners says Pastors for Trump is particularly worrisome. “This is further evidence that the threat of muscular white Christian nationalism is real and needs to be counteracted.” More

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      Anti-abortion US priest Frank Pavone defrocked by Vatican

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      Anti-abortion US priest Frank Pavone defrocked by VaticanPavone had been investigated for placing an aborted foetus on an altar and posting a video of it online The Vatican has defrocked the anti-abortion US priest Frank Pavone for what it said were “blasphemous communications on social media” as well as “persistent disobedience” of his bishop.A letter to US bishops from the Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, said the decision against Pavone, who heads the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, had been taken and that there was no chance for an appeal.Pavone had been investigated by his then diocese of Amarillo, Texas, for having placed an aborted foetus on an altar and posting a video of it on two social media sites in 2016. The video was accompanied by a post saying that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party would allow abortion to continue, and that Donald Trump and the Republicans wanted to protect unborn children.Pavone remains a firm supporter of Trump. His Twitter handle features him wearing a Maga hat with a background photo featuring the former US president, whom many conservatives praise for his supreme court nominees who overturned the landmark decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion in the US.Pavone was defiant in a tweet on Sunday, comparing his fate to that of unborn children. “So in every profession, including the priesthood, if you defend the unborn, you will be treated like them! The only difference is that when we are ‘aborted’ we continue to speak, loud and clear.”His supporters immediately denounced the measure, including the bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland, who referred to Joe Biden’s support for abortion rights as “evil”. Pavone had appealed to the Vatican over restrictions placed on his ministry in 2011 by the Amarillo bishop, succeeded in getting the restrictions eased and relocated away from Texas while remaining active with Priests for Life.In his letter, Pierre cited information from the Congregation for Clergy that Pavone had been found guilty in a canonical proceeding “of blasphemous communications on social media and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop”. The letter was first reported by Catholic News Agency.The statement said Pavone was given “ample opportunity to defend himself” as well as to submit to his bishop. The statement concluded that since Priests for Life is not a Catholic organisation, it would be up to the group to determine whether he could continue his role “as a layperson”.Laicisation, or being reduced to the lay state, is one of the harshest sanctions in the church’s canon law. TopicsVaticanAbortionHealthWomenTrump administrationCatholicismReligionnewsReuse this content More

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      The US supreme court is poised to strike another blow against gay rights | Moira Donegan

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      The US supreme court is poised to strike another blow against gay rightsMoira DoneganThe court is hearing a case that could allow the kind of naked discrimination that the gay rights and civil rights movements fought so hard to end It’s not clear what, exactly, Lorie Smith’s problem is. The Colorado woman aspires to be a web designer; apparently, she’s also upset that gay people can get married. Smith is an evangelical Christian who says that her faith makes her object to same-sex marriage.This wouldn’t be anyone’s problem, except that Smith lives in a state with a robust civil rights law, one that forbids business owners who make their services available to the public from discriminating. But Smith really wants to discriminate: she hopes to be able to turn away gay clients from her as-yet-hypothetical wedding website business; she wants to put a banner at the top of her business homepage proclaiming her unwillingness to design websites for gay weddings. The law would forbid this if she ever went into business, so she’s suing.As of now, none of this has actually come up. At the time Smith filed her lawsuit, demanding an exemption to her state’s law, she didn’t even have a business with which to discriminate. The law has never been enforced against her; she’s never had the opportunity to discriminate that she so craves. It’s not clear, in other words, that she really has standing to sue – she’s never been forced to provide services to gay people, so, in legal parlance, there’s no “injury” to speak of. But Smith is an angry conservative, and she’s found some very well-funded lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a huge rightwing legal organization that has embarked on a nationwide campaign of lawsuits to erode civil rights protections for gay people.The result is 303 Creative v Elenis, a case in which Smith argues that her religious convictions mean that she shouldn’t have to comply with a generally applicable civil rights law, and should be granted license to discriminate by her state. The US supreme court heard oral arguments on Monday, and the 6-3 conservative majority is certain to hand Smith a victory allowing her to deny service to clients based on sexual orientation.A decision from the court is expected next summer. The question, as happens so often with this rabidly conservative court, is not who is going to win. That question was probably answered the moment the court agreed to hear the case, to the point that briefings and oral arguments in hot-button culture and identity cases like 303 Creative have been rendered largely moot.The question, instead, is how far the court will go: how much the justices will unravel the anti-discrimination laws that govern public accommodations – that is, the laws that say that businesses which serve the public cannot deny service to people based on their identity – and how much discrimination, humiliation and bigotry in public life they will unleash upon gay Americans. The question is whether the speech that Smith can deploy in any other form of her life – any belief that she already has every right to broadcast online, or in her church, or in writing, or by holding a sign up in the street – is also an opinion she is entitled to enforce through the conduct of her business.If the 303 Creative case sounds familiar, that’s because it’s more or less a rerun. In 2018, the supreme court heard Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, another case by a business owner challenging the same state law, this time a baker who didn’t want to make a gay couple’s wedding cake. In that case, the court punted, ruling that lower tribunals had mishandled the case, but not making a decision on the merits about whether an individual businessperson’s opinions trumped civil rights law. But the court looked very different in 2018: that punting opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy, who retired soon thereafter and was replaced by his protege, the beer enthusiast Brett Kavanaugh. Since then the court has lurched even further to the right, and has shown a willingness to indulge even the most far-fetched claims of Christian religious litigants.But it’s worth considering what the court did not do when it agreed to hear 303 Creative: it did not grant certiorari on Smith’s claim that her religious freedom was violated by the anti-discrimination law. This is unusual, for this court: since the Trump justices joined the court, turning it from what was already a quite conservative institution into a maximalist, revanchist one with a culture-war axe to grind, the court has expanded free-exercise-of-religion rights quite rapidly – at least, so long as those free-exercise rights are being exercised by conservative Christians.The court has even specifically used the constitution’s free-exercise clause to imply an entitlement to discriminate against homosexuals: in last summer’s Fulton v Philadelphia, the justices ruled that municipal agencies handling the welfare of children in need were obliged to work with a religiously affiliated adoption agency, even though that agency discriminated against gay couples in violation of city civil rights law.But in 303 Creative the court is only considering Smith’s wish to discriminate as a free speech issue. This opens a new avenue for challenges to civil rights law, and will provide an opportunity for rightwing lawyers to begin unraveling the laws regarding non-discrimination in public accommodations in the wake of the civil rights movement, like pulling on a loose thread to unravel a sweater.Though Smith wants to discriminate only against gay couples, and other exemptions to civil rights law are likely to focus on allowing open bigotry against LGBTQ+ people to be expressed in commercial life, there is no limiting principle that means that only gay people will be targeted. After all, if a website designer is allowed to decline to make a gay wedding website, what stops her from making the same claim to refuse an interracial wedding, or an interfaith one? Is she allowed to decline to make sites for birth announcements of children born to gay couples, or via IVF?I keep thinking of the sign that Smith wants to put at the top of her future business’s webpage, the one that says she won’t make websites for gay weddings. It’s essentially an advertisement of her belief in gay people’s inferiority, an effort to exclude them not just from her own goodwill, but from commercial life. How different is such a sign, really, from those that advertised whites-only lunch counters, or the signs that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled seeing in the windows of shops when she went on family road trips as a child: “No dogs and no Jews”.It has become vogue, in rightwing legal arguments against civil rights law, to speak of the “indignity” imposed on anti-gay business owners who are forced to comply with anti-discrimination law. It’s a shame that the court doesn’t seem poised to consider the indignity of facing discrimination itself.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS supreme courtReligionLaw (US)LGBTQ+ rightscommentReuse this content More

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      Record number of Muslims elected in US midterms: ‘We should lean into who we are’

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      Record number of Muslims elected in US midterms: ‘We should lean into who we are’ Advocates cite desire ‘to create social change’ as candidates win seats at the national, state and local levelsAs a woman, a millennial, a progressive – and a Muslim – Nabilah Islam faced long odds in her bid for elected office in Georgia. Two years ago, she ran for Congress but lost in the Democratic primary, despite a high-profile endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This year, she ran for state senate to represent parts of the Atlanta metro region and won.“People thought it was unthinkable that in the south, someone would vote for a woman with the last name Islam,” she said. “I’m like: they did. Fifty-three per cent of this district did.”Islam, 32, is among a record number of Muslims elected to local, state and national office in November. A new analysis by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), a civil rights and advocacy group, and Jetpac, a non-profit focused on increasing Muslim political representation in the US, found that Muslims won at least 83 seats nationwide, up from an estimated 71 in 2020.“I ran because I wanted to make sure that we had representation in the halls of power,” said Islam, a Bangladeshi American who is the first Muslim woman and the first South Asian woman to be elected to the Georgia state senate. “It’s so important that we don’t run away from ourselves and we lean into who we are. I think that’s what inspires folks to go out and vote for people, because they trust them.”Muslims also won seats in Texas, Illinois, California, Minnesota, Maine, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These newly elected officials come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, including Somali, Pakistani, Afghan, Indian and Palestinian, but tend to be young and Democratic.The path to these wins was paved in part by higher-profile Muslim politicians, including Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress, who is now Minnesota attorney general; André Carson, a congressman from Indiana; and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Muslim women to serve in Congress. But Mohamed Gula, national organizing director at Emgage, a Muslim civic engagement non-profit, said the phenomenon was also fueled by the community’s desire “to create social change, to create a culture shift and the systems that are supposed to represent us”.California legislature is 10% LGBTQ+ in record-setting year nationwideRead moreAisha Wahab, the first Muslim and the first Afghan American elected to California’s state senate, said her run was about paying it forward to the next generation. “We need to see what else we can do for our community or country that we live in,” she said.Wahab, who first served on city council for Hayward, in the San Francisco Bay Area, will represent a majority Asian American and Latino district that has one of the largest Afghan populations in the US. As the only renter in the California legislature, Wahab, who grew up in the foster system, ran on a platform of affordable housing, supporting small businesses to ensure local job creation and expanding Medi-Cal coverage.Meanwhile, the Democrats Salman Bhojani and Suleman Lalani won state House races in Texas, becoming the first Muslim lawmakers for the state. Bhojani had become the first Muslim to hold elected office in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless when he served on the city council. He said bipartisanship was one reason for his success: even though he was the only Democrat and person of color on the city council, his colleagues elected him as mayor pro tem for the city in 2020. During this time, he worked on programs to educate youth about local government and encourage large-scale development.“That meant a lot to me and how I’ve been able to work across the aisle and pass legislation that’s common sense and kitchen table as opposed to partisan rhetoric,” he said.In addition to winning over Republicans, Bhojani, who is Pakistani American, also reached out to constituents often ignored by other politicians. He built relationships with his district’s sizable Tongan and Nepalese communities, often meeting them in their own community spaces.Islam, too, reached out to diverse constituencies during her campaign, drawing on her background from a working-class, immigrant family to connect with members of her district, which is 65% Black and brown, she said.“People see themselves in my candidacy, in my story,” she said. “And that’s why I think a lot of people were inspired to go out and vote.”Growing Muslim political participation is also happening at the voting booth. A 2020 study by EmgageUSA showed significant gains in the number of registered Muslim voters in several states compared with 2016: 39% in Georgia, 35% in Texas and 46% in Wisconsin. Even though Muslims make up just 1.3% of the US population, large communities in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Minnesota mean they can play a role in determining key races. In Pennsylvania, for instance, Emgage’s Gula said the state’s large population of African American Muslims had helped the Democrat John Fetterman defeat the Republican Mehmet Oz. (Oz, who is of Turkish descent, has described himself as a secular Muslim.)“When you’re looking at where a large number of the Muslim community is, it allows for us to ensure that we are able to have a certain level of bargaining power,” Gula said.US corporations gave more than $8m to election deniers’ midterm campaignsRead moreMuslims are also serving in government in non-elected positions, Gula said, as well as on campaigns and as community organizers, which has helped energize political participation in the community. More than 70 Muslims serve in the Biden administration, he said, including Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission; Sameera Fazili, national economic council deputy director; Reema Dodin, White House Office of Legislative Affairs deputy director; and Rashad Hussain, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.Shafina Khabani is one of these community organizers, who is now executive director of the Georgia Muslim Voter Project (GAMVP), founded in early 2016 in response to Islamophobic rhetoric during Trump’s presidential campaign and the local Muslim community’s low level of civic engagement.“One of the issues that we grapple with within our community is a lack of trust, especially when there are outsiders coming into the community, and our history of Islamophobia and surveillance,” Khabani said.Through conversations, Khabani learned that many Muslims were not registered to vote. “It wasn’t because our communities didn’t care, it was because politicians were not paying attention and reaching out to our communities,” she said. “It’s because organizations that were on the ground doing voter engagement and voter registration work were not reaching out to our communities in culturally competent ways.”By showing up at places of worship, halal restaurants, grocery stores, cultural and religious festivals, the GAMVP resonated with Georgia Muslims because community members saw that it was an organization run for and by Muslims.Muslim political engagement will only continue to grow. “They want to be a part of the American social fabric, but they also want to be a part of building the future for America in general,” Gula said.TopicsUS politicsIslamReligionUS midterm elections 2022featuresReuse this content More

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      Rights group calls for Samuel Alito to be investigated after claims of leaked 2014 ruling

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      Rights group calls for Samuel Alito to be investigated after claims of leaked 2014 rulingAnti-abortion activist said supreme court justice revealed the landmark ruling on contraception and religious rights weeks earlier A civil rights group issued a call Saturday for US supreme court justice Samuel Alito to be investigated over allegations that the judge leaked a 2014 landmark ruling involving contraception and religious rights at a private dinner with wealthy political donors.The claim was contained in a New York Times article in which minister Rob Schenck, an anti-abortion activist, said he was told of the decision weeks before it was announced and had used the information to prepare a public relations push.Samuel Alito assured Ted Kennedy in 2005 of respect for Roe, diary revealsRead moreSchenck also claimed he tipped off Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that brought and won the case allowing privately-held, for-profit businesses to be exempt from regulations to which its owners religiously object, in this case requiring employers to cover certain contraceptives for their female employees.“The Senate judiciary committee should immediately move to investigate the apparent leak by Justice Alito,” said Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice.“This bombshell report is the latest proof that the Republican justices on the court are little more than politicians in robes. It’s no wonder trust in the court has hit a record low. Structural reform of the court, including strict new ethics rules, is needed now more than ever.”Fallon added that Schenck “should be called to testify about both the leak and the years-long lobbying effort he once led to cultivate Alito and other Republican justices”.Claims of the judicial leak, potentially for political purposes, comes six months after a draft opinion of the Dobbs decision overturning the nationwide abortion rights established by the 1972 case Roe v Wade was leaked ahead of its June publication.In a letter to supreme court chief justice John G Roberts Jr dated 7 June, Schenck wrote that he was reaching out to the judge “to inform you of a series of events that may impinge on the investigation you and your delegates are undertaking in connection with the leak of a draft opinion”.He described a dinner at which an unnamed political donor invited to dine at the home of Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, had offered to try to glean information about the pending decision in the Hobby Lobby case.The next day, the Times reported, the dining guest called Schenck and told him Alito had written the majority opinion in the case and that Hobby Lobby would win. That exact decision was publicly announced less than a month later.Schenck concluded the letter to Roberts by saying he “thought this previous incident might bear some consideration by you and others involved in the process”.How that directly reflects on the current investigation into the leak of the Dobbs decision is not clear, but it arrives at a time of concern for the court’s legitimacy as it works under the sway of a conservative supermajority. Polls show that a majority of Americans are losing confidence in the supreme court.After the leak in May of the Dobbs decision draft, Alito called the unauthorized disclosure “a grave betrayal” and ordered an investigation by the supreme court’s marshal.The Times noted that Schenck’s account has “gaps”. But the newspaper’s examination of the claim uncovered emails and conversations that “strongly suggested” that Schenck knew of the decision before it was made public.TopicsUS supreme courtAbortionRoe v WadeContraception and family planningReligionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More