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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
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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

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      Alarm over Texas law forcing schools to display ‘In God We Trust’ signs

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      Alarm over Texas law forcing schools to display ‘In God We Trust’ signsCivil rights advocates say it ‘imposes religion’ as new law requires public campuses to display any donated items bearing that phrase Civil rights advocates are ringing alarm bells about officials distributing “In God We Trust” posters in Texas schools after a state law took effect requiring public campuses to display any donated items bearing that phrase.“These posters demonstrate the more casual ways a state can impose religion on the public,” Sophie Ellman-Golan of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) told the Guardian. “Alone, they’re a basic violation of the separation of church and state. But in the broader context, it’s hard not to see them as part of the larger Christian nationalist project.”The Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition (SARC) said they were “disturbed” by the precedent the posters’ distribution could set.“SARC is disturbed by the precedent displaying these posters in every school will set and the chilling effect this blatant intrusion of religion in what should be a secular public institution will have on the student body, especially those who do not practice the dominant Christian faith,” the group said in a statement.While the phrase doesn’t explicitly mention any specific religion, many argue that “In God We Trust” has long been used as a tool to forward Christian nationalism.Christians were instrumental in putting the phrase on coins during the civil war, Kristina Lee of Colorado State University wrote last year, and has since used the phrase as supposed evidence to prove the United States is a Christian nation.The flags’ distribution in Texas is not the first time that a government body has imposed the phrase.In Chesapeake, Virginia, the city council ruled in 2021 that every city vehicle was to carry “In God We Trust” motto, a move that would require a budget of about $87,000.Ellman-Golan of JFREJ said the issue is deeply connected to other concerns, such as women’s health and education in Texas.“We know that state governments in places like Texas are codifying white Christian nationalist patriarchy into law at an alarming rate,” she added. “The most dangerous examples of this are bans on abortion and gender-affirming care, as well as efforts to censor education.”Texas state senator Bryan Hughes, who is Republican and said he is the author of the “In God We Trust Act,” celebrated on Twitter, saying that the motto “asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God”.Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights organization, welcomed the initiative and said this might allow for an opportunity for students to learn about other faiths.“The notion of trusting God is common across faiths,” CAIR spokesperson Corey Saylor told the Guardian. “Applied through that lens, the posters can foster discussions among Texas students about their various faiths and enhance understanding.”Saylor did not comment about how safe Texas’s Muslim students might feel in Texas about their religion. About half of Muslim students in Texas’s Dallas-Fort Worth area have reported being bullied at school over their faith, according to a 2020 CAIR report.Sometimes in Texas, a fear of people from non-Christian backgrounds has prompted their being reported to police.For instance, In 2015, a 14-year-old Muslim boy in a Texas suburb was arrested after he brought a clock he made to school, and a teacher fearing it was a bomb called police on him. A few months later, a 12-year-old Sikh boy in another Texas suburb was arrested after a bully told his teacher he was carrying a bomb in his backpack.Saylor said the “In God We Trust” initiative’s success depended on “students of minority faiths’ [feeling] supported by educators to express how they understand trusting God”.TopicsTexasUS educationUS politicsReligionnewsReuse this content More

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      Alarm as US supreme court takes a hatchet to church-state separation

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      Alarm as US supreme court takes a hatchet to church-state separation A series of court decisions has raised fears that the conservative majority are forcing religion back into the US political systemWhen America’s highest court ended the constitutional right to abortion after half a century, Jeff Landry, the attorney general of Louisiana, knew whom he wanted to thank.“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad,” he said in an official statement. “Today, along with millions across Louisiana and America, I rejoice with my departed mom and the unborn children with her in Heaven!”The US supreme court is letting prayer back in public schools. This is unsettling | Moira DoneganRead moreThe southern state’s top law enforcement official was not the only Republican to reference God while taking a victory lap. Nor was he alone in rooting for the supreme court to continue a pattern of forcing religion back into the US political system and tearing down the wall that separates church from state.The court – said to be more pro-religion than at any time since the 1950s – wrapped up one of its most consequential and divisive terms this week. Critics lamented a string of decisions that they say undermine legal traditions that prevent government officials from promoting any particular faith.In May the conservative majority ruled in favor of a Christian group that wanted to fly a flag emblazoned with a cross at Boston city hall under a programme aimed at promoting diversity and tolerance among the city’s various communities.Last month they endorsed taxpayer money paying for students to attend religious schools under a Maine tuition assistance programme in rural areas lacking nearby public high schools.Then they backed an American football coach at a Washington state public high school who was suspended by a local school district for refusing to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games. This ruling cast aside a 1971 precedent, known as the Lemon test, which took into account factors such as whether the challenged government practice has a secular purpose.In all three cases, the court decided against government officials whose policies and actions were taken to avoid violating the constitution’s first amendment prohibition on government endorsement of religion, known as the “establishment clause”.In addition, although their decision last week to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion nationwide did not involve the establishment clause, it was celebrated as a seminal victory by religious conservatives. Mike Pence, the former vice-president and a born again Christian, called for a national ban on the procedure.Paradoxically, the trend comes against the backdrop of an increasingly diverse and secular nation.Last year a Gallup survey revealed that Americans’ membership in houses of worship dropped below 50% for the first time, and last month Gallup found that the share of US adults who believe in God – 81% – was the lowest since it first asked the question in 1944.White Christians represented 54% of the population when Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008 but now make up only 45%. Former president Donald Trump’s appointment of three rightwing justices, however, helped put the court on a very different track. And the nature of its rulings have been unusually radical and sweeping.Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, said: “What we’re seeing is a desperate power grab as the sun is setting on white Christian America. In the courts, instead of moving slowly and systematically, it’s a lurch.”Jones added: “In the meantime we’re going to be left with essentially an apartheid situation in the US where we’re going to have minority rule by this shrinking group that’s been able to seize the levers of power, even as their cultural democratic representation in the country shrinks.”The establishment clause prevents the government from establishing a state religion and bars it from favoring one faith over another. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, said in an 1802 letter the provision should represent a “wall of separation” between church and state.Some far-right Republicans now brazenly challenge that premise. The Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert reportedly told a church service last Sunday: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.”In its trio of provocative decisions over the past two months, the supreme court decided that government actions intended to maintain a separation of church and state had instead infringed separate rights to free speech or the free exercise of religion, also protected by the first amendment.In the ruling on school football coach Joseph Kennedy, the conservative justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court’s aim was to prevent public officials from being hostile to religion as they navigate the establishment clause. “In no world may a government entity’s concerns about phantom violations justify actual violations of an individual’s first amendment rights,” Gorsuch opined.Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represented the school board in the case, said the separation was “under complete attack” by the supreme court as it favours the free exercise clause at the expense of the establishment clause, thereby raising the specter of religious favoritism.“We are at risk of taking away the religious freedom of vast numbers of Americans, which should make the founders of our country be doing somersaults in their grave and I’m sure is alarming to the world as a whole, because they see America as a beacon of light when it comes to religious freedom.”The line between church and state has been crucial, Laser argues, to advances in LGBTQ equality, racial justice, reproductive freedom, protecting religious minorities, the teaching of science in schools and safeguarding democracy itself. But all this is suddenly precarious because of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.She added: “The court pandered to a religious extremist agenda and implemented it by forcing one set of religious views on all of us and taking away the right of a woman to do with her body what her religious and moral views dictate, or taking away the right of a Maine taxpayer to not fund the teaching of a religion or religious discrimination that they disagree with, or taking away the right of a Jewish or Muslim or an atheist or a Buddhist public school student not to feel pressured to pray to play and be included in public school.”Like Jones, Laser perceives in the court’s opinions a backlash against America’s religious pluralism, racial diversity, an increase in women’s power in society and the advent of marriage equality and progress on LGBTQ equality.“This is a backlash that is meant to reinforce and cement existing power structures into our law, and it panders to a white Christian right extremist agenda. It’s incredibly divisive. It’s dangerous to our democracy in that regard.”Unusually, the nine-member supreme court currently includes six Catholics: Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, all appointed by Republican presidents, and Sonia Sotomayor, seated by a Democrat. Last year the court ruled that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could ignore city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who apply to take in foster children.But although most of the court’s religious rights decisions in recent years involved Christian plaintiffs, it has also backed followers of other religions. These included a Muslim woman in 2015 denied a retail sales job because she wore a headscarf for religious reasons and a Buddhist death row inmate in 2019 who wanted a spiritual adviser present at his execution in Texas.The court also sided with both Christian and Jewish congregations in challenges based on religious rights to governmental restrictions such as limits on public gatherings imposed as public safety measures during the coronavirus pandemic.The New York Times reported recently: “Since John Roberts became chief justice in 2005, the court has ruled in favor of religious organizations in orally argued cases 83% [now 85%] of the time. That is far more than any court in the past seven decades – all of which were led by chief justices who, like Roberts, were appointed by Republican presidents.”The shift has been welcomed by conservative pressure groups. Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said: “The court’s recent pro-religious liberty streak shows how far it has come from earlier decades. A majority of the justices continue to demonstrate a clear record of protecting religious liberty and expression, something the constitution explicitly guarantees.”Activists and academic experts, however, warn that the emboldened supermajority of six justices is out of kilter with the will of the people on government endorsement of religion and other issues. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, said: “It’s paradoxical but it’s also a function of our system that creates so many avenues for minority rule and that’s something that we as Americans need to really reckon with: whether this 18th-century system still works for us in the 21st century.”TopicsUS constitution and civil libertiesUS politicsUS supreme courtChristianityReligionLaw (US)featuresReuse this content More

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      Supreme court sides with high school coach who led on-field prayers

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      Supreme court sides with high school coach who led on-field prayersRuling expands religious rights of government employees in latest of decisions taking a broad view of religious liberty The US supreme court’s conservative majority on Monday sided with a former public high-school football coach who lost his job for praying with players at the 50-yard line after games.The 6-3 ruling, with the court’s liberals in dissent, represented a victory for Christian conservative activists seeking to expand the role of prayer and religion in public schools. In its decision, the court ruled that the school district had violated the constitutional rights of the coach, Joseph Kennedy, when it suspended his employment after he refused to stop praying on the field.“The constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.The case before the court pitted the religious rights of public school employees against the rights of students not to feel pressured into practicing religious activities. Since expanding its conservative majority, the court in recent years has increasingly ruled in favor of expanding individual religious rights, turning against government actions once viewed as necessary to maintaining a separation of church and state.Police arrest New York man accused of slapping Rudy Giuliani on backRead moreIn a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision “sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion”. She was joined by Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan.The Bremerton school district argued that Kennedy “made a spectacle” of delivering prayers and speeches, invited students to join him and courted media attention while acting in his capacity as a government employee. Some parents said their children felt compelled to participate.The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals last year ruled against Kennedy, finding that if they let his actions continue local officials would have violated the ban on government establishment of religion that is embedded in the first amendment of the federal constitution.Kennedy served as a coach at his alma mater, Bremerton high school, from 2008 to 2015. His lawyers assert that he “lost his job” because of his actions and sued in 2016. Kennedy’s suit sought a court order to be reinstated as a coach, accusing officials of religious discrimination and violating his free speech rights.Kennedy initially appeared to comply with directions to stop the prayers while on duty, the district said, but he later refused and made media appearances publicizing the dispute, attracting national attention. After repeated defiance, he was placed on paid leave from his seasonal contract and did not reapply as a coach for the subsequent season.Officials have pointed out that Kennedy no longer lives in the school district and has moved to Florida. He has said he would return if he got his job back.First Liberty Institute, a conservative religious rights group, helped represent Kennedy in the case.Kennedy’s victory was only the latest in a series of rulings on religious rights that the supreme court has issued this year.On 21 June, it endorsed the use of public money to pay for students to attend religious schools in a Maine case. On 2 May, it backed a Christian group that sought to fly a flag emblazoned with a cross at Boston city hall. On 24 March, it directed Texas to grant a convicted murderer on death row his request to have his Christian pastor lay hands on him and audibly pray during his execution.In other religious rights rulings in recent years, the supreme court broke down barriers for public money to go to religious schools and churches and exempted family-owned corporations from a federal requirement regarding employee insurance coverage for women’s birth control on religious grounds.It also sided with a Catholic organization receiving public money that barred LGBT people from applying to be foster parents and backed a Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.Reuters contributed to this reportTopicsUS supreme courtUS politicsReligionLaw (US)Washington statenewsReuse this content More

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      How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America

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      How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America Leaders of the movement understood very well that if you can capture the courts, you can change societyThe supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reverses the constitutional abortion rights that American women have enjoyed over the past 50 years, has come as a surprise to many voters. A majority, after all, support reproductive rights and regard their abolition as regressive and barbaric.Understood in the context of the movement that created the supreme court in its current incarnation, however, there is nothing surprising about it. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large.How did this conviction come to have such influence in the courts, given America’s longstanding principle of church-state separation? To understand why this is happening now, it’s important to know something about the Christian nationalist movement’s history, how its leaders chose the issue of abortion as a means of creating single-issue voters, and how they united conservatives across denominational barriers by, in effect, inventing a new form of intensely political religion.Christian nationalists often claim their movement got its start as a grassroots reaction to Roe v Wade in 1973. But the movement actually gelled several years later with a crucial assist from a group calling itself the “New Right”.Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Phyllis Schlafly and other leaders of this movement were dissatisfied with the direction of the Republican party and the culture at large. “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo,” Paul Weyrich said. “We want change – we are the forces of change.”They were angry at liberals, who they believed threatened to undermine national security with their softness on communism. They were angry at establishment conservatives – the “Rockefeller Republicans” – for siding with the liberals; they were angry about the rising tide of feminism, which they saw as a menace to the social order, and about the civil rights movement and the danger it posed to segregation. One thing that they were not particularly angry about, at least initially, was the matter of abortion rights.New Right leaders formed common cause with a handful of conservative Catholics, including George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, who shared their concerns, and drew in powerful conservative preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones Sr. They were determined to ignite a hyper-conservative counter-revolution. All they needed now was an issue that could be used to unify its disparate elements and draw in the rank and file.Among their core concerns was the fear that the supreme court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities – Jones went so far as to call segregation “God’s established order” and referred to desegregationists as “Satanic propagandists” who were “leading colored Christians astray”. As far as these pastors were concerned, they had the right not just to separate people on the basis of race but to also receive federal money for the purpose.They knew, however, that “Stop the tax on segregation!” wasn’t going to be an effective rallying cry for their new movement. As the historian and author Randall Balmer wrote, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe – that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”In many respects abortion was an unlikely choice, because when the Roe v Wade decision was issued, most Protestant Republicans supported it. The Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions in 1971 and 1974 expressing support for the liberalization of abortion law, and an editorial in their wire service hailed the passage of Roe v Wade, declaring that “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” As governor of California, Ronald Reagan passed the most liberal abortion law in the country in 1967. Conservative icon Barry Goldwater supported abortion law liberalization too, at least early in his career, and his wife Peggy was a cofounder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.Yet abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills of the age – the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation – the issue became a focal point for the anxieties about social change welling up from the base.Over time, pro-choice voices were purged from the Republican party. In her 2016 book, How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life, Phyllis Schlafly details the considerable effort it took, over several decades, to force the Republican party to change its views on the issue. What her book and the history shows is that the “pro-life religion” that we see today, which cuts across denominational boundaries on the political right, is a modern creation.In recent decades, the religious right has invested many hundreds of millions of dollars developing a complex and coordinated infrastructure, whose features include rightwing policy groups, networking organizations, data initiatives and media. A critical component of this infrastructure is its sophisticated legal sphere.Movement leaders understood very well that if you can capture the courts, you can change society. Leading organizations include the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is involved in many of the recent cases intended to degrade the principle of church-state separation; First Liberty; Becket, formerly known as the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty; and the Federalist Society, a networking and support organization for rightwing jurists and their allies whose leader, Leonard Leo, has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to a network of affiliated organizations. This infrastructure has created a pipeline to funnel ideologues to important judicial positions at the national and federal level. Nearly 90% of Trump’s appellate court nominees were or are Federalist Society members, according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and all six conservative justices on the supreme court are current or former members.The rightwing legal movement has spent several decades establishing a new regime in which “religious liberty” is reframed as an exemption from the law, one enjoyed by a certain preferred category of religion. LGBT advocacy groups are concerned that the supreme court’s willingness, in the next session, to hear the case of a Colorado website designer who wishes to refuse services to same-sex couples is a critical step to overturning a broad range of anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT Americans along with women, members of religious minority groups and others.The legal powerhouses of the Christian right have also recognized that their efforts can be turned into a gravy train of public money. That is one of the reasons a recent supreme court decision, which ruled Maine must fund religious schools as part of a state tuition program, was predicted by observers of this movement. This decision forces the state to fund religious schools no matter how discriminatory their practices and sectarian their teachings. “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.This supreme court has already made clear how swiftly our Christian nationalist judiciary will change the law to suit this vision of a society ruled by a reactionary elite, a society with a preferred religion and a prescribed code of sexual behavior, all backed by the coercive power of the state. The idea that they will stop with overturning Roe v Wade is a delusion.TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsReligionChristianityfeaturesReuse this content More