Very difficult to overstate how dangerous this is. A Supreme Court justice suggesting that "secular society" is a risk, that the government somehow favors or even is dependent on religion and believers over others is a step toward theocracy and away from our founding principles.
Religious freedom is the freedom to believe or not to believe. Separation of church and state, which this court has begun to attack, is, as Madison noted, created to protect not only citizens from a state imposing the beliefs of the few but also to protect religions themselves.
Do not for one minute think this is about ensuring all who wish to worship are free to do so. It is about giving religious activists an opportunity to institutionalize and enforce their beliefs--as is being done in the case of abortion or in the Kennedy vs. Bremerton case.
It is what puts the right to marry who you want at risk, the right to contraception at risk, the right to privacy at risk. And almost certainly, it will soon put less favored religions at risk as well. This is not the work of believers, of the faithful.
This is the work of white Christian nationalism. It is the work of incipient fascism. It is the work of those who seek to enshrine the narrow superstitions of a small minority in laws and rulings that will in fact replace religious freedom with religious obligations.
It is the beginning of the end of democracy in America. And make no mistake, we are already far more infected with the view that somehow the state must promote and defend religion than are many other nations. Should we go further down this road...
...we will become precisely the kind of country the founders sought to avoid, the kind of country that they left behind (and that, fortunately, history has left behind in many places). Could the US be a theocracy or a theocracy-lite?
Could churches hold a favored or leadership role within our society, within our government? A rule-setting role? If you think that is the stuff of dystopian fiction, you are not paying attention. And if you think it is not getting worse and could not get much worse still...
...you are not just a clueless optimist, you yourself are a threat. Because it will take all of us, pushing back as hard as we can to stop and ultimately reverse this trend and do what we must to restore full freedoms and protect democracy in America.
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