After Bostock, there is disagreement about religious liberty: Is it for narrow contexts, such as religious entities? Or, for broader contexts? @RyanTAnd's essay argues why religious liberty is narrowed when substantive moral goods are denied or eclipsed.
thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/07/67142/
thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/07/67142/
In other words, some of the good SCOTUS wins might mitigate the impact of Bostock's reach for religious entites, but exclude actors outside those narrow fields—healthcare, sports, etc. Basically, all the areas Alito's dissent mentioned. "But Liberty Keeps Winning" we're told.
To say it somewhat differently: "Liberty" is not a neutral idea. It is a tradition-dependent concept. Like "justice," "liberty" can and should be universalized in accord with natural law, but that only makes sense where natural law assumptions have broad cultural acceptance.
As Christian ideas about liberty—and more broadly, teleology—get displaced by secularized concepts, the ends for which our liberty is granted will be redefined. As always, metaphysics lurks beneath the surface, and a secularized metaphysic will not countenance a Christian one.
Thus, liberty is only as safe and intelligible as the tradition behind it is. It will grow dimmer and narrower as our voluntarist overlords dispense with it as a threat to the secularized common good.
In other words, just wait until AOC-types get appointed to SCOTUS.
In other words, just wait until AOC-types get appointed to SCOTUS.
Tl;dr: It’s always, always, always about metaphysics. Changing the underlying metaphysic results in different outputs and definitions of ideas we think are plastic, but are truly not.
