I was just reading this excellent and sobering @Dahlialithwick piece on the mounting corruption of the federal judiciary, starting at the very top. Specifically, it is a new theory, in the Court minority for now, which seems poised to invalidate ALL vaccine mandates ...
https://twitter.com/PGourevitch/status/1473825587710107660
2/ on the theory, among others, that the state simply has no compelling interest in preventing the spread of communicable diseases. It's part of the broader right wing judicial agenda to put much of the power of the state at the mercy of a novel sort of Calhounite ...
3/ minority veto. But there's a whole other layer of this corruption that gets too little attention. In the overwhelming number of cases the idea that these mandates are violating ANYBODYS religious scruples, let alone liberties, is just bullshit. Here's an example.
4/ There are many people who believe it is an abuse of the free exercise clause to put civil rights legislation or abortion rights legislation at the mercy of claims of religious liberty. I am definitely one of those people. But there are large communities of belief in ...
5/ this country who believe abortion is deep moral evil and that belief is deeply interwoven with their confessional identity. I don't think that means they should be able to veto public laws or get carve out or whatever. But I grant that these are at least issues ...
6/ that their religious beliefs directly speak to. There are close to no religions in this country who have anything like that with vaccinations. Christian science does. A very small very small sects. But VERY few. Overwhelmingly this religious objection is just totally ...
7/ made up. There are basically no mainstream Christian denominations that say anything about vaccination. Now it is true that we really don't want to get the state into the business of litigate what your religion says and what you do and don't believe. But this is why the ...
8/ has always been on the believer to make some good faith effort to demonstrate that something the state is requiring impinges on some actual body of belief, or even some demonstrated personal history. Otherwise, it's just an ability to opt out of or actually overthrow ...
9/ any law that doesn't match with your current preferences or political impulses or beliefs. We'd all like to do that sometimes. But that's the burden of living in society, living in a democracy. The whole notion of religious liberty has become a mockery ...
10/ of the original conception - which was the liberty to **practice** your own religion, not the ability to use your religious confession as a sort of constitutional force field that allows you to ignore or break laws you don't happen to like. But we shouldn't lose sight ...
11/ of the fact that these vaccine claims are actually already that reductio ad absurdum. Religions these litigants purport to subscribe to have no objection to vaccination. Very few of these individuals even have personal histories of such opposition. Have they ever ...
12/ gotten a tetanus shot? These latest ruling go beyond the rulings of recent years which make religious liberty less a defense against the hand of the state so much as a cudgel to be used against here. Here, again, the claims of religious scruple are just ...
13/ made up out of whole cloth because the path has already been created for such fabulisms by the corruption of free exercise doctrine. None of this is a surprise to anyone. We know this stuff is made up. It's bullshit even on its own terms.
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