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| Trump’s 3 appointees: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett |
I have always said that while I didn’t support the man in any way, I did support most of his policies, Which tended to be based on politically conservative values. (Both economic and social.) Sometimes bad people can do good things.
This court has accomplished 3 things that were once thought impossible to achieve: They overturned Roe v Wade; they rejected the reverse racism of Affirmative Action; and they protected the constitutional rights of religious people to not to be forced to violate their religious principles. As reported by Reuters:
The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines in favor of Denver-area web designer Lorie Smith, who cited her Christian beliefs against gay marriage in challenging a Colorado anti-discrimination law. The justices overturned a lower court's ruling that had rejected Smith's bid for an exemption from a Colorado law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and other factors.
Smith's business, called 303 Creative, sells custom web designs, but she opposed providing her services for same-sex weddings.
I’m sure that liberals will try to explain why religious rights are never violated by being forced to accommodate an LGBTQ request like that. And that the 6-3 decision by SCOTUS was instead borne of non democratic religious values based agenda of the SCOTUS majority. But that is a matter of opinion which I do not share.
What about LGBTQ rights to patronize a website for their purposes - which contradict the religious values of its owner? No one is denying them those rights. They can easily be accommodated by other website designers whose religious principles are not violated by doing so.
Liberals love to challenge my views with the following analogy. Is denying LGBTQ access to the website of their choice not the same as denying the rights or racial, ethnic, or religious minorities to the website of their choice?
There is no legitimate religious view that sees accommodating any of these minority populations a violation of their religious principles. Fringe White Supremacist groups who claim their racist views to be religious views are not articulating any religious doctrines other than their own racism, antisemitism, or xenophobia. That kind of ‘religion’ cannot be tolerated in a a democracy any more than human sacrifice can. There is an obvious difference between widely accepted and reasonable religious principles on the one hand - and on the other hand barbaric primitive religious principles or principles that are based on racial or ethnic prejudices.
My view on Roe v Wade is a bit more complex. I was opposed to overturning it since I believe that the procedure should be completely legal and free of any government interference - so that we can access it if and when we need it. That said, I have always been against abortion as a means of birth control or as a matter of convenience. Which was one of the things that Roe V Wade protected. I am with the pro-life crowd on that point.
My view about the SCOTUS decision on Affirmative Action was articulated in the last post and I do not want to belabor it here.
Bottom line is that in a democracy like ours conservative values are just as legitimate as liberal values. One’s political as applied in the voting booth will determine which values are ‘more’ democratic’ at any given time.
And that is the beauty of this great experiment in democracy called the United States of America. The will of the people generally guides the institutions that make these determinations. For many years a liberal SCOTUS defined democracy. Now it is a conservative SCOTUS that does. That is how the pendulum swings in a true democracy.
Now if only both sides would stop shouting at each other and respect the right to disagree. If anything can undermine our democracy it is the unwillingness to do that. Which in my view is the cause of the extreme polarization that now domaninates political discourse to the point of storming the capital to assure that one’s own political perspective is the one that prevails. That is NOT democracy, It’s totalitarianism. Which almost happened here on that fateful January day in 2021. And there is only one person that can be blamed for inciting that near insurrection, Former President Donald J. Trump. For that - I not only do NOT thank him, I condemn him.