How Trump-empowered religious extremists are having a Supreme Court 'field day': advocate
The leader of one the nation’s largest religious-freedom groups warns “America cannot stay America” without a renewed commitment to fighting back against extremists emboldened by former President Donald Trump.
In a wide-ranging interview with Raw Story, Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Trump’s departure from power — temporary or permanent — in no way signals any respite from a crisis of religious extremism he helped propel.
“We are witnessing a religious extremist movement that no longer is afraid to say the quiet part out loud, and that unabashedly is driving towards a white Christian America where the laws codify white Christian privilege,” Laser said. “And we have a Supreme Court that is by and large advancing their agenda.”
Topping that list: the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the federal right to obtaining an abortion.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State has made that a top priority, working with women’s groups, but employing a religious-liberty angle that’s decidedly unconventional.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State and National Women’s Law Center recently filed a lawsuit in Missouri on behalf of clergy members challenging a 2019 Missouri state law exclusively upon church-state protection provisions.
It’s a strategy that apparently is emerging nationally, as Insider reports:
“There have also been more than a dozen cases challenging abortion restrictions on religious freedom grounds since the Supreme Court's decision, said Elizabeth Reiner Platt, director of Columbia Law School's Law, Rights, and Religion Project. A Florida Jewish congregation, a group of Florida multi-faith leaders, Methodist ministers in Texas, and Jewish and Muslim claimants in Indiana, among others, have all brought similar claims.”
The group chose Missouri as a test case in no small part because state legislators there had made no effort to hide their rationale for enacting some of the nation’s toughest anti-abortion laws. Abortions are only permitted now in cases of a medical emergency in Missouri. There are no exceptions for rape or incest under the law.
Health care providers who violate that law can be guilty of a class B felony, which can result in five to 15 years in prison, and have their medical license suspended or revoked, the Missouri Independent reported. And when such provisions were passed in 2019, Republican legislators didn’t bother hiding the reasons why.
“Missouri was the perfect alignment of the stars, because the lawmakers all said explicitly that they were religiously motivated in passing these bans,” Laser said. “They put explicit religious language into their law, which says the Lord almighty is the author of life and made no effort to hide that their religious beliefs were behind this. They didn’t hide anything.”
Laser said similar motivation is driving an attack by the far-right on public education, LGBTQ rights and a gamut of other freedoms.
“Religious extremists are having a field day with this court, and unfortunately they’re just getting started,” she said.
Might religion-driven legal crusades subside if Trump fails in his 2024 re-election bid?
“It won’t,” Laser said. “Trump absolutely emboldened religious extremists to do what they’re doing. But whether or not Donald Trump wins in 2024 won't effect that, because he's already put this court into power. And the justices he appointed are intent on continuing what they’ve started.”
Laser also cited “a religious extremist crusade to take down public schools and divert all of the funding to private religious schools” as a particular threat.
She said much — but not all — of that activity is taking place at the state level, regarding matters such as the separation of church and state and the fight over “critical race theory,” a largely college-level academic concept that some conservative politicians have used as shorthand for any public school curriculum that addresses racism.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State was nonpartisan and approached the topic as such. She cautioned that unsuspecting politicians of both parties can be influenced by efforts to blur the distinction of church and state by programs, such as “Project Blitz”.
READ MORE:Separation of church and state? Let's get real — that's over. So what do we do now?
That’s the effort organized by Christian nationalists in the early years of the Trump administration to arm legislators with model bills advancing the far-right agenda, the New York Times reported. They range from bills attacking the rights of same-sex marriage couple to permitting adoption and foster care to discriminate based upon their religion to efforts to blur church-state lines in ways that seem benign.
“There are plenty of Democratic state representatives who have introduced bills from the Project Blitz playbook thinking they're perhaps more harmless than they are,” Laser said. “Things like bills that would post “In God We Trust” in public schools or invite Bible classes into public schools.
“They've got sort of a stronghold on sort of many states where they have elected representatives come together and advance this escalating agenda that's goal is to license discrimination in the name of quote, ‘religious freedom,’ close quote.”
Laser says an example of how a seemingly innocent concept respecting religious liberty can become distorted is the “ministerial exception.”
In theory, it’s intended to protect religious institutions from intrusion by the government in hiring and dealing with key religious employees, and specifically ministers.
So, if a church has an anti-LGBTQ philosophy, it can follow it in hiring its ministers. But that sort of discrimination doesn’t stop there, Laser says.
“The problem is that the religious extremist movement is trying to expand that exception to have it apply well beyond ministers,” she says. “They want to be able to call any employee of a religious institution from a janitor to a math teacher to a nurse in a religious hospital, a ‘minister’ — which they're not — to license discrimination in the name of religion.”
Last month, Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed an appeal of a federal judge’s ruling finding the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis could rely upon the ministerial exception to fire a high school guidance counselor for being in a same-sex marriage. Laser says it’s the sort of battle her organization is fighting across the nation.
“Our priority is to reawaken the nation to how connected church-state separation is to so many freedoms we have, and to restore the nation's commitment to this principle,” Laser says. “Because without it, America wouldn't be America.”
Related Post