A pride flag flies in front of the US supreme court, in Washington. The extreme religious right’s mission to roll back civil rights from abortion to public accommodations is being fueled by false facts and false history. Recent articles in the New Republic have documented the shaky factual foundation behind 303 Creative LLC v Elenis , the case in which the supreme court held that a website design business owned by an evangelical Christian, Lorie Smith, could refuse service to same-sex couples. Even more troubling, the history undergirding the majority’s reasoning is misleading and dangerous to the separation of church and state. Tragically, the religious right knows it has a friendly audience in the six conservative Catholic justices on the supreme court, who have been partners in shaking the foundations of fundamental rights. The justices’ new standard is whether a constitutional right is grounded in “history and tradition”, the latest byword for the bogus doctrine of “originalism”. So they need some history, and apparently any history will do. The legal end to reach a thunderous ruling justifies their debatable means. So the concept of “religious autonomy”, built on a foundation of misleading scholarship, “impact” litigation and, above all, false […]
