Supreme Court sides with Catholic adoption agency that refuses to work with LGBT couples
The Supreme Court was once the most dignified of American Institutions, a carefully vetted, carefully chosen group of wise old men (and eventually women) who could sit back and render cool-headed opinions on justice and equality. The people we could most count on to keep the dream of democracy alive. We are not a democracy by a long shot. Never have been. But in our better moments we've been a democracy-seeking collection of individuals, and our three branches of government have worked to extend to an ever greater number of us the freedoms the rest of us enjoy. Child labor is no more; slavery is no more, women now vote, gays now marry.
We find ourselves at a low moment in American history. Our legislature is in thrall to a political party dedicated not to truth and the rule of law but to backing up a twice impeached Divider in the Executive Branch. And now the Supremes climb on the injustice bandwagon. We're looking more and more like Hungary every day.
Most people care far more about their own personal welfare than the welfare of their neighbors and the folks in other places across the nation. That's why we have a bunch of old folks in robes we call justices, to keep us from forgetting that liberty for all is not the same thing as liberty for those with white skin or those who can afford it. Sometimes, as with the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, when the Supreme Court decided that separate schools for black folk were inherently unequal, it brought freedom to Americans where it had been previously denied. At other times, as with the Dred Scott case a century earlier, in 1857, they went the other way. They decided slavery wasn't such a bad thing after all. The Supremes are not infallible, and just, democracy-extending decisions are by no means a given.
The Roman Catholic Church, like the Supreme Court, a fallible institution despite its arrogant claims to the contrary, has decided that gay and lesbian people are not as worthy as other people, deserving of second-class status. Not real citizens. Not nice people. Not somebody you'd want to have raising kids. And the Supreme Court has decided that's just fine with them.
I don't give a hoot what the Catholic Church thinks. I thank the great spaghetti monster in the sky that, as an American citizen, I am not required to live by the bigoted guidelines of the church of Rome. People are leaving it in droves, for very good reasons. If they want to bang on about how the Jews killed Christ, they are free to do so. This is America, after all. We value the freedom to be stupid or unkind if you want, provided, as they say, your freedom to swing your fist stops short of my nose. It's all on you what things you advocate, and not for government to dictate. If you want to tell women they can't practice birth control, that's fine with me. They are free to tell you to take a hike. If you want to stop research on stem-cells, that's OK too. The majority of people who want to keep their loved ones alive through research on stem cells, they too are free to tell you to take a hike. The church is a broad collection of all types of folks, kindly folk who care for people in the shadows of life, and hypocrites and abusers of children, people who want their fellow Catholic president to be denied communion - all kinds.
The Supreme Court, however, is an institution I count on to further my civil rights and those of my fellow-Americans. Today, however, they have fallen on their faces and come down on the side of bigotry, and that's a crying shame. This cruel decision will be corrected eventually, as the Dred Scott approval of slavery was corrected. In the meantime, we can only hope America's children needing a home find their way to a non-Catholic organization to provide them with one.
Anybody who has picked up a newspaper in the past is familiar with the fact that thousands of lesbians and gays have made loving homes for children they adopt - as well as children they themselves give birth to. People have tried their damnedest to demonstrate that kids raised by LGBT people are harmed by the sexuality of their parents - to no avail. According to a report published in 2012 by the American Psychological Association,
The City of Philadelphia, working to place kids in need of fostering in good homes, took a dim view of the homophobia of the church and decided it wouldn't work with them. The church sued, and lost. The 3rd U.S. District Court of Appeals sided with the city and agreed that they had a right to not do business with an institution that discriminates against its lesbian and gay citizens. So the church took it all the way to the top, and today they won the day. It is now officially OK in the United States of America for homophobes to discriminate when it comes to taking care of needy children.
Chief Justice Roberts slipped up, however, and his decision is going to bite him in the ass eventually. The true conservatives on the court, Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas, wanted to go all the way. They should have taken down, as well, the 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith which allowed the city to forbid discrimination in a number of areas, according to Alito. He argued that the First Amendment's free exercise of religion should be interpreted to mean that citizens are free to discriminate against people they consider to be "intrinsically disordered," to use the language of the official Roman Catholic catechism. Roberts, however, obviously felt shy about letting that line of reasoning get out of hand. He was willing to say no to discrimination in most cases and decide this particular case quite narrowly. You can discriminate, he says, when it comes to gay parenting, but not otherwise.
Better watch out, Justice Roberts. You're about to go down in history as wishy-washy. And as the boss of an organization on a par with the bigoted Catholic Church. If you will just give it a little thought, Mr. Justice, you'll realize that not all of us are bigots. Or Roman Catholics.
We'd like to be able to count on you too.
Sad day today in America.
Update: Sunday, June 20, 2021
If you read the opinion expressed in Slate a few days ago (on the 17th) you may conclude that the opinion I express here is naive because it underestimates the craftiness of Chief Justice Roberts, who recognized that he needed to find a way to prevent opening the floodgates to the wholesale discrimination against lesbians and gays that would result from a refusal to throw them under the bus in this particular instance. I lack the legal training and probably the legal mind and cannot follow the Smith argument well enough to engage with it, and I leave it to others to have at it if they can.
What I am left with is a sour feeling in my gut that this may well be just another case where the decision is decided pre-argument according to the biases of the judges and then the bureaucratic mind goes to work to find the legal means to put that bias into practice. The big picture, anti-discrimination, gets lost, decency plays second fiddle to cleverness, and one can do little at this stage but sigh that real democracy remains out of reach for now and hope for better days.
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