Alito admits he used Dobbs to Expand Religion

Justice Alito knows that building a robust religious jurisprudence is not built in a day,” says the woman who introduces Alito for his keynote speech at Notre Dame’s 2022 Religious Liberty Summit. The secret is out. Alito is using his position as a United States Supreme Court justice to expand religion.

He didn’t do it as subtly in Dobbs as he did in the several other cases that the founder of the summit lists off, Hobby Lobby and cases he strategically writes statements in cases like Kennedy v. Bremerton School District in the denial of cert that later teed up the case that came back into the Supreme Court and became a landmark case for religious victory. Dobbs has become one of those landmark  religious liberty cases that has expanded religion, but this time at the cost of freedom. Dobbs eliminated a panoply of rights in favor of Alito’s beliefs that this freedom offends his religious beliefs and morals.

What rights have been eliminated in Dobbs?

The right that has been sacrificed in Dobbs is women’s constitutional right to access to abortion.

Did Dobbs Weaken other Rights?

Yes.

What rights did Dobbs Weaken?

The Dobbs decision weakened many unenumerated rights and have put them at risk of being overturned like the rights to same-sex marriage, the right to desegregation, the right to sexual privacy, the right to inter-racial marriage, just to name a few. Justice Thomas has sounded the bell that he would like the right to same-sex marriage reviewed under this new rule, and since the precedent in Roe v. Wade no longer exists as Roe was overturned.

Constitutional Rights are not Safe Unless they are Necessary for Protecting Religion

Alito’s idea of protecting religion means elevating religion as the cornerstone and the lens through which all other rights are reviewed. If the right offends religion the right will be eliminated. So Alito is not just expanding religion, he is trying to place religion as a higher right than all other fundamental rights. He is creating a  hierarchy through which all rights go through the Dobbs rule .

So if you apply Alito’s reasoning in this Notre Dame speech, oppressing women was necessary to protect religious practice and to not offend religious beliefs. Completely contrary to the constitution where offending a belief is not the measure through which government can interfere with a fundamental right.

Does Alito believe that Religious Rights have Limits?

Alito expresses that he does not like the narrow tailoring of religious protections, but does admit that even religion is subject to some limitations. Those limitations are very rare and would have to be akin to sacrificing a baby’s life.  He says that no one would stand for the sacrifice of babies over religion. He makes no mention of overthrowing Roe with the Dobbs decision here.

Who does Justice Alito Mock?

Alito complains that Prince Harry, aka the Duke of Sussex, doesn’t like his ruling, and claiming that Boris Johnson is suffering because of his criticism of the case.

Alito Cares more about Catering to his own Religious Beliefs than he does about Constitutional Rights.

Alito also makes no mention about the sacrifice of women’s rights, privacy rights, and other unenumerated rights that he has affected in his most recent landmark Dobbs opinion either. It was more important to Alito to mock the foreign leaders that have criticized his Dobbs ruling then to care about the women bleeding out and suffering in Texas as they now have to wait until a baby’s heartbeat stops before it’s mother can receive life-saving medical treatment.

Later Alito does mention First Amendment rights, but only in the context of how it protects freedom of speech in religion and freedom of association in religious assembly, claiming that protecting religion is what protects these rights. Wow, if this isn’t a glaring admittance to a conflict of interest, I don’t know what is. You can read more about Alito’s faith-based conflict of interests on Slate.

Alito believes that secularism is a threat to Religion.

Alito complains about religious oppression while being totally okay with oppressing women and trying to force you to live his religious views. Alito expresses the belief that “secular society” poses a threat to religious freedom — and state-sponsored indoctrination is the only solution.”

We’re not the only ones that believe that Alito is not performing his duty as our Founding Fathers intended. Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern agree that ” . . . the Framers of the First Amendment did not share this view: They quite deliberately created a secular government through the establishment clause while enshrining an individual right to religious liberty through the free exercise clause. To them, secularism was not a menace to religion, but a crucial component of it: History taught them that once the government got involved with matters of faith, it harmed both church and state.”

What Happens when We Lose Confidence in the Courts?

SCOTUS is the highest Court in the land. When the confidence in the courts disappear we know that people take matters into their own hands. We’ve seen it happen in communities where the lower courts are losing respect as they violate constitutional rights in family law. Crime increases and people no longer feel they have somewhere to go to resolve differences peacefully. When you cannot trust that the court is going to be fair and will apply justice as you are entitled, people will no longer use the courts, and we will be right back where we were before our jurisprudence system was established.

When the highest Court in the land has a justice violate their oath to be unbiased and instead push their own agenda, now you have a countrywide crisis.

“. . . public confidence in the Supreme Court has plummeted to historic lows. A new Marquette poll shows the high court with a 38 percent approval rating, down from 60 percent last July;” and “a recent Gallup poll shows that just 25 percent of Americans are very confident in the court.”

Justice Clarence Thomas is also taking advantage of this change in SCOTUS attitudes when he “used a public speech this past spring to insult Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues. And has been suggesting that LGBTQ rights should be reviewed since the Roe precedent has been overturned.

Is Alito starting a religious war?

“Who is that man?” Alito says as he tells a story about a boy in Berlin who didn’t know a religious symbolic male (probably Jesus), and therefore feels it is his duty now to impose his beliefs on everyone else through state-sponsored indoctrination. Alito wasn’t shy about elevating christianity as required knowledge for everyone in the world. Alito believes that anyone who doesn’t know his religion is ignorant and therefore justifying a new religious imposed moral code.

“Ignorance about religion, hostility towards religion . . . “ as he goes on to make his case for all religious leaders to support his narrative and convert secular society while he promises to continue to use his position as a Supreme Court Justice to make it easier for christian leaders to punish those who offend them through SCOTUS.

Alito gives Religion Special Protection

Alito’s goal is to convince people who are not religious that religion warrants special protection. We already have special protections and exceptions for religion, but those are not enough Alito says. Alito believes that it is his duty elevate religion to the highest order or else religious erosion will occur. He says that a right without protection is no right at all.

Alito’s beliefs are dangerous to American freedom.

Alito has started a religious war in this country and he has started with eliminating some of women’s rights to expand his religious morality. In his opinion, women’s right to decide what they do with their body threatens religious freedom.

Alito says that the Packers fans do not have protected rights to express their support of their team. Religious liberty trumps all according to Alito. So much for protecting your First Amendment Freedom of Speech like  he claims earlier. Remember, he only protects it in the context of protecting religion. So kiss that right good bye too as soon as he can narrow tailor it to remove all that offends the religious community. I can think of a few things that will go quickly, porn, sexual expression, onlyfans. Most likely Hustler magazine’s Larry Flynt would have lost his First Amendment landmark case. I’m surprised that there isn’t an immediate outcry by religious leaders to overturn that landmark case already.

At 33:00 minutes in Alito’s keynote speech, he explains how he sees the relationship between freedom of religion and other freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. This is where Alito admits that he is only interested in protecting only the other rights that protect Alito’s mission and only when used for that purpose. Protecting the right to have your medical, health, and reproductive rights don’t qualify according to Alito’s ruling in Dobbs. He also admits that there is such thing as a panoply of rights (or in other words unenumerated rights that exist) that warrant receiving his protection. But apparently the panoply of women’s rights that were protected in Roe v. Wade offends Alito’s religious moral beliefs.

Alito says protecting religious liberty makes it harder to limit those other freedoms. Dobbs tells us otherwise.

Making a Case for Religious Liberty

Alito gets this wrong. As he did in Dobbs, he cherry picks religious history and religious leaders to make you think that if not for religion there would not have been the downfall of the Soviet regime, the dictatorship of Poland, etc. But he misleads you into believing that it was the religious freedom that caused the downfall when in actuality the examples he uses just happened to also be religious leaders. The two however can be separated.

It’s not the religious freedom that allowed these social and cultural changes, it is the freedom of speech that allowed it. It is the freedom of speech that protects religion, not the other way around.

The Relationship between freedom of religion.

Alito says to consider the relationship between freedom of religion and your other fundamental rights. Alito pleads as he tries to convince the religious sector to learn to use his ideas as a way to sway others to defend freedom of religion as the pillar of protection to all other freedoms. Alito is a spin master and manipulator. And one who answers to no one.

Alito states:

“If religious liberty is allowed it will be harder for the state to restrict other speech and other assemblies. Thus as a practical matter religious liberty and other fundamental rights tends to go together. And many have seen the rise of limited government often attributed to liberal ideology as an outgrowth of the freedom for which the church has always fought.”

The church does NOT fight for freedom of religion. It fights for its own freedom to persecute others. Freedom for other religions survives only so long as one church doesn’t have the power to suppress the others. On the day one achieves that power, all others lose their freedom.

Totalitarian Regimes and Religious Oppression

Alito then talks about John Paul II who used his authority to expand opportunities for religious practice.

Alito quotes the Roman Encyclical Dignitatis Humanae which he reads to say:

“The church boldly proclaimed that no person should be ‘forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others within due limits.”

And Alito claims that adopting this belief creates the adoption of a panoply of rights! What!!! This completely goes against Alito’s argument in Dobbs where he claimed that according to the original text of the Constitution that women don’t have the unenumerated right to abortion as a constitutional right because it is not explicity stated in the United States Constitution. Hmmm, but let’s remind Alito that this right to decide when you will reproduce, have a baby in other words, is part of the panoply of rights for deciding ones future or destiny as the Bill of Rights entitles us, that was incorporated as part of the United States Constitution.

Our Declaration of Independence proclaims our natural rights to be granted by God. Alito says NO. God is NOT the source of rights, Alito is. And Alito does NOT grant you any right of personal autonomy that goes against his religious beliefs. Christianity holds that God gives us free will so that God might judge us by how we exercise that free will. Alito tells God, NO! You, God, will NOT judge, I Alito will prevent people from exercising free will to deprive God of his right to judge. Alito appears to believe that he can create moral action by use of government force and violence. I think Alito has failed God’s test of free will.

Conclusion

Alito is creating a culture that expands protections for religion and makes you think he is protecting other constitutional rights, when he is really saying that religion protects those rights and therefore religion warrants extra special protections that weren’t written into the constitution this way. In Alito’s world, rights that protect women and mothers don’t get constitutional protection. Women once again are told to beg those in power for their “grant” of freedom. If your freedom can be granted by government, you don’t have freedom.

Bottomline, Alito makes strawman arguments and tries to sound smart and put together, when in actuality he is a mess. He sees his role as being one where he can now expand religion into every American’s life and call it protecting religious liberty. When actually he is taking away your freedom to believe how you choose and not be persecuted for it. He has reduced all other freedoms to less than Religion and will sacrifice what rights he can as long as he doesn’t believe he is sacrificing his ability to expand religion.

This speech is Alito being an activist judge, promoting his policy agenda, and parcing his thoughts that he says should be said to a skeptical culture about the protection of liberty.

Alito admits that if a right is not protected “it will not endure.” Alito says make no mistake about it unless the people can be convinced that something is worth protecting, “it will not endure.”

And then he even makes the following quote even though he just completely weakened our personal liberties: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, when it dies there no constitution, no law, no court can do much to help it. “ Alito calls this a gloomy note. Wow.

His final plea for accepting his religious rule is a story he tells about his trip to China in 2016. He says that the Peoples Republic of China did its best to eradicate religion completely and says just as Roman emperors did their best as well. Despite making practicing or believing in christianity illegal, the practice and beliefs in christianity grew.

Lastly, Alito’s uses a birth example at the end of his speech completely oblivious and ignoring that he just used an example of how a mother had to hide her decision about reproduction from her government because of a law that restricted the number of children she could have, he just completely is oblivious to the fact that he has just placed women back into the position of having to hide their medical needs when it comes to needing an abortion. This is no different from what lengths women will go through to do what they must to protect their life and family from the harm of a government mandate that has removed protections from women to make these personal family decisions. Doesn’t matter if it is a decision to have a child in a government that restricts the number of children you can have like in China or whether you restrict a woman from deciding not to have a child, imposing more births on her than she chooses. They are both oppressive and they both create the same responses.

In Alito’s world you have reproductive freedom only as long as you choose to procreate endlessly, so China bad, Alito good. The degree of arrogance in one’s belief that is necessary for them to fail to see this blatant error in their logic is staggering.

So I truly hope that you will not be fooled by these misleading arguments that Alito uses. Make sure that you don’t let the same biases that Alito uses convince you to violate the rights of others who make different choices from you, or you might find yourself without one of the precious panoply of rights that you enjoy for making choices in your own life.

Citations:

You can watch the full video of Alito’s speech here: 2022 Religious Liberty Summit: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito

Justice Alito mocks Prince Harry, Boris Johnson for Opposing Roe reversal

Samuel Alito takes Aim at Prince Harry for Critical U.N. Speech

Alito’s Speech Mocking Foreign Leaders Has a Deeper, Darker Message

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