Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is not a nice person. If anything, it’s clear he’s pretty mean. I say this without having met him but in response to what seems obvious: since writing the majority opinion in the decision that struck down a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, the 72-year-old judge doesn’t seem to have spent time worrying about the weight of his action.
Instead, he was in Rome last week, speaking at a conference on religious liberty organized by Notre Dame Law School. Rather than acknowledging the suffering and confusion he imposed on the country, women unable to obtain medicine and practitioners worried about legal action when they should be focusing on saving lives, he used the global outrage his writing spawned like a punchline.
“I had the honor of writing, I think, the only Supreme Court decision in the history of this institution that was lambasted by a whole host of foreign leaders – who felt perfectly fine commenting on the law. American,” Alito said, drawing laughter from the crowd. He joked that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who announced he was stepping down from the post, had “paid the price” for speaking out. He pointed the finger at Prince Harry for listing the Alito-drafted Dobbs decision as part of a “painful year in a painful decade”.
Alito’s real lamentations have been preserved for decline of religiosity in the United States and Europa. “It has a very big impact on religious freedom because it’s very difficult to convince people that religious freedom is worth fighting for if they don’t think religion is a good thing worth protecting. “, did he declare.
But Salon’s Amanda Marcotte correctly notes that “if Republicans want to know who is to blame for young people leaving the church in droves, they should look in the mirror.” The cultural clashes that Alito arbitrates as a Supreme Court justice have often pitted conservative Christians, especially evangelicals, against those who favor expanded rights for all, regardless of sex, sexuality, gender and of race.
“The more Republicans and the Christian establishment reject these basic rights, the more they can expect to be rejected themselves, especially by young people,” Marcotte writes. Moreover, the recourse too often favored by Alito seems to be less a protection of religious freedom than an imposition of a religion as a reference for morality and public policies.
Alito’s decisions come across as the court’s version of “Old Man Cries Cloud”, but with the power to affect millions of lives.
Alito seems to have little respect for the separation between church and state. Instead, he continues to base his decisions not on law or precedent, but on his outrage that society dares to stray from the beliefs he believes should be at the heart of that society.
The result is that his decisions appear like the judicial version of the “old man cries cloud”, but with the power to affect millions of lives. In the Dobbs case, he showed an amplified version of the mindset that some baby boomers have developed: everyone who came before him is a fool and everyone who comes after him is an idiot. Roe’s editors, almost all of whom were Republican appointees, are in the first group. Liberal justices who dare to disagree with him are in the second.
Some people have wickedness forced upon them, souring with age or under the weight of circumstances. Alito gives the impression that he was born a mean old man and there is nothing in his writings to counter this assumption. He was a feisty 55-year-old when he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2005, but even then he was less of a jurist and more of an irascible curmudgeon howling at the changing face of society.
It’s because a devoted collection of his fellow villainous old men surrounded him with a coterie of like-minded judges that he made an impact. It is thanks to their efforts that Alito can stand in front of a room full of people and laugh at the pain he has caused. It is telling that in his version of “religious freedom” there is no room for the compassion that one’s own religion teaches offers the key to the kingdom.