Here we go folks.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3535841-thomas-calls-for-overturning-precedents-on-contraceptives-lgbtq-rights/?email=3e3e05957a1601d9ed8c50443e2456f2129dcc1d&emaila=364f61cb39c988ac2755c1195b57dc19&emailb=59de916469d77944bc5f1053324d387b9c69814ed2aadb66216b9a558294fbc4&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=News%20Alerts

Unlike Mormons who control Utah and parts of the intermountain West, Evangelical extremists want to make what they call "god's law" the law of the United States Of America -- which they think is their "promised land" that was given to them and them alone by "divine providence."

While evangelicals are vocal in politics and social affairs from what I can find there are no evangelicals on the SC. Alito who wrote this opinion is Catholic.

No one worked harder than evangelicals to get the former guy elected based on pro life. They own some of this.

That said, I am not a fan of the Catholic influence. I want to puke when people like Nancy and Joe babble on about their faith and grovel to the Pope. They are enabling suppression of women by legitimizing Catholic beliefs, IMO. Sure, Catholics do their own thing, yada yada. However, it empowers the religion which in turn empowers the believers who act on the actual beliefs in extreme ways.

Having been raised middle-of-the-road Catholic, I'm not completely sure where all of this SCOTUS nonsense is coming from. Yes, Amy Coney Barrett is a member of a Catholic sub-group that seems really whack-a-doodle. But the majority of Catholics are not that way. In fact, most Catholics support abortion rights in all or most circumstances.

I have a feeling this boils down to judicial philosophy more than religious impulse.

It's an important point.

Evangelicals did a lot to get Trump and his justices installed, but the justices who made these recent decisions are generally catholics--Coney Barrett, Alito, and Kavanaugh.

The point is that the extremism is not limited to evangelicals. In fact, I remember when evangelism triggered an evangelical-style movement in Catholicism, called Charismatic Christianity. That nomenclature has died out, but the extremism has persisted.

Evangelicals and Catholics may believe each other will be damned, but while on earth they are more than happy to put women in hell.

There are some extreme sub-groups within Catholicism (Opus Dei comes to mind,) but that's not most Catholics. As I explained to Dagny above, the majority of Catholics support abortion rights in all or most circumstances. I've long said that most Catholics will listen politely to the Pope, and then do as they please. It's like trying to herd cats.

Which makes the majority Catholic makeup of the present court a bit of a puzzler. With the exception of ACB, who is a member of an extremist Catholic group, the Catholicism alone is to my mind an insufficient explanation for what is going on.

I agree with that.

But we could go with Samuel Huntington's famous theory (Political Order in Changing Societies) that certain forms of religious organization coincide with certain forms of political organization. Specifically, that protestantism (arguably until rise of the populist evangelicals) was a better fit with democracy while Catholicism tended to fit dictatorships historically.

You are right that in most of Western Europe and the US Catholicism has moved in a more democratic or anarchic direction, but for people who are both thoughtful and faithful, like the supreme court justices, the old pattern may still be fairly strong. I think Coney Barrett's cult is a good example of that, but Scalia, Alito, and Kavanaugh also strike me as relatively historical and literal.

There are many Catholicisms. I think the justices share a more dogmatic and organized one.

I appreciate your thoughts, but I think I'd have to look more closely at the Catholic backgrounds of Scalia, Alito, and Kavanaugh.

To my thinking, Biden is a much more typical Catholic, where his religion runs in the background.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> To my thinking, Biden is a much more typical
> Catholic, where his religion runs in the
> background.

I agree with that, too.

I have lived through the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK. I have lived through Watergate. I have lived through wars (one in Vietnam, two in Iraq), that were supported by lies and misinformation. I have witnessed so much, and yet I have never been as pessimistic about the future of the USA as I am now.

Notice he did *not* include interracial marriage in his opinion, because his own marriage is interracial. But as long as it only harms others, it's OK with him.

Exactly right. As I said before, the invalidation of Roe on the basis of constitutional silence meant the whole branch of "privacy" rights are in jeopardy. What Thomas has just done is call for the revocation of all Griswold rights *except" the one that benefits him and his wife.

This echoes his sole dissent on the recent ruling that Congress has a right to presidential records. Why would he take the losing side of an 8-1 decision? Because those records inculpate his wife in the January 6 debacle.

Thomas apparently thinks the constitution was designed to protect his personal interests. Contraception and gay rights should be eliminated but not the right to interracial marriage. Griswold was wrongly decided--except in those instances that benefit Thomas personally, in which case it was right. The right to privacy does not exist in the constitution but the right to interracial marriage, which is also missing in the constitution, is sacrosanct.

Bravo.

We'll see.

There are literally dozens of rules in the constitutional jurisprudence that are not specified in the constitution itself. Most of those the present SCOTUS has never indicated it wants to invalidate. In other words, their decisions are idiosyncratic and unpredictable and capable of parochial manipulation.

Lawrence Tribe was right when he said this is not a real court.

I can't find it now, but Thomas seems to have some perverse form of black nationalism where he thinks African Americans would be better off living in a segregated society and blames Great Society social programs for destroying families and poverty instead of economic things like loss of jobs in cities, poverty concentration, redlining, etc. Going back in time won't solve those things either.

I don't know about the news article, but there is a good profile of JUstice Thomas that was done by NPR's Brooke Gladstone for "On the Media," back in November 2019.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/supreme-court-justice-most-say

Unfortunately, a written transcript is not available. However, if you listen to the audio, host Brooke Gladstone refers to Mr. Thomas as a "black nationalist" very early on in the narrative. The interview she has with a Caucasian Thomas biographer is very good, too. In it, he points out that the real enigma is why most white liberals can't see Justice Thomas for what he actually is.

I saw Thomas for what he is based on what he did to Anita Hill.

And Mormon US Senator BorinOrrin Hatch really went after Anita Hill in the hearings.

I listened to the interview. It is profoundly disturbing.

George W. Bush appointed a bitter, hateful, raging man to the supreme court. The interview explains so very much.

I wonder if Justice Thomas learned his greed and hypocrisy from the 45th U.S. president or was it the other way around.

We knew it was coming but it is still a shock and devastating to have it be reality.

I don't understand that Thomas guy at all. Doesn't he get that he is working toward ideas against biracial marriage and overt anti black actions? Does he not get that he is black? Is he thinking his vote as a judge should be three-fifths of a white judge and women judges shouldn't be able to vote at all? I don't understand why he seems to be veering toward scary regressive places, because he is working with types who will go as far as they can. I find him to be an enigma. Actually, I'm disgusted that someone who should be impeached and off the bench for supporting an insurrection through his spouse is allowed to participate at all.

All this "sanctity of life" bullsht has me so disgusted. They are absolutely fine with dead children and women.

dagny Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't understand that Thomas guy at all. Doesn't
> he get that he is working toward ideas against
> biracial marriage and overt anti black actions?
> Does he not get that he is black? Is he thinking
> his vote as a judge should be three-fifths of a
> white judge and women judges shouldn't be able to
> vote at all? I don't understand why he seems to be
> veering toward scary regressive places, because he
> is working with types who will go as far as they
> can. I find him to be an enigma.
================================

One of the disadvantages of being a believer-ideologue is the capacity to find new data, incorporate that data, and reason original solutions has died due to disuse atrophy.

He is not thinking.
Of Course it doesn't make sense.

Maybe Justice Thomas has come to believe that all his friends can see that on the inside he's really White?

Wait’ll his wife is indicted on sedition charges.

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Wait’ll his wife is indicted on sedition
> charges.


I wouldn't hold my breath. Though it does seem like things are slowing inching towards the time a certain Cheeto-colored ex-prez is indicted.

What if the finding for an indictment against Cheeto-brains is the trigger various groups are just itching for?

Cheeto colored?

Do you mean The Orange A-Hole?

Maybe now folks will finally wake up.

Nobody wants to change until it becomes personal.
Now that it's going to affect a lot more people, a lot more people are going to be personally affected and it's going to be a lot more personal.
Hopefully it'll motivate lazy ass Americans to get up off their asses and VOTE, because this is what happens when only half of the potential voters vote, all it takes for a fascist tyrant to win is slightly more than 1/4 of the vote.
In a democracy, we get the government we deserve.
Get off your ass and vote!

I'm really afraid that the current SCOTUS will support certain states' attack on voting rights.

I also found the decision on concealed carry concerning. This is going to be a wild ride.

Yes, concealed carry and an additional decision weakening the Miranda construct.

The Roberts court is a disaster. It eliminated restrictions on campaign finance, rendering both parties dependent on the same class of wealthy magnates; eviscerated 200 years of gun control rules by--ironically for a court that claims to be strict constructionists--ignoring the "militia" wording of the 2nd Amendment; and eliminated the constitutional and statutory federal review of state voting procedures in order to prevent disenfranchisement. But that was just the first act in this tragedy.

Now we have seen, in short order, the vitiation of Miranda, the rejection of century-old rules on concealed carry, and the overturning of Roe. Justice Thomas, meanwhile, has called for the "reconsideration" (for which, read: abolition) of gay marriage rights (Oberfell), the right to have gay sex in the privacy of one's own home (Lawrence), and the right to use contraception (Griswold).

What's remarkable about Thomas's role in all of this is that he has listed virtually all of the modern privacy cases except Loving v. Virginia, which prohibited anti-miscegenation laws. Apparently he thinks the "privacy" branch of constitutional law can be pruned off but Loving will stay aloft, a twig severed from the tree that somehow levitates independently.

That makes no sense. One day another court will follow his "originalist" approach and note that the right to interracial marriage has no foundation in the constitution nor, now that the privacy cases have been abolished, in constitutional jurisprudence. It too must therefore be abolished. The only way Thomas can discount that probability is by somehow convincing himself that his own logic does not apply to him and his wife.

Curious.

I forgot about the Miranda decision. Yet another disaster.

Yes. Stare decisis no longer applies. The constitution says what SCOTUS says.

Republicans will discover what that means for the rights they cherish soon enough.

They Lied.

They lied under oath during their confirmation hearings.

It was their plan all along.

But we knew they were lying, and they knew they were lying.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/24/2022 07:19PM by anybody.

And Susan Collins knew they were lying. She'll now pronounce herself "deeply concerned," scowl indignantly for the cameras, and then go about her business as usual.

Yup.

I haven't had the time to read the concealed carry one end-to-end, but what little I've seen looks like a rare bright spot in an otherwise horrid time period. (Dot gov making one justify wanting to exercise a right, and with the authority to arbitrarily deny said for whatever damn reason they want, is just straight up horse-crap. You know, much like forced pregnancies.)

Agreed on the Miranda ruling; again, from what I've read so far.

But the Roe ruling ... sweet, merciful crap! This country is so screwed right now. Yikes.

You are right about the logic of the concealed carry decision. It's easy to say that if it is a right, it should be unrestrained.

But, and this is a big "but," rights are not absolute. If the first amendment were interpreted with pure logic, it would be legal to incite riots and yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater. All rights are contingent, qualified. That's where precedent comes in; it dictates how the exceptions and the right are managed.

The problem is that when purists approach an issue, they oftentimes adopt approaches that create all sorts of negative effects. For example, the country has undergone incredible bloodshed in recent decades, bloodshed that the old supreme court decisions allowed to be regulated. Miranda is the same way. It is not in the constitution, but it has many decades of history and supreme court approval--and yet it too has been gutted. Abortion is the same as these: overturning Roe undermines the basis for all sorts of freedoms, including gay marriage, interracial marriage, contraception, and even oral sex in heterosexual marriage. I think you would agree that these are dangerous developments.

The second amendment debate works the same way. When the Roberts court decided that the right to bear arms inures to the individual, it patently violates the 'militia' wording of the amendment. That is hardly an "originalist" decision. Why does it matter? Because the way the amendment was written and the way it was implemented by courts over nearly 250 years meant that governments could regulate the most dangerous forms of weapons and activity.

Even worse, if the second amendment is to be treated as absolute, there is no form of weaponry that can logically be regulated. That includes the "cop killer" bullets used by bad guys in the 1990s, assault rifles, and even landmines, grenades, etc. Surely it would make more sense not to pursue the logic of absolutism.

At least Sharia law is only for believing Muslims.

Christians want Christian doctrine for everyone and we've got the ancient torture machines to prove it.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

-Henry David Thoreau

This doesn't precisely fit today's situation re SCOTUS, but the urgent sense to avoid the do-gooders feels spot on.

Alas, avoidance will no longer work.

The CokeCan Creep is alive and unwell and trying to show some leadership.

Between him and the battleAxe wife I can't tell which is the bigger Ass.

We'll learn more, hopefully, in the remaining hearings.

As I posted a few days ago, Stare decisis is OPD

And as I posted a few days ago, what does stare decisis have to do with the Orlando Police Dept?

That was my indirect way of saying you used an acronym that means absolutely nothing to me. I even looked it up, and found several dozen possibilities for what OPD means, none of which made any sense in the context you used.

If you are going to use an acronym, it is considered good form to use one your expected audience is likely to recognize, or to take the extra four seconds and actually type out the whole thing.

So, pray tell, what is OPD in your world?

Now that I reread the list, "officially pronounced dead", in the middle of the list, seems like a good candidate. I must have missed it because I was so charmed by "Overfilling Protection Device". I consider your OPD WTO (way too obscure)

https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/OPD
OPD Orderline Personality Disorder
OPD Oakland Police Department
OPD Outpatient Department
OPD Organismos Públicos Descentralizados (Spanish: Decentralized Public Organizations)
OPD Optical Product Development
OPD Ornamental Plaster Design (UK)
OPD Organizational Psychology Division (San Diego, CA)
OPD Orlando Police Department
OPD Out Patient Department
OPD Out-of-Plane Distortion
OPD Office of the Public Defender
OPD Opificio delle Pietre Dure (Florence, Italy)
OPD Optical Path Difference
OPD Optimized Profile Descent (aviation)
OPD Online Professional Development (various organizations)
OPD Operations Division (US Department of War, WWII)
OPD Overfill Protection Device (propane tanks)
OPD Operand
OPD Offshore Product Development
OPD Organizational/Professional Development
OPD Ocean Power Delivery (Edinburgh, Scotland)
OPD Office of Public Defense (Washington State)
OPD Organizational Process Definition (Process Area; Capability Maturity Model Integration)
OPD Officially Pronounced Dead
OPD Officer Professional Development
OPD Ontario Police Department
OPD Overfilling Prevention Device (propane tanks)
OPD Office of Policy Development (Department of Homeland Security)
OPD Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostic
OPD Obnoxious Personality Disorder
OPD Odessa Police Department (Odessa, Texas)
OPD Online Persian Dictionary (website)
OPD Orderly Payment of Debts
OPD Olympia Police Department (Olympia, WA)
OPD Ortho-Phenylenediamine (chemistry)
OPD Owensboro Police Department (Owensboro, KY)
OPD Ocala Police Department
OPD Osaka Performance Doll (Japanese band)
OPD Organization Process Definition
OPD OmniPage Document
OPD Office of Program Development
OPD Oto-Palatal-Digital Syndrome (general bone/skeletal disorder)
OPD Operationalize Product Development (various companies)
OPD Opelousas Police Department (Louisiana)
OPD Open Panel Discussion
OPD One Per Deck
OPD Out Patient Door (healthcare; India)
OPD Ocoee Police Department
OPD Orland Police Department
OPD Overcurrent Protection Device
OPD Output Performance Distribution
OPD Orting Police Department (Orting, Washington)
OPD Ocean Profile Database
OPD obsessive personality disorder
OPD Outraging Public Decency (criminal charge; various jurisdictions)
OPD Audit Programs Division (DCAA)
OPD Other Protestant Denominations
OPD Optical Proximity Detector
OPD Ovideo Police Department
OPD Original Promise Date
OPD Over Past Due
OPD Old Persons Disease
OPD Obsessive Potter Disorder (humor)

Officially Pronounced Dead

Official Prophetic Doctrine

I wonder how he feels about the principle of inter-racial marriage, should that be a ‘stated rights’ issue too?

Yeah, exactly.

The basis for the privacy rights is "substantive due process," the doctrine that there are some rights that so fundamental that without them the constitution does not function. Freedom of speech, for example, freedom of association, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure don't make sense if there is not an ambit of privacy into which the state may intrude at will.

The privacy branch of constitutional law--as I have said before, includes the rights to contraception, to interracial marriage, to practice oral and anal sex, to engage in homosexual activities, and for gay people to get married--stem from substantive due process. So there are three points at which the supremes could wield their pruning sheers: at abortion, at privacy, or at substantive due process.

Graphically,

CONSTITUTION ==>
Substantive Due Process==>
privacy==>
abortion, contraception, sodomy, homosexuality, gay marriage, interracial marriage.

The supremes could sever abortion from privacy, privacy from substantive due process (SDP), or SDP from the constitution. The majority opinion inconsistently says that the privacy branch is bad because it is not in the constitution, but the same logic applies to SDP. Alito's claim that the decision only applies to abortion is nonsense. If his logic is correct, then all of the privacy rights are specious and even SDP should be overturned. The tree should be cut back to CONSTITUTION alone.

Thomas is more honest insofar as he says privacy and SDP should both be eliminated since they are not in the written constitution. That's the reason he says the rights to contraception, sexual privacy, and gay marriage should all be "reconsidered," meaning rejected. In fact, you can be sure that a lot of states will challenge those rights on the grounds that Thomas outlined, since they are what Alito's logic actually demands.

The irony--besides Alito's fudge--is that Thomas too is cheating. For contraception, sexual privacy, sodomy, and gay marriage are not all of the privacy rights. The one he omits is the right to marry interracially. In short, he thinks the one privacy right that benefits him and his wife Ginni should be upheld. But how do you do that? If you cut down the SDP branch, or the privacy branch, how does the one twig of interracial marriage stay aloof without any connection to the trunk of the constitution? How does it levitate.

The bottom line is that the jokers behind the rejection of Row are all cheating. Those who signed on to Alito's decision want to pretend that the other privacy rights are unaffected. That is false. Meanwhile Thomas recognizes that all of the privacy rights are toast except the right to interracial marriage. how does that work?

CONSTITUTION==>
==> thin air
==> thin air
==> interracial marriage

Neither Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett nor Thomas are exhibiting even the most basic jurisprudential consistency. This isn't a court: it's a star chamber.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/27/2022 08:08PM by Lot's Wife.

Let's go straight to the endgame. If a Loving reversal gets to SCOTUS (assuming its current makeup), Thomas will join the liberal 3 solely to protect his own interests. Roberts will join them because (a) he would rather eat live coals than go down in history on the wrong side of this issue and (b) to avoid even more damage to the court's reputation. *At minimum* then, it will be 5-4 to retain. Thomas will write the opinion and offer up some intellectually dishonest pretzel logic to justify it, basically coming down to "because I say so."

With five votes in the bag, the others don't much matter. I suspect it would go 9-0 or 8-1 (Alito dissenting) to avoid the charges of racism. IMHO.

You may be right. But I would look forward to the court engaging in such brazen hypocrisy.

It would solidify its already justified place as the most corrupt supreme court in US history.

For starters, they are proven liars on top of the hypocrisy. So, they will be able to justify whatever they want at this point.

The justices who said, "Oh, it won't include THAT" cannot be trusted to keep their word.

Oh, I don't know. We have Susan Collins to protect us.

It has been reported that DJT warned there could / might be a backlash if Roe was reversed…

He Finally got one Right.

Test

Is this politics?

Not being a political creature, I'm thinking that this must be exmormon politics, and so I remain a patient observer ... for the most part.

And behind every intrusion into National Politics is the question, where will the church draw lines, if any?

Are you trolling ?