“Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
-Chief Justice Tom Parker, Alabama Supreme Court
This morning's NYT brought a great essay by Charles Blow about our slide into theocracy as a nation:
The about quote, from the Alabama Supreme Court's concurrence in the recent IVF case that held frozen embryos were children, and therefore dropping one accidentally could lead to prosecution under the nation's stupidest state's wrongful death act. A judge could reach the same result in a principled manner, saying in effect "I may think the law is ridiculous, but it's not my job to rewrite it. You folks did this to yourselves at the polls." Or something like that.
Instead, we get the above blather from the chief justice, no idiot given that he did his undergrad at Dartmouth and got his JD at Vanderbilt. But Alabama elects its supreme court justices, and this guy knows what sells in the Heart of Dixie.
Meanwhile in Texas we await a ruling from the most flagrantly biased jurist in the country, on the issue of whether it's illegal to send abortion pills across state lines because they're so dangerous to the poor women who order them.
This particular ass clown and Trump appointee never misses a chance to fold his nutty evangelical views into his jurisprudence, which is such a breach of public trust as to be utterly deplorable. That's why right wing lawyers always file these sorts of suits in Amarillo, of all places. Their boy is on the bench there.
Ick. Just ick. Only 24% of Americans identify as evangelical Christians, at most, and a little over half the country is Christian at all.
We've gone through these waves of religiously induced insanity before, and we'll survive this one. Their world is coming to an end. That's why they keep rigging the system so they can wield outsized political influence over their poor neighbors who are just trying to live their lives.
But there is another way, another thread in our Western tradition that is more amenable to leaving us all alone.
Meet Baruch Spinoza.
Reason and tolerance over superstition. Human flourishing over wielding power in the name of misogyny and racism. The value of the individual over the "values" of the mob.
As John Lennon put it, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." There's certainly a better world than the one being crafted and advanced by the MAGA right.
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