I used to wake up in a cold sweat during law school after reading the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s Spanish-Inquisition-like opinions. Little did I know the real nightmare would begin with his death, and those who would ignore Constitutional edicts and stack the Supreme Court with even more vile, hateful, vindictive beings intent on using religious tyranny to control and eviscerate the free will of humans that their alleged god bestowed.
This week it has been difficult to focus on anything else but the disgusting and disingenuous excuse for a jurist known as Samuel Alito. It helped to read a piece in the May/June issue of Writer’s Digest, in which the first place winner of WD’s 2023 Personal Essay Awards, Katie Love, is interviewed by Moriah Richard. In “Hilarity With a Side of Heartbreak,” Love shares how she walks the line between comedy and tragedy in her writing.
There is no comedy, only tragedy, in the current state of our nation’s not-so-Supreme Court, but it was Love’s final advice to essayists that resonated: “Don’t worry so much about the end result, and who’s going to be your reader, and where will it get published, and how much will I get paid…Just ask yourself, What’s the most important thing I want my reader to know from reading this piece? What must they walk away with? And it takes down the chatter and calms your mind.”
Ten years ago I published a nonfiction tome that dared to denounce the religious right to defend our civil rights. The most important thing I wanted readers to know, to take away from its content, was that extremists were aiming to erode our democracy.
It is unfortunately and uncannily pertinent to what is happening in our nation today with the Supreme Court and treasonous groups like the Federalist Society who seek to turn us into a religious autocracy. Hence, here’s an excerpt from the conclusion of my book, Raising Questions:
Can we afford to instill with power those who would sell off liberty under the godly guise of litany? History has shown us that blind faith does not lead us into blind justice.
Furthermore, justice is no longer blind in the objective sense, but instead often lacks insight derived from reason, a form of malevolent myopia of men that suppresses liberty in the darkness of ignorance without enlightenment born of a quest for knowledge—and the search for truth. Self-evident truth.
Is it not religion that instills this lack of reason while suppressing enlightenment in those who are legally as opposed to morally bound to seek liberty versus follow liturgy? A smug superiority that hurls justice heedlessly down a slippery slope, throwing caution to subjective winds and burying objectivity of the law under a rockslide of right-wing righteousness.
Since the days of our Founding Fathers, we have all seen attempts to legislate morality result in legal analysis splintered and weakened by theology at the expense of democracy…
The goal of a secular democratic nation should be integrity. The difference between right and wrong as opposed to right and left, and the difference between free will and involuntary servitude.
No branch of our government should cave to the cacophony of religious fanaticism when it should be standing tall with compassion, civility, and citizenship.
Religion should have no bearing on civil rights provided by an American Constitution, especially an institution that is not a democracy and should not attempt to participate in legislation or weigh the balance of power with piety, propriety, pomposity, or prophesy—and most especially a sacred entity that displays hypocrisy so profoundly faith-shattering it amounts to a crime as well as a sin…
To everything there is a season and a purpose. But this nation was not founded on Christianity by our seemingly fearless Founding Fathers, and fear of God is neither an appropriate nor enlightened tool for seeking truth, justice, and the American way. I believe our Founding Fathers knew this firsthand and wisely sought a secular nation. Our Constitution is about humanist values versus humorless, puritanical proselytizing.
For years I’d warned about the critical importance of one’s presidential vote, given it determines who gets to select potential justices for our highest court. SCOTUS is no longer lofty, with a majority of religious extremist justices—whose true religion would appear to be power and greed—blatantly supporting racial and Christofascist supremacy, not upholding the rule of law known as the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
In my Other Worldly novels, one of the most important things I wish my readers to know is how ugly and stupid racism is, how hypocritical it is for a group like the Armed Evangelicals to worship guns and hate aliens. In my upcoming Aliens Watch, protagonist Rowan Layne goes up against another enemy of the state and religious freedom known as Patriots Glare.
How dangerous it is that those who seek to elevate their Christian bible to a higher status than the US Constitution do so knowing how violent, misogynistic, racist, classist, and cruel their professed beliefs are, as conveniently twisted from a book that has no white people or Americans, nor was it written by them.
Those who would place this ancient and foreign book with multiple translations and highly subjective interpretations over the Constitution’s Bill of Rights also treat the Second Amendment as a commandment while ignoring thou shall not kill.
Justice Alito has blatantly and deliberately aligned himself with this fascist, treasonous, dangerous stupidity. An insurrectionist sympathizer has no place in our government, much less adjudicating cases for our highest court that have bearing on whether we will remain a democracy.
There is nothing hilarious in his derisive and divisive smug superiority, this heinous traitor of a once honorable SCOTUS who spews outright animosity for our American democracy. Openly celebrating flags that glorify insurrectionists, and blaming his wife. Claiming he had no control over flags flown on his property due to petty disputes with neighbors, while he and his corrupt cronies seek to control all American women in every facet of their lives.
Meanwhile, too many Americans still don’t get it. This is the ultimate battle of good and evil. There may not be another in the democracy known as the USA.