Commentary: Jews and Catholics v. Cuomo: Another Chapter of the Useless Supreme Court
- Updated: 2022-07-25
- By: Dr. Floyd
- Summary:
- Tags:
A century after Johns Hopkins University (JHU) tortured children like Little Albert into fearing harmless things; JHU tortured the general public into panic by reporting, as deaths from covid, countless unrelated deaths during a certain political span, regardless how tenuous was the relationship between that virus and a given death. Seizing on this unscientific reporting and its manufactured panic, many politically powerful men—and their living-dead female surrogates—sought to exercise the kind of absolute power that corrupts absolutely. One example arose in New York, where the government, in essence, banned religion as non-essential.
In the case Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo, 141 S. Ct. 63 (2020), the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) took up the question of whether the government, by limiting free association to the extent of effectively banning religion in the state, had run afoul of SCOTUS's legalese standards that govern whether government may trample religion. In the case, arising from the covid lock down, SCOTUS's six atheistic Catholics and two culturally Jewish atheists collectively agreed to humor the begging of Catholics and Jews in New York, who sought a temporary allowance, during appeal, to go to chuch without threat of state-sponsored violence. Still, the most atheistic Catholic dissented against the opinion, as did both pseudo-Jews.
The opinions on both sides followed the path common in our era of jurisprudence: limp, petty, artificial, and self-important. Issues arose to whether the begging Catholics and Jews suffered any real harm by the banning of religion under the threat of government violence; whether the New York government had a "compelling government interest" for banning religion; and whether banning religion was the "least restrictive means" for attaining that interest.
Justice Gorsuch, concurring, opined:
"The dissenting opinions argue that [the Court] should withhold relief because the relevant circumstances have now changed," i.e., because the government has temporarily deigned to allow the resuming of religious association. But the majority noted the precariousness of such presumed governmental authority: that those subjected to such supposed authority "remain under a constant threat" of the government resuming its targeted anti-religion overreach.
Citing the opinion of some people in robes, Gorsuch continued that the first amendment prohibits government officials from treating religious exercises worse than comparable secular activities, "unless they are pursuing a compelling interest and using the least restrictive means available."
Gorsuch further sassed that "during the COVID pandemic, certain States seem to have ignored these long-settled principles," and then worried that limits against religion "might operate to exclude all women" among the Orthodox Jewish community (because of the Orthodox Jewish community's discrimination against women).
According to the Court, when the government picked its pandemic winners and losers for being essential, and thus not subject to state-sponsored violence for operating: the government's losers included houses of worship, while the government's winners included "hardware stores, acupuncturists, . . . liquor stores. . . . [b]icycle repair shops, certain signage companies, accountants, lawyers, and insurance agents."
Gorsuch sassed again: "So, at least according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?"
Gorsuch's saving grace was to have pointed out that the New York governor's rabid, anti-religion rules are "exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids." After all, the first amendment is not—at all—about rights: it is about forbidding the government from acting beyond certain limits. In relevant part: the government shall make no laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
Of course, the Bill of Rights (rather, in large part, the bill of limits) arose as a concession, to form a more perfect union, by one faction to another—as an assurance against exactly the kinds of slippery slopes that arise when power accrues to those limp and lawless who would, for example, subordinate piousness to drunkeness (and child-murder: cf. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/06/health/abortion-access-coronavirus-cnnphotos/).
Yet despite any sassy legalistic grandstanding by the dueling judicial autocrats of the Supreme Court, that bill of limits is a memory precisely as distant as Adam's admonition that ours ought to be "a government of laws and not of men" (Massachusetts Constitution, part 1, article XXX, https://malegislature.gov/laws/constitution). Indeed, laws are only as real as their enforcement. Thus, nothing is real about a law against government prohibiting the free exercise of religion—if that government is free to trample, casually and unilaterally, on that prohibition as long as the government can show itself that its trampling is in pursuit of a "compelling interest" and that the government thus tramples its limits through "the least restrictive means available."
Idealistically, one could say that such is a government not of laws but of men. Realistically, one would have to consider that government to be not of laws or men, nor of flesh and blood—but of evil in high places (cf. Ephesians 6:12).
–Dr. Floyd