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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Christianity and the courts [1]

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Date: 2023-07-09

We begin today with Kate Shaw of The New York Times pointing out that the Supreme Court is presenting a “disorienting” view of the limits of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment’s establishment clause as it concerns religion.

This last point is significant. Where historically some of the court’s most important religious freedom rulings have protected members of minority religions from discrimination, the big winners in the recent cases have been practitioners of mainstream Christian religions.

The legal questions and reasoning differed, but since Justice Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court has sided with religious plaintiffs in every major religion case except a few exceptions on the shadow docket, representing an essentially unbroken streak of wins for Christian plaintiffs.

In just the past three years, the court has sided with a religious foster-care agency that refused to certify same-sex couples as foster parents; a religious group that wished to fly a Christian flag over Boston’s City Hall; religious schools in Maine that sought public subsidies; a public school football coach who insisted on praying at midfield after games, on some accounts causing students to feel pressure to participate; and religious organizations that challenged early Covid restrictions on gathering in large groups.

Chris Geidner of LawDork blog reports on the ramifications of a split three-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowing Tennessee to enforce a law that bans gender-affirming medical care for minors.

The Saturday ruling itself alters the legal landscape for these bans, at least temporarily. First, and most immediately, Tennessee is free to enforce its ban, pending any further court orders. While calling the ruling “wrong on the facts and on the law,” Chase Strangio, who is one of the key ACLU lawyers on this and several other challenges to anti-transgender laws, added, “We also know that things are moving quickly and for many families, waiting for legal relief is not an option. The untenable position that adolescents, their caregivers and their doctors have been put in is not only illegal, but also deeply unethical and dangerous.” [...] It was not immediately clear, however, whether the challengers would seek to get the stay lifted, either by the full Sixth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. “We are still evaluating all our options with our primary concern of course being how can we help ensure that people in Tennessee are not cut off from the care they need,” Strangio stated.

Anthea Butler writes for MSNBC that the hate group Moms for Liberty is here to stay and is utilizing already-tested strategies known in the conservative movement for decades.

As a professor who has written for over 20 years about conservatives and women, it’s clear to me that Moms for Liberty isn’t just another flash-in-the-pan organization. It’s only existed since 2021, but in that short time, the group has quickly grown its membership and amassed clout within the Republican Party and the conservative ecosystem. Moms for Liberty has fashioned itself into the tip of the spear of the Republican Party’s culture wars, and its members may have already been raising hell at a school board meeting near you. But that’s just a part of it. The group aims not to just take over school boards, ban books and help elect conservative candidates on the local and state level. No, as the visits to the convention from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Hayley, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy demonstrate, Moms for Liberty intends to play a major role in choosing the Republican who runs for president in 2024. And it likely will. The group Moms for Liberty may be new, but its strategy is not. Education has always been a valuable culture war and wedge issue, one that often attracts allies across class, race and gender lines. Capturing school boards was a tactic religious right conservatives used to oppose progressive ideas such as sex education in the 1960s.

Casey Fiesler writes for The Conversation that in spite of the increasing number of Twitter alternatives, the eulogies for Twitter are probably premature.

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