Slouching toward Gilead
Angry white Christian Nationalists and their Supreme Court
In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled against Homer Plessy, who had been denied the use of a white-only rail car, in so doing creating the long-standing legal basis for segregation. It was not a shining moment for American jurisprudence and it was not the last time the Supreme Court defended white supremacy or trampled individual rights. Thankfully, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally overturned in 1954.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court remains not only a body that reflects some of our worst national inclinations but a highly politicized, out-of-touch, and unaccountable branch of government that is rapidly destroying American democracy.
With the leak of an apparent reversal of Roe v. Wade and another Supreme Court ruling that the City of Boston discriminated against a Christian Nationalist when it wouldn’t let him fly the Christian Flag over Boston — and another likely favorable ruling in the pipeline favoring a Bremerton, Washington football coach who coerces his players to pray to Jesus on the 50 yard line — we are in big big big big trouble.
Christian Nationalists are coming for our rights.
In 1964 Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay in Harpers magazine (expanded to a book) on what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics — and it he focused on the politics of angry white grievance that had metastasized into, and become embedded in, white Christian Nationalism almost as soon as the Civil War was over. Hofstadter’s original subject was Goldwater Republicans, uncannily similar to today’s Trump Republicans.
The reversal of Roe v. Wade was the fruit of that grievance. Methodically, and over multiple presidencies and Senates, the Republican Party managed to stack the Supreme Court with white Christian Nationalists until, finally, the reversal of Roe v. Wade was the logical, and long-desired, outcome.
That moment was a long time coming.
Before Ron DeSantis and his war on Black voters and Black history, there was George Wallace and his "Segregation Forever." Before Christopher Rufo, with his attacks on "Critical Race Theory" and accusations that "cultural Marxists" are taking over the country, there were the KKK and the John Birch Society dreaming up a conspiracy of Communists and "Fellow Travelers" to create a "Soviet Negro Republic" in the South.
Let’s not pretend that the racism, the homophobia, and the insistence on controlling women’s bodies are unrelated. These are all features of a twisted parody of Christianity first concocted in the antebellum South, preserved and enlarged by Southern populist evangelicals, and then spread like tumors to every corner of the body politic.
Long before the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Discovery Institute, or Moms for Liberty ever decided to excise the Marxist “cancer” from America's schools by criminalizing the teaching of science and history, we had the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial, which convicted John T. Scopes of teaching evolution in a biology class in a Tennessee school.
Between the assaults on women’s rights, civil rights, science and free speech, it almost feels as if we have been dumped into a time machine and dropped off at a Tennessee street corner 97 years ago.
At the time of the Scopes trial a fundamentalist group called the Anti-Evolution League of America had sponsored legislation criminalizing the teaching of evolution in Minnesota, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Sound familiar? Populist politician William Jennings Bryan offered his services to the League, and after his death Bryan's son became its president.
Shown in the photo below is the stall of evangelist T.T. Martin near the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee where the case was tried. Martin is hawking copies of his book, "Hell and the High School," the contents of which are eerily familiar to school committee members under attack today for trying to defend science and reality.
In 1925 groups like the Anti-Evolution League were still considered to be on the fringe and were ridiculed for their non- and pseudo-science. Today, however, groups like the Discovery Institute, an offshoot of the Hudson Institute, peddle Creationism (aka "Intelligent Design") with significant support from mainstream Republicans and their slick websites lend them a veneer of credibility. It's no surprise to discover that the most vicious “anti-CRT” attack dog, Christopher Rufo, is involved with the 21st Century equivalent of the Creationist Anti-Evolution League.
With a new stranglehold by Christian nationalists, the Supreme Court’s majority makes no pretense of writing judgments based on either the Constitution, the common good, or on an expansion of citizen rights.
If you have actually read the leaked draft of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade it is obvious that Christian supremacy and states’ rights were the only criteria used to reach their rather twisted conclusion.
The ruling’s Appendix lists states — including Massachusetts — to buttress their argument that states have at times opposed abortion. But Massachusetts permits abortion, and the SCOTUS draft fails to acknowledge public opinion polls that consistently show that two-thirds of all Americans support abortion rights — although the far-right now has come up with its own polls.
And, in all fairness, Massachusetts has also stopped burning witches.
Spitting in the face of public sentiments, the Court’s white Christian Justices are hell-bent on limiting the freedoms of everyone other than white Christians. Other than Roe v. Wade, what other landmark cases is the Court prepared to overturn? What other civil liberties and previously protected groups does it have in its cross-hairs?
We seem to be rapidly slouching toward Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.
Given the grave threat that a Christian Nationalist majority on the Supreme Court presents to democracy, it is not clear to me why Democrats are still hesitating to expand of the number of Justices to, say, 12 — as the Court is in England.
Democrats had better do something while they still have a shred of political power.