Religion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb | The Hill Column
An irresponsible sentence that Justice Samuel Alito wrote eight years ago may now excuse religious people from nearly every legal obligation they have, so long as a hypothetical, nonexistent government program could substitute for it. That became clear this week when Judge Reed O’Connor declared in Braidwood Management v. Becerra that employers with religious objections may offer health plans…
Read MoreThe abortion emergency in the federal courts | The Hill Column
It is now notorious that the criminalization of abortion, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, doesn’t do much to lower the abortion rate but has had devastating effects on the ability of doctors to treat pregnancies that go wrong. Horror stories accumulate. Opponents of abortion have claimed that the press has exaggerated the…
Read MoreReligion and the wrong defense of abortion rights | The Hill Column
It is commonly claimed that restrictions on abortion illegitimately impose some people’s religious beliefs on the rest of us. This is the wrong way to defend abortion rights. It implies that religious motives have no legitimate place in lawmaking. In fact, we all have normative commitments that we have trouble articulating – you could call them matters of…
Read MoreClimate change and the Supreme Court’s version of police abolitionism — The Hill Column
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which in June gutted the Biden administration’s ability to reduce the electrical power industry’s carbon emissions, may be the Supreme Court’s most reckless and lawless decision (in an extremely competitive field). The court comes close to anarchism, crippling Congress’s capacity to protect the country from disaster and undermining the…
Read MoreThe neglected common ground on abortion — The Hill Column
Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in American politics, made even more toxic by the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t need to be. Pro-life and pro-choice people should be able to agree on policies that would actually reduce the abortion rate. To accomplish that, though, opponents of…
Read MoreIf an embryo is now a person, mortality rates just soared in Alabama — The Washington Post, Outlook
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, states have begun enforcing statutes that forbid abortion. The states with laws specifying that personhood begins at the moment of conception carry extra baggage: Paradoxically, death rates for their youngest citizens will spike. Statutes supposedly intended to protect the lives of the unborn will instead,…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court and the new religious aristocracy — The Hill Column
The Supreme Court has effectively authorized schoolteachers to pressure their students to pray. Kennedy v. Bremerton held that football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to engage in what Justice Neil Gorsuch called a “short, private, personal prayer” on the 50-yard line after games. The court held that forbidding that prayer improperly discriminated on the basis of religion,…
Read MoreBiden’s gay rights/religious liberty opportunity — The Hill Column
Democrats need another political win — preferably one that appeals to wavering Republican voters. The fraught issue of gay rights and religious liberty offers an opportunity, one that could also help fix the toxic polarization of American politics. Sooner or later the extremists who now dominate the U.S. Supreme Court will confront that issue, and will almost certainly…
Read MoreOriginalism and the football coach’s prayer — The Hill Column
Amid the recent Supreme Court argument over a high school football coach’s demand to lead his players in prayer, the judges lost sight of one of the central purposes of the First Amendment’s prohibition on “establishment of religion” — a purpose that should be of particular concern to the court’s self-styled originalists. The justices’ questions…
Read MoreAkhil Amar and the Dobbs draft — The Hill Column
Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, in a prominent defense of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade, argues in the Wall Street Journal that it contains “nothing radical, illegitimate or improperly political.” Amar supports abortion access but doubts that it is protected by the Constitution. He emphasizes that Roe was poorly reasoned. He thinks that…
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