Like all smug, vain men, SCOTUS Justice, Samuel Alito, reads his reviews. And like all weak men, he petulantly lashes out at anything short of adoration. You know the type. We once had a President like that. But he lost. After his dismissive opinion overturning a half-century-old constitutional right (based on lies, cherry-picked facts, and, in part, on the legal thinking of a C.17th jurist who believed in witches), Alito has been feeling good about his misogyny. He has now taken his act on the road to Rome. How symbolic.
Here he was free to break bread with the leaders of a two-millennia-old institution whose business plan is to scare superstitious supplicants into handing over their hard-earned cash to a bunch of libertines. Who, in turn, used the funds to buy fancy clothes, build big houses, fund schools that did not teach, sponsor land grabs that destroyed native cultures, and forced their way of thinking on people who had done them no harm.
And as a hobby, they raped children and covered it up.
Alito proved himself second to none in his sanctimony and fact-free self-righteousness as he spoke to the Religious Liberty Conference on July 21. Nowhere in his laugh-line speech did he show empathy for the thousands of lives he has potentially ruined. Or share any ideas on how children born into poverty might have their prospects improved.
No, his speech was all about him. Take this piece,
"I had the honor this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law."
This sniggering nose-picker may have been addressing a religious freedom love-in, but freedom to speak is something he believes foreign leaders ought to shut up about. And if he thinks this was the only time foreign leaders have "felt perfectly fine" about commenting on American law, he needs to get his head out of his ass. Foreign leaders have had opinions about American law ever since post-WW II America decided it had the cure for all that globally ails us.
Then he got personal and referenced the world leaders who had criticized his regressive atavism, including the outgoing British Prime Minister, who had called Alito’s decision “a big step backwards". Alito quipped, "One of these was Boris Johnson, but he paid the price." The audience thought that was hilarious and yukked it up.
Next, Alito took a shot at Prince Harry, who had, at the UN, condemned the "rolling back of constitutional rights".
"What really wounded me was when the Duke of Sussex addressed the United Nations and seemed to compare the decision whose name may not be spoken with the Russian attack on Ukraine."
What the feck is he talking about? The decision was ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.’ And everyone is speaking its name - usually in sentences like, “Dobbs is the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessy.”
Alito is the epitome of the ivory tower legalist who has no clue what effect his agenda-driven decisions have on regular people. His co-worker, Elena Kagan, knows. As she said,
“I'm not talking about any particular decision or even any particular series of decisions, but if over time the court loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that's a dangerous thing for a democracy."
Too late. The public confidence in the Court is now an abysmal 25%.
But Alito was more than just a clown during his address. He had his serious moments, such as when he said
“One thing I hope they [historians] will say is that our country, after a lot of fits and starts, and ups and downs, eventually showed the world that it is possible to have a stable and successful society in which people of diverse faiths live and work together harmoniously and productively while still retaining their own beliefs.”
Now that is truly funny. Could Alito be more deluded? America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. He is like Monty Python’s Black Knight claiming, “It’s only a scratch”.
He then took a world view,
“If we look around the world today, we see that people of many different faiths face persecution because of religion.”
What he fails to say is who is persecuting the people of faith. Of course not, because the persecutors are usually people of other religions. Take the US. In 2017 we tried for a Muslim ban. I do not remember Alito making pro-Islam religious liberty speeches then. Alito is not interested in general religious freedom. He is a devout Catholic whose only concern is his team.
His anti-choice decision did not promote religious freedom. It advanced the Christo-fascist cause. Just as his decision to allow “non-coercive (Christian) prayer’ by football coaches on the fifty-yard line of high school football fields did.
Alito addressed the reality that people — especially in the Western world — are growing up and thinking for themselves. And in doing so they are rejecting superstition and cultism.
“It is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection. The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe, and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection. That will not be easy to do.”
Does Alito consider why it is not easy to convince the non-religious that religious liberty is worth protecting? If he did, he would soon realize that religion has stamped out rights for so many. And religious-driven decisions like Dobbs make religion look like an anti-liberty force dedicated to suppression and domination. why the hell would any non-religious person want to protect that God-awful agenda?
I will let Friedrich Nietzsche have the last word. “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough – I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.”
Supreme partisan hack comedian