The Leonard Leo Coup
The Leonard Leo coup has seen its first major success. Gutting affirmative action in college admissions – that’s low-hanging fruit. For decades, movement conservatives have focused their efforts on manufacturing an artifically biased right-wing Supreme Court in order to reach the goals they cannot accomplish through electoral politics.
The movement conservative right-wing Supreme Court – completely out-of-touch (by design) with the people of this country, have today gutted our entire civil rights infrastructure. It is no surprise or accident that at least two of the Court’s right-wing members maintain a level of ethics and good government one might expect from a Russian oligarch. Alito and Thomas – Leonard Leo’s pets.
It was not too long ago – 60 years – that the Jim Crow South still had legal, institutionalized segregation in public accommodations. Whites-only water fountains, waiting rooms, means of egress, etc.
The pain and anguish and hard work of the ensuing six decades do not matter one whit to a movement hell-bent on ensuring that white elites maintain their slipping grip on power and institutionalizing one specific subset of Christianist ideology on the entire population.
It’s why today’s Republicans are so busily gutting and weakening voting access and rights in a way that is specifically designed to most adversely affect voters whom they perceive to be friendliest to centrism and Democrats. They are a fundamentally anti-democratic coterie of liars, hypocrites, and charlatans.
It is only thus that a contrived, fake “controversy” over a website for a gay couple that never existed could reach the highest court, and that court would rule that it is ok for places of public accommodation to discriminate against a protected class, so long as the discrimination is arguably based on moral or religious beliefs.
Just think! Soon we may have the benefit of living actual history with storefronts in East Aurora or Williamsville peppered with “no gays” (certainly any such establishment would use a stronger, more offensive epithet), or “trans not allowed” or “interracial couples need not apply.” Perhaps we can usher in a return of the Green Book – digitized for our “modern” era – so that LGBTQ couples and people of color can find which places of nominally public accommodation are welcoming to them.
Run a public opinion poll on that and find out whether normal Americans agree with a return to institutionalized segregation and bigotry.
But this post is the principal reason why the Leo Christianist right are having such a lovely time and a field day – they’re making the right people (namely, “libs”) angry. Owning the libs is the central ideological feature of modern conservatism, and nothing makes these snowflakes happier than making sure that any historically marginalized group from black folks to gay folks are spat upon and treated as dirt. They are fighting the war against “woke!” They are battling something they call the “woke mind virus!”
I am not a Christian of any ilk, so perhaps one of you who is can explain to me – reconcile for me – Christian religious doctrine with a political ideology grounded in hatred and cruelty?
Just wait until someone with a business open to the general public decides that their morality dictates that they not serve white heterosexual couples, or conservatives, or people with tattoos or facial hair.
Certainly religious doctrines deserve to be protected by the Constitution, which is why the Court did not – and cannot – force churches or other places of worship to solemnize same-sex unions, and cannot force a religion to recognize or perform such marriages. That is fine. What this right-wing ideology is doing, however, is giving a place of public accommodation the same treatment as a religious organization or facility.
I guess they were right about the arc of the moral universe and its length. Rest assured that history will view this coup-Court as a national embarrassment and disgrace. Someday.
Welcome to the tyranny of the unelected Christianist dictatorship-for-life.