An awakening of concern for church-state separation?

The Daily Beast writes in an article, There's No Separation of Church and State on the Supreme Court:

In a democracy founded on the separation of church and state, we’ve got a Supreme Court on the cusp of a decision that cements a theological view of abortion that even most Catholics don’t abide by.

All five of the justices who signed onto the draft opinion that would dump Roe (and any ruling associated with it)—plus Chief Justice John Roberts—are progeny of the Federalist Society. Over the past three decades, the legal group’s blessing has become a de facto requirement for Republican presidents who owed their election to white evangelical voters and ran on a promise to deliver an anti-Roe Supreme Court.

“Religion is the elephant in the room,” says Amanda Tyler, executive director of Baptist Joint Committee (BJC), a legal advocacy group for religious freedom that doesn't take a position on abortion. “We are all free to be religious or not, but we expect our government to be secular and to rule for all Americans and not for their religious views. And that principle is being threatened by at least the appearance of what’s going on in this case,” Tyler adds.

She points out that the words “religion” or “religious” do not once appear in Alito’s leaked draft opinion, yet he calls abortion “a profound moral issue”—phrasing that goes beyond the rule of law. “Many people read into the word ‘moral’ a religious objection, even though he’s going out of his way not to use religion,” says Tyler, which is why she calls it the elephant in the room.

She calls the looming decision by five Federalist Society alums “a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state…an assault on the core pillar of our democracy and the DNA of America.”

The ascendancy of conservative, anti-Roe Catholic jurists has been forty years in the making, dating back to the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982.

“The intersection of the religious right with conservative politics occurred with the anti-abortion agenda, and because evangelicals were lacking a bench of legal scholars, they had to turn to Catholics,” says Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College. “Political conservatism is baked into Catholic legal scholarship.”

“All picked by the Federalist Society,” Trump boasted. “All gold standard,” Trump declared as he rallied conservative voters with the promise of delivering the Court they wanted.

When Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame at the time, testified in 2017 before the Senate for a lower court position, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced concern about her religious affiliation with an evangelical offshoot of the Catholic Church. “I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma,” Feinstein said. “In your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”

Feinstein was castigated—and not just by Republicans—for straying into territory that felt uncomfortably close to a religious test. Three years later, Democrats questioning Barrett for the Supreme Court didn’t quiz her on her religious activism and what connection, if any, it might have to her views on Roe.

So, as late as 2017, Senators could not even ask about the role of religion in a nominee’s life. That reflects two things. First how utterly clueless Democrats were and still are about what the Republican Party has become. Second, it shows how effective Republican Party propaganda and messaging tactics really are. They are so effective that the targets of their deceit and lies are unaware of the true nature of who the opposition is and what their intent is. 

Even worse than 2017, by 2020 Senate Democrats had been cowed into not even raising the issue of the role of radical conservative Christian fundamentalism in a judge’s reasoning. Sadly, it is not the case that asking the question would have made any difference. The Republican Party would put any religious freak on the federal bench, no matter how anti-democratic and radical theocratic. The GOP elites, and most of its rank and and file are just fine with White male Christian-dominated neo-fascist theocracy. And, their judicial nominees do not hesitate to use the KYMS[1] tactic on the Senate or to lie by both affirmative lies and lies of omission, all of which they are expert at. 

Clueless does not do justice to what the Democratic Party has degenerated into. At least they voted against radical Christian theocrats and their jihad to replace secular law with Christian Sharia law. An end-game vestige of political opposition. Whoo-hoo, there's a little spunk left in ’em!

The church is swallowing the state before our eyes and most Americans cannot see the threat due either to sheer ignorance and deceit, or they cannot accept the reality because the truth hurts too much. As one observer put it about such situations generally, their fee-fees would be hurt so they do not see what is in plain sight and remain psychologically comfortable and self-assured. But maybe a few more people are starting to wake up to the seriousness of the Christian theocratic threat. Just maybe.

Footnote: 

1. The KYMS or keep your mouth shut propaganda tactic. It is manifested in various popular deceptive, faux responses to questions among professional political propagandists and liars. Popular KYMS examples for judges include ‘I don't recall’, ‘I can’t remember’, ‘no comment’, ‘I can't answer that’, ‘I can't prejudge that until the issue is before me’, ‘that is just a hypothetical and I do not comment on hypotheticals’, ‘it is settled law’, ‘Senator, that is a settled precedent the court has relied on for decades’, etc., etc., etc.