Courts

Conservative SCOTUS Thinks Religious Liberty Is Just For Christians

Even on the Supreme Court, conservatives no longer feel the need to hide their bigotry.

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To be clear, I don’t think the state should be killing anybody anyway. I think the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment, I think the selective enforcement of the death penalty violates the Fourteenth Amendment, and even if I didn’t think it violated the Constitution, I’d still think it was wrong and should be outlawed in a society that claims to be civilized.

Given that, I didn’t really think I could be “shocked” by any conservative Supreme Court jurisprudence around a death penalty case. That the same people who think their God commands women to be talking incubators also thinks the state can murder unarmed people for the purposes of revenge is enough hypocrisy to last a lifetime. But the Court’s decision last night in Dunn v. Ray somehow managed to leave me slack-jawed at by the contempt this Court feels empowered to extend to non-Christians in these lands.

The facts are simple. Domineque Ray was scheduled to be executed by the state of Alabama. He asked for a spiritual advisor to present during his last moments, a courtesy extend to the condemned at least since Braveheart times according the the DVD commentary. Ray is Muslim so he wanted an imam instead of a priest and… Alabama said no. The case was appealed up to the Supreme Court and the five conservatives, sneaking Theocrats to a man, said no.

I’ll let Ian Millhiser on ThinkProgress take it from there:

One of the cornerstones of the Supreme Court’s religion jurisprudence is that the government may not discriminate among faiths. As it explained in Larson v. Valente, “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” Yet, as Kagan writes [in dissent], that is exactly what the court did in Ray…

To be fair, it is possible that the Republican majority denied Ray’s request due to a lack of sympathy towards death row inmates generally, rather than out of particular animus towards Muslims. Yet it is also unclear why a mere desire to ensure that executions are carried out would justify the decision in Ray.

We can blame Trump for a lot of the religious bigotry against Muslims we see today. We can blame Fox News. We can blame Ralph Reed. But the Supreme Court, the current collection of conservative clergy masquerading in judicial robes, are the ones who are most eager to wallow around in that filth. Their decisions to promote Christians’ beliefs above secular norms, and give outright bigotry towards Muslims the imprimatur of Constitutionality, strike blows on the religious toleration the “New World” used to embody.

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Domineque Ray was killed last night. Alone. Alabama officials barred his imam from entering the death chamber for “security reasons.”

The Supreme Court just handed down a truly shocking attack on Muslims [ThinkProgress]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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