U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

Clarence is going to coach her to say things like "I truly believed", "at the time, things were unclear", "the intent was peaceful protest", all innocuous plausible deniability shit.

Second SCOTUS ruling is a good one! US v. Taylor. Whether an unsuccessful attempted robbery counts as a "crime of violence" under a statute that makes "crimes of violence" punished severely.
7-2 Court says "NO." Written by Gorsuch. Thomas and Alito dissent.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) June 21, 2022

One thing to understand about Thomas's jurisprudence is that he basically thinks the government shouldn't be allowed to do anything other than murder criminals or (lately) murder innocent people suspected of crime. His dissent today keeps on with that tradition.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) June 21, 2022

This is kind of a fun case (in a law nerd way) because we're dealing with whether an "attempted" robbery counts as violence. Can we really know if "violence" was part of it since the robbery never happened?
Gorsuch says "Who knows?" and Thomas says "I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS"

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) June 21, 2022

Ginny is the crazy pill.

The Supreme Court's fourth decision is Carson v. Makin. This is a big one. In a 6–3 opinion by Roberts, the court holds that Maine violated the free exercise clause by refusing to provide public funding to private religious schools. https://t.co/saVbopQJyq

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 21, 2022

Here we goooooooo.

xpost Sippin' on Ginny Juice

Here is Breyer asking the next logical question: Does this ruling mean that states must provide equal funding to private religious schools and public schools? Taken at face value, Roberts' decision has the potential to dismantle secular public education. https://t.co/saVbopQJyq pic.twitter.com/ICQXbBbI6o

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 21, 2022

Carson v. Makin is a major decision with huge consequences for state funding of religion. The conservative majority holds that the First Amendment requires Maine's taxpayers to fund explicitly religious education. That is a breathtakingly radical holding. https://t.co/saVbopQJyq

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 21, 2022

Looks like it's time for the Church of Satan to start founding elementary schools and demanding public funding. "Give me your children for the first ten years, and they are mine forever," and all that.

And to think that my big thing right now is BULLDOZE THE CHURCHES OR TAX THEM

The State: We don't have any money for social services.
Any Reasonable Person: You should tax churches since they're actually political advocacy cults and have nothing to do with religion.
The State: No, what we should do is let people starve and then let white evangelical "Christians" take over everything in the country!

fuck the church, fuck God, fuck this country, i'm so sick of it.

"so what, it's just 4 years" - want to smack everybody that said that now.

^^^ otm, also "c'mon, how much damage can one guy do in four years?"

I really wish Obama had played dirty pool and recess appointed Garland (though I've read technically that wouldn't have been legal).

I'm going to terraform another planet, see y'all

white evangelicals are not going to stop until they control everything. in other words, they will never stop. they believe the entire world is theirs by divine right. they smile politely at your sin but they actually, really do, believe they are better than you

it sucks that they continue to hurt more and more people as time goes on. i wish they'd just fucking go away

(oh yeah, and they're going to whine endlessly about how they're persecuted as they do it)

Here's the thing: what if I refuse to pay taxes, as I don't want my tax dollars funding religious schools? It is *compelling* non-believers to support religious education. Talk about a *real* first amendment violation.

The fact that these massive cultish cons are able to do all this without paying taxes is astonishing to me, still. In a sense, we've been supporting them indirectly for our entire lives. Absolute fucking garbage.

from the NYT:

One of the schools at issue in the case, Temple Academy in Waterville, Maine, says it expects its teachers “to integrate biblical principles with their teaching in every subject” and teaches students “to spread the word of Christianity.” The other, Bangor Christian Schools, says it seeks to develop “within each student a Christian worldview and Christian philosophy of life.”

The two schools “candidly admit that they discriminate against homosexuals, individuals who are transgender and non-Christians,” Maine’s Supreme Court brief said.

good thing I plan to die before reaching Medicare age. faith-based Social Security forthcoming!

xpost well, time for daily protests outside the schools

The two schools “candidly admit that they discriminate against homosexuals, individuals who are transgender and non-Christians,” Maine’s Supreme Court brief said.

nice for the ME SC to say that, but it's a very big open secret that white evangelicals are against all of those things. they talk openly about it and gather in a room together for hours each week to discuss the different ways in which god has commanded it

it's such an embarrassing thing for white evangelical christians to just admit that the end of the book, the one that they literally believe, involves them winning and everyone else painfully losing

yeah but I bet the casseroles they bring are fresh

(but sorry, not THOSE white evangelicals, the cool ones. jesus fucking christ what an uphill climb for them though)

We have a pilot voucher system in Tennessee that hasn't started yet but that is going to allow parents to use publicly funded vouchers to send kids to religious schools. I've anticipated that it will face a legal challenge once it actually starts, but this ruling makes that seem a lot less likely (or that it would be a successful challenge, anyway). To start with, the program will only be available to kids who attend districts with a high percentage of "failing" schools, but it will almost certainly be expanded to everyone at some point.

(My kids have actually gone to pretty good public schools here, I'm glad they only have 4 more years to get through.)

scammy white flight "academies" that sprung up in the 60s-70s all over the south (and i'm sure elsewhere) about to have a new golden era

We have a pilot voucher system in Tennessee that hasn't started yet but that is going to allow parents to use publicly funded vouchers to send kids to religious schools.

as far as i understand, that was already legal, but today's ruling comes from the other direction, of whether or not a state can prevent such a thing.

The Supreme Court has long held that states may choose to provide aid to religious schools along with other private schools. The question in the cases from Montana and Maine was the opposite one: May states refuse to provide such aid if it is made available to other private schools?

we have a major catholic, red dreher beloved school in our neighborhood. i check out their curriculumn and i'm thinking it might be racist. hmm

Our classical curriculum promises a learning adventure that will take our students from Mt. Olympus in ancient Greece to King Arthur's court and St. Benedict's monastery in the Middle Ages. They will learn about Rome's conquests and its ultimate fall, the rise of Christianity through the ages, and the thinking of our Founding Fathers as they embarked on the American experience over two hundred years ago.

scammy white flight "academies" that sprung up in the 60s-70s all over the south (and i'm sure elsewhere) about to have a new golden era

For sure, to be joined by a bunch of Hillsboro-affiliated "classical education" academies.

And yeah, KM is correct, SCOTUS ruled 2 years ago that vouchers have to be open to religious schools.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-ne-religious-schools-voucher-decision-20200701-32kfsvkosfg5lkgg7tmy4l2cb4-story.html

tempted to record 3 albums worth of anti-Christian hymns and use the proceeds to uhh pay the ACLU or Satanic Temple to fight back.

but let's be real 5 people would buy them

rent-seekers and racists teaming up to scam public funds is basically the only reason the USA exists now

Cool cool cool, Maine is where I'll be starting my new Madrasa, to teach Sharia law

If I'm reading correctly, the reason this Maine decision happened in the first place is that Maine *already* had a program to help pay tuition for private schools for people who don't live in an area that has its own public secondary school available. The ruling says that the state has to include religious schools in that. I don't read that "at face value" to mean that all states must enact voucher programs and give money to parents to send their kids to religious schools, and as noted above, voucher programs already have to allow religious schools. Still definitely bad, as is the voucher decision.

It's also an absolutely absurd and NON-textualist reading of the free exercise clause -- there is no possible way in which the government is "prohibiting the free exercise" of religion merely by not funding it.

The opinion does reiterate the principle that there's no obligation for a state to fund private education at all. But then I bet charter schools will be the next frontier.

The opinions are not based on any sort of rationale or legal reasoning found in the constitution or otherwise. They are deciding the outcome then working back from there.

that's the essence of strict construction, baby

We construct, you decide.

Fables of the strict construction

Specific memories have faded of my one terrible year in a non-denominational Protestant school but I was struck even then at how abhorrently racist the world history book was. (OTOH, entirely possible that 6th grade world history books at public school in 1993 were also super racist.)

anybody else read Weekly Reader in the 80s in school, and get pro-government propaganda delivered to your widdle grade school arms for fwee?

Yep!

The first year of Obama's presidency I had to remind Mom, freaking about kids singing that playground chant about him, that Weekly Reader ran a cover story on the day of Reagan's election. Anodyne stuff ("He is the 40th president. He will be the new leader of the United States"), but nothing is anodyne.

I had totally repressed the memory of the Weekly Reader until just now.

Luckily I grew up in a pretty liberal area, we learned about a lot of stuff that other kids didn’t, seemingly.

I was in a complete bubble of 80s conservatism so I lapped it up pretty uncritically. they made us sing Lee Greenwood's "Proud to Be an American" in 4th grade for assembly, and around the same timeframe, my brother and I were in the Methodist church kids musical, which was called "America" and was purely jingoist pro-military/imperialist shit.

Wow, definitely got propaganda-lite where I was!

I went to a quasi-Catholic elementary private school less propagandistic than my Catholic high school (run by Bah-ston liberal Marist Brothers). I'm delighted I survived.

Wow I’m admittedly slow on the uptake but I don’t have memories of weekly reader being shitty, and I was a little tween Reagan hater.