The Supreme Court has no right to inflict its conservative religious views on Humanity
First, a confession. After submerging my personal, metaphysical beliefs beneath the shield of journalistic objectivity (which I believe was the professionally ethical thing to do) for twenty-five years, I feel compelled to object to SCOTUS’s conservative supermajority banning abortion and stripping away the little protection we have had against yahoos bristling with deadly firearms in public places. My confession is that, unlike the conservative justices, all of whom either are or were raised Catholic, I see myself, first and foremost, as a human being, part of the only human race that appeared on Planet Earth.
Like billions of human beings before me, I have wondered how we got here, the two major explanations being evolution, which I studied in school, and “creation,” which was drilled into me at home and at church (Protestant). If you ask me if humanity arrived via this route:


I’d have to go with the chimps, given that evolution is based on rational, scientific research and the creation story is based on oral traditions of ancient Hebrew people, written down by very, unscientific scribes and shamans. Christians made it even harder to believe when, as Michelangelo did in his classic rendition on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, they insisted that the Almighty was white and –poof!—his “Adam” was, too, even though it all happened in the Middle East, where the natives were and are all people of color.
No human being alive or long dead ever asked to be born. But here we are. And contrary to the Christianized Justices, I believe the mere fact of our existence automatically entitles each and every one of us to certain “human rights.” (I am so convinced of this I wrote a book about it: This Mere Existence, available from Amazon Books :–)
“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” written as the dust settled from the horrors of WW II, laid claim to those, self-evident rights. The framers, world citizens all, recognized that every person is born free and equal in dignity and rights, and that those rights cannot be withheld on the basis of race, colour, sex, language, religion or political opinion.
The Conservative Supremes should be reminded that every human being has the right to life, liberty and the security of person and that no one should be subjected to interference with their privacy, family, home or correspondence. Justice Thomas has begun the drive against LGBTQ human beings and same-sex marriage. He should be reminded that, as the UNUDHR proclaimed, men and women have the right to marry and have a family, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion. The UN’s list forcefully asserted that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the only justifiable reason for getting anywhere near those rights is to ensure that every human being can exercise them.
The Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion and gun possession run roughshod over the United Nation’s vision of humanity. Giving states the power to control a human being’s body (ban abortion) does great violence to the right to “security of person.” Justice Thomas’s goals of stomping out the right for certain human beings to marry and have a family, and erasing the right for human beings (including those of varying sexualities) to live lives free of fear of discrimination or worse, promise significant harm to millions of Americans. The conservative majority’s rejection of state laws intended to protect all of us from the threat posed by the unfettered presence of firearms at all times in all places virtually mandates more injury and death from guns.
What lies ahead is an uneasy future in which white, Christian nationalists (Protestants and Catholics) work to accomplish more and more of their decades-long, undemocratic, highly discriminatory agenda for trashing the UN’s (and the U.S. Constitution’s) guarantees of freedom of religion and thought and person. This conservative, Christianized Supreme Court appears ready and willing to make those right-wing Christian dreams come true. I read an article the other day by a writer who already fled this country because he didn’t want to live under the iron hand of white, Christian nationalists. I’m not ready to do that, but I’m at a loss for how we can prevent it. I argued in This Mere Existence that we should be able to subdue the conservative, Christian wave, and other threats to humanity, because there are simply more of us—people willing to share our country and the world with human beings of all shapes, sizes, colors, sexualities, schools of thought and religion—than there are of the intolerant conservatives. If we’re going to do that, we’d better get our act together, because this Supreme Court, and those who obviously have their ear, aren’t wasting any time in their crusade to remake America in their own image.