Supreme Court

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Thinking about Xavier Becerra: A conservative Catholic checklist of sure-fire news stories

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First things first. Yes, the following think piece is from a conservative Catholic news source.

But there are times when doctrinally conservative Catholic folks need to read the National Catholic Reporter. And this is a time when doctrinally liberal Catholics — and journalists, especially — should read and mark up an article from the National Catholic Register.

Here’s why: This essay contains a long checklist of valid story ideas, as in issues from the past that are almost certain to come up again in the near future. You can see this in the long, long second line in this Register headline:

What a Xavier Becerra HHS Could Mean for Catholics

Becerra’s record in California shows that he, perhaps more than any other state attorney general, has been willing to wield the power of the state to enforce pro-abortion policies against religious and pro-life groups.

Now it’s true that, for conservative Catholics, this story is packed with potential public-policy nightmares, in terms of their impact on traditional Catholic groups and ministries. Can you say “Little Sisters of the Poor”?

At the same time, many — but not all — Catholic liberals will cheer if some of these policy showdowns come to pass.

In terms of doctrine and church-state law, Catholics on the left and right will have radically different views of Becerra being handed this crucial high ground in the culture wars. Evangelicals who lead colleges and universities will be concerned, as well.

But that’s beside the point, if one looks at this piece through the eyes of a religion-beat professional (or even an open-minded scribe on the political desk) who is looking for valid stories to cover. Journalists need to read all of this, but here are a few items that demonstrate what I am saying. Spot the potential stories in this passage:


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SCOTUS flips script on COVID-19 worship bans, but Francis Collins of NIH urges closures

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First New York.

Now California.

With the addition of a fifth, solidly conservative member — new Justice Amy Coney Barrett — the U.S. Supreme Court has flipped the script on months of legal battles over pandemic-era worship gatherings.

“It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote last week as the 5-4 court blocked New York from imposing strict attendance limits on religious services.

Then on Thursday, the court “sided with a California church protesting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pandemic-related restrictions on indoor worship services,” noted the Washington Post’s Robert Barnes. The brief, unsigned order returned the issue to lower court judges and “suggests the state’s ban on indoor services is likely to fall,” reported the Los Angeles Times’ David G. Savage.

In San Francisco, Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has complained that the city’s “treatment of churches is discriminatory and violates the right to worship,” as explained by the Catholic News Agency. For more details on the California battle, see Sacramento Bee writer Dale Kasler’s story this week on churches defying Newsom’s order.

In related news, the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas highlighted a clash over in-person classes in religious schools in Kentucky. And Boston.com’s Nik DeCosta-Klipa covered Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s concerns over “COVID-19 clusters stemming from religious gatherings.”

Here in my home state of Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt has refused to issue a statewide mask mandate that might help slow the spread of COVID-19. But he declared Thursday a day of prayer and fasting over the coronavirus, as reported by The Associated Press’ Ken Miller.

Amid a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths nationally, a top public health official Thursday “called on religious leaders to keep their worship spaces closed, despite rising protests from some church leaders,” according to NPR’s Tom Gjelten:


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How should Biden-era Americans understand 'religious freedom' and First Amendment?

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THE QUESTION:

What does American “religious freedom” now mean?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Protection of Americans’ “free exercise” of religion has been guaranteed by the Bill of Rights for 229 years and counting.

Until recently, people generally agreed on what this means. The debates involved whether this constitutional right should be exercised or restricted in specific, unusual situations. For example, the Supreme Court has permitted the Santeria faith to conduct ritual slaughter of animals, and exempted Amish teens from mandatory high school attendance laws.

Now this principle is swept up into culture wars that divide the population and the two political parties. In October, the Brookings Institution, a moderately liberal think tank, issued a lengthy white paper titled “A Time to Heal, A Time to Build” with recommendations on religion policy for the U.S. president. It states that the older consensus “began breaking down as new issues emerged, particularly around the struggle for LGBTQ equality.” Brookings consulted 127 experts on church and state for this document, though few were from the so-called “religious right.”

Consider some history: Back in 1993, Democrats were central in passage of the federal “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Then-Congressman Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, introduced the bill in the House, where it won 170 co-sponsors and easily passed by voice vote. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy, a Catholic, was the Senate co-sponsor with Republican Orrin Hatch, a Latter-day Saint, and the act was approved 97–3. President Bill Clinton, a Protestant, enthusiastically signed it into law.

The act states that government cannot “substantially burden” the “exercise of religion,” even when the burden applies to people generally, unless limiting of the freedom is “the least restrictive means” to further a “compelling governmental interest.” Those whose freedom is wrongly suppressed have the right to “obtain appropriate relief” in court. (This restored prior U.S. Supreme Court doctrine that the court had shelved in its 1990 Smith ruling.)

That was then.


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Podcast: NYTimes op-ed offers sharp media criticism on SCOTUS and religious liberty

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In light of trends in the past year or so, the op-ed page of The New York Times was the last place I expected to find sharp media criticism focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, the First Amendment and, to be specific, religious liberty concerns during the coronavirus pandemic. Miracles happen, I guess.

Here’s the context. There was, of course, a tsunami of press coverage of the 5-4 SCOTUS decision overturning New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s aggressive rules controlling in-person religious services in New York. Frankly, the coverage was all over the place (and let’s not get started discussing the Twitter madness) and I had no idea how to write about it.

Thus, I was both stunned and pleased to read the recent Times op-ed that ran with this headline: “The Supreme Court Was Right to Block Cuomo’s Religious Restrictions.” That essay provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

This op-ed was written by a former federal judge named Michael W. McConnell, who directs the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and Max Raskin, an adjunct law professor at New York University. While their essay includes lots of interesting information about the logic of the recent ruling, GetReligion readers will be interested in its commentary on how the decision was viewed in public discourse — including media coverage.

Here is a crucial block of material at the top that includes some specific facts that would have been appropriate in news stories:

Unfortunately, the substance of the decision has been drowned out by a single-minded focus on judicial politics — the first evidence that President Trump’s appointments to the court are making a difference. Maybe that is so. In the first two pandemic-related worship-closure cases to get to the court this year, it declined to intervene by 5-to-4 votes, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Democrat-appointed justices in deferring to state regulators. Last week’s decision went in favor of the Catholic and Orthodox Jewish plaintiffs, with the chief justice in dissent.

But politics is a distorted lens for understanding the case. Looking to the substance, six justices agreed that the Free Exercise Clause was probably violated by the governor’s order. The restrictions, which are far more draconian than those approved by the court in the earlier cases, are both extraordinarily tight and essentially unexplained. In red zones, where infection rates are the highest, worship is limited to 10 persons, no matter how large the facility — whether St. Patrick’s Cathedral (seating capacity: 2,500) or a tiny shul in Brooklyn. Because Orthodox Jewish services require a quorum (“minyan”) of 10 adult men, this is an effective prohibition on the ability of Orthodox women to attend services.

In other words, many journalists and public intellectuals — I am shocked, shocked by this — decided that Trump-era political divisions were more important than information about the legal and religious realities at pew level.


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Thinking about Thanksgiving and beyond: Always coronavirus winter, but never Christmas?

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I am very sorry, but I need to talk about the Baby Boomers.

Trust me, I know that Americans are tired of hearing about the 73 million or so Baby Boomers. I know this is true because I am a Boomer and I’m tired of hearing about us. As a 66-year-old gravity challenged male with asthma, it seems like every time I turn on the television there is an advertisement about some medication that I may or may not need — soon.

Then there is the coronavirus pandemic and that pushy #BoomerRemover trend in social media. However, it’s certainly true that millions of Boomers fall into multiple COVID-19 risk categories.

This brings me to a sobering think piece that ran the other day in the New York Times by former ABC News religion correspondent Peggy Wehmeyer, whose byline will be familiar to many GetReligion readers.

On one level, this was a piece about Thanksgiving. But it also points forward into the entire holiday season, underlining many of the painful choices facing Baby Boomer grandparents, their children and, yes, their grandchildren. Here’s the double-decker headline:

‘Gram, Are You Sad?’ This Year, We’re Spending the Holidays Alone

None of our grandchildren will be at our table for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But the pandemic winter still leaves room for the imagination.

Yes, there are valid news stories hiding in this piece and some of them are linked both to religious rites and to family traditions that, for millions, are linked to religious seasons. For starters, what will happen to Midnight Mass? In my own tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy, what happens to those glorious meals breaking the Nativity Fast?

Wehmeyer turned to the fiction of C.S. Lewis for a powerful image for what is ahead and what millions of people will be feeling in the weeks ahead. Emotions will really be running high during the Christian season of Christmas, which begins on Dec. 25th and runs for 12 days.


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Justice Alito warns: To spot religious-liberty trends in USA, listen to voices on campuses

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Justice Alito warns: To spot religious-liberty trends in USA, listen to voices on campuses

Almost a half century ago, comedian George Carlin recorded his controversial "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue.

That was then.

"Today, it would be easy to create a new list entitled, 'Things you can't say if you are a student or a professor at a college of university or an employee of many big corporations.' And there wouldn't be just seven items on that list -- 70 times seven would be closer to the mark," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, via Zoom, addressing the recent Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention.

Discussing religious beliefs, he argued, has become especially dangerous.

"You can't say that marriage is the union between one man and one woman," he noted. "Until very recently, that's what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it's considered bigotry."

Consider, for example, the case of Jack Denton, a Florida State University political science major whose long-range plans include law school.

In June, he participated in a Catholic Student Union online chat in which, after the death of George Floyd, someone promoted a fundraising project supporting BlackLivesMatter.com, the American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups. Denton criticized ACLU support for wider access to abortion and the BLM group's "What We Believe" website page that, at that time, pledged support for LGBTQ rights and efforts to disrupt "nuclear family" traditions.

"As a Catholic speaking to other Catholics," he said, "I felt compelled to point out the discrepancy between what these groups stand for and what the Catholic Church teaches. So, I did."

Denton didn't expect this private discussion to affect his work as president of the FSU Student Senate. However, an outraged student took screenshots of his texts and sent them to the Student Senate. That led to petitions claiming that he was unfit to serve, a painful six-hour special meeting and his forced exit.


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Thinking about Georgia, while looking at some 2020 religion numbers from Ryan Burge

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Did you enjoy a day or two away from political Twitter? Me neither.

So let’s move on to Georgia, where voters in greater Atlanta and then the rest of Georgia are going to be hearing the voice of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) quite a bit in the next few weeks.

All together now, here is that Schumer quote from a celebratory street party in New York City: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”

Because of its unique election rules requiring a 50% win in key contests, Georgia currently has two open U.S. Senate seats — which means that Schumer and his colleagues can control the next U.S. Senate (with the tie-breaking vote of soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris) by taking both of them. Thus, Georgia is suddenly on everyone’s mind.

That includes folks at the New York Times political desk, who are asking the obvious question: What is causing Georgia to move from the forces of darkness to the world of love and light? Trust me, that’s pretty much the tone of this analysis feature that is not labeled an analysis feature. The overture is spot-on perfect, from a New York-centric point of view:

MARIETTA, Ga. — It took a lifetime for Angie Jones to become a Democrat.

As a young woman, she was the proud daughter of a conservative family active in Republican politics. Ten years ago, after a friend’s son came out as gay, Ms. Jones became an independent, though one who watched Fox News. After the 2016 election, Ms. Jones, a stay-at-home mother in Johns Creek, a pristine wealthy suburb north of Atlanta, became frustrated with her conservative friends defending President Trump through scandal after scandal.

And this year, she voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., after spending months phone banking, canvassing and organizing for Democratic candidates with a group of suburban women across Atlanta.

“I feel like the Republican Party left me,” said Ms. Jones, 54. “It very much created an existential crisis for me.”

I have family in Georgia and I’ve paid close attention to politics there since the mid-1970s (and almost moved there, from Illinois, in the early 1980s). The bottom line: Georgia may be turning into Illinois, a rural state dominated by a super-city and its suburbs (and the corporations and media therein).

Now, there is a crucial question missing from that Times overture, a question that millions of Georgians — Black and White — would spot instantly. The anecdote doesn’t tell us (a) where this woman goes to church, (b) where her conservative family went to church in the past or (c) where she is now refusing to go to church. If she has changed churches, that would be crucial.


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Religious liberty and foster care: five key numbers as SCOTUS weighs dogma and LGBTQ rights

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We voted.

Then we waited. And fretted over the outcome. And waited some more.

While we did, perhaps some of us missed Wednesday’s arguments in the latest U.S. Supreme Court case pitting religious freedom vs. gay rights and the Sexual Revolution.

The dispute involves the city of Philadelphia ending its foster care contract with Catholic Social Services over the faith-based agency’s refusal to place children with same-sex parents.

Here are five key numbers that stood out to me:

5,000 CHILDREN IN CUSTODY

NPR’s Nina Totenberg’s reported:

On one side is the city of Philadelphia, which has custody of about 5,000 abused and neglected children, and contracts with 30 private agencies to provide foster care in group homes and for the certification, placement, and care of children in individual private foster care homes.

Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung asked a city official about the potential impact if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Catholic Society Services:

A ruling against Philadelphia could make it easier for people to cite religious beliefs when seeking exemptions from widely applicable laws such as anti-discrimination statutes.

“If individual organizations can begin to choose to discriminate against whom they want to serve, then it does begin to set an unfortunate precedent,” said Cynthia Figueroa, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for children and families.

ZERO SAME-SEX PARENTS DENIED

Robert Barnes of The Washington Post quoted Lori Windham:

“Zero” was the answer from Windham, a lawyer for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, when asked how many same-sex couples had been denied the opportunity to be foster parents because of CSS policy. She said if ever approached, the agency would refer the couple to one of the more than two dozen agencies that have no issue with same-sex marriage.


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What role does religion play in U.S. Supreme Court justices' nominations and decisions?

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THE QUESTION:

What role does religion play in Supreme Court justices’ nominations and decisions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

By a thin margin, Amy Coney Barrett won confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court without the quizzing about her devout Catholicism — like Senate Democrats Diane Feinstein raised with Barrett’s lower-court nomination and Kamala Harris with another judicial nominee.

Nevertheless, the media pushed this theme, including her involvement with People of Praise, a close-knit community of “charismatic” Catholic families.

This was perhaps the most intense discussion of a nominee’s religion since Louis Brandeis (a justice 1916-39) became the Court’s first Jew following the agony of history’s longest confirmation process, with 19 hearings. Ostensibly, critics questioned his entanglements as a Boston lawyer, but Democratic stockbroker William F. Fitzgerald gave the game away by regretting the nomination of a “slimy fellow” with a “Jewish instinct.”

A smaller dustup involved Democratic nominee Hugo Black (on the Court 1937-71). He was denied the usual automatic deference granted a fellow U.S. Senator when reports emerged that as a young lawyer he joined the Ku Klux Klan, with its hatred of African-Americans, Catholics and Jews. Journalists only proved his KKK membership after a strong Senate vote for confirmation.

The Brandeis breakthrough launched an unwritten tradition of the Court’s “Jewish seat,” also filled by the religiously agnostic Benjamin Cardozo, who overlapped with Brandeis (1932-38), Felix Frankfurter (1939-62), Arthur Goldberg (1962-65) and the unfortunate Abe Fortas (1965-69). After a long gap, Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her celebrated tenure (1993-2020). There was also a “Catholic seat” line with Pierce Butler (1923-39), Frank Murphy 1940-49), William Brennan (1956-90) and Antonin Scalia (1986-2016).

The first Catholic on the Court was Chief Justice Roger Taney (1836-1864), who is not loudly hailed because he wrote the Dred Scott decision that’s widely blamed for precipitating the Civil War.


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