Religious freedom as our Founders conceived it means the freedom to worship the God of your choosing, and to not be bothered while in church. It’s a negative right. In other words, it works as a shield, not a sword. And that is all to the good.
On the other hand, our Founders were *extremely* opposed to theocracy. They were every bit as opposed to it as monarchy. Either system, as they saw it, led to Old World despotism, and was fundamentally incompatible with the pluralistic democracy that they were trying to build.
This radical-right Supreme Court claims to follow Originalism — that is, “what the Founders intended.” Whatever the merits of Originalism (and it can be critiqued, certainly, no more so than on the issue of slavery), SCOTUS has ceded such a huge amount of power to litigants who couch their attempts to run other people’s lives as a matter of “faith.” But as soon as your faith infringes on others’ liberty, it becomes a sword, not a shield.
SCOTUS religious jurisprudence over the past 10 years or so reveals they’re straying far from the Founders’ vision, and that their viewpoints instead track most closely with whatever storyline FOX News is peddling at the moment.
Caption this Meme 