Justice Samuel Alito Is Now Beefing With Boris Johnson and Prince Harry
Time to bust out the world’s tiniest violin for sore winner Samuel Alito.
The Supreme Court Justice authored the Dobbs decision in June, which upended nearly 50 years of federal protections for the right to choose and has since thrown abortion laws and healthcare for pregnant patients into utter chaos. But Alito used his speech at a “religious liberty” conference in Rome as an opportunity to gripe about foreign leaders who criticized the rollback of civil rights in the U.S.—including British royals and the political leaders of Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.
Speaking at the University of Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Summit in Rome, Alito said he’d “had the honor this term of writing, I think, the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law.”
Those leaders included U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom Alito joked “paid the price” for his criticism after Johnson called the Dobbs decision “a big step backwards.” The crowd laughed, then applauded. (Johnson was forced out as prime minister this month after a revolt from Conservative Party members over a host of scandals.)
Alito also alluded to criticism from French President Emmanuel Macron, who said women’s “rights are being undermined by the Supreme Court of the United States” and whose government announced support for including abortion rights in France’s constitution following the Dobbs decision, as well as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called the ruling “horrific.”
Prince Harry, who now lives in California along with American wife Meghan Markle, gave a speech at the United Nations earlier this month honoring Nelson Mandela. In the speech, Harry criticized a “global assault on democracy and freedom” taking place “from the horrific war in Ukraine to the rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States.”
Alito said he was “really wounded” when Harry compared “the decision whose name must not be spoken” to the war on Ukraine.
“Despite this temptation, I’m not going to talk about cases from other countries…but ultimately, if we are going to win the battle to protect religious freedom in an increasingly secular society, we are going to need more than positive law,” Alito said.
Alito also said during this speech that he once witnessed a young boy in a museum in Berlin ask who Jesus was, as proof of a “growing hostility to religion, or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors.”
Given the recent decisions of the Supreme Court, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the hard-right majority Alito is a part of prioritizes “religious liberty” over, well, pretty much anything else.
During the most recent term, the Supreme Court not only eviscerated abortion rights—a Jewish synagogue has challenged Florida’s 15-week abortion ban on religious liberty grounds, by the way—but forced Maine taxpayers to fund religious schools and prohibited a Washington school district from banning a coach from praying at the 50-yard line.
#DmtDailyNews
via https://www.DMT.NEWS
Paul Blest, Khareem Sudlow
