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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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The denial of cert on L.M. v. Morrison was an incredible betrayal by Barrett (with additional mixed feelings on Gorsuch). This only confirms what many have increasingly feared. Roberts and Kavanaugh have always been establishment stooges so I know it's impossible to expect real constitutionalism from the Court, when push comes to shove, but I had hoped that a Scalia acolyte like Barrett could at least be counted on to get the important cases heard.

Yeah. On the upside, we also have Skrmetti dropping in the next couple weeks, it's near-certainly going to be a Roberts or Thomas opinion, and I'm sure they picked that case out of many available preliminary injunction cases just to affirm a denial of a preliminary injunction.

The cynical answer is the squishy center of the court is triangulating: a couple Trump cases and (maybe?) Skrmetti cost too many weirdness points, so sad, everyone else interested in vindicating their rights can go home. I find that particularly undesirable because my preferences don't exactly fall among Red Tribe Blue Tribe lines, but I'd bet someone like @WhiningCoil that does think trans minor laws are super-critical is going to see that sort of thing as 'look, we didn't vindicate their fake rights or your real ones, what do you mean blues keep coming up with new fake rights', not some even-handed application of justice.

But the even-less-optimistic one is that they just don't care. 2rafa lists ways that Barrett isn't a Red Triber, but it's not like she's been some exactly-by-the-book advocate of Catholic dogma, either. These things just don't matter to this court, and that's going to control how they apply the law. The FedSoc project insisted that they could mitigate or at least reduce the role of political currents in the judiciary in favor of a hard-hearted dedication to the raw text of the law, and the Litany of Tarksi tells us that no, they can't, and trying to find people who did gave us, 100% of the time, instead people who'd been drowned in Blue Tribe norms and expectations.

Barrett is a liberal with Haitian children, she is left on every single issue except abortion. She is as conservative as the Pope (current or former). Her policy is just the policy of the Catholic Church, some kind of generic progressive social democracy except opposed to abortion.

I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".

Her policy is just the policy of the Catholic Church, some kind of generic progressive social democracy except opposed to abortion.

I honestly have to laugh about this, because remember back when she was being confirmed and the rumour-mongering was about her being a member of a cult? A traditionalist cult that treated women as second-class? I don't think Dianne Feinstein was complaining about her being too liberal when she went off about the dogma lives loudly in you.

Yeah, weirdly enough the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is not a right-wing American institution. Or a left-wing American institution. But now you guys have the pope, here's your chance to get it Chicago-style!

I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".

And the other SCOTUS Catholics?

This is my third draft of this comment. I am trying to figure out how to articulate this clearly and with a minimum of snark.

Your first paragraph is a 100% correct critique of 2rafa’s read of Barrett. But I think your second paragraph betrays a tendency common among Roman Catholics to read current practice back into history as always having been the practice of the church, and this is mistaken. Aquinas would not have accepted Catholic social teaching – the body which has evolved since the late 19th century – as it is now. Very few Roman Catholics, and perhaps no popes, before the twentieth century would have accepted the position on the death penalty now given in the Roman catechism.

I think that a great deal of Catholic social teaching as it now exists is the product of Western modernism. At its best it can include some genuinely countercultural Christian teaching. (As a Protestant, I particularly appreciated Rome’s stand against torture when everyone else seemed to be losing his mind.) But it is not above the fray or immune to secular influences, often to its detriment.

Well, sorta the other way round. Modern social justice movement grew out of Catholic beginnings. But I was more amused by Barrett being excoriated as a liberal when she was being excoriated by the liberals for being a fundie.

Don't make me quote "Orthodoxy". Oops, too late! Chesterton is talking about Christianity as a whole, but I think it fits the case of the Church as well:

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre.

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