Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the devout Catholic conservative who has long warned of animus against religion in America, says in a new book that he believes the court’s landmark decision extending marriage rights to same-sex couples was “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty.”

Alito, who dissented sharply in the 2015 case, made the claim at Catholic University of America three years after Obergefell v Hodges in a speech that was not open to the public or widely covered at the time. The remarks were published this month in “So Ordered,” a collection of Alito speeches that he says reflect his judicial philosophy and outlook on the country.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Is he stupid, or what? Freedom of religion is that you can believe what you want, not that you are free to demand others to follow the rules of your faith.

  • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Someone should remind the bigot that so was interracial marriage.

    Of course he ignores that marriage is a civil contract that exists outside of religion. Why would he let facts get in the way of his sexist position.

    • altphoto@lemmy.today
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      19 hours ago

      Yeah, what a total fuckass numbnuts. Interracial couples love eachother and so do gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, pansexual and other such couple or tuple combinations. The sex part has nothing to do with the marriage part. It’s similar to how two cars or different shape size and color can end up in the same garage /driveway/dealership etc. None of the car features have anything to do with how the cars ended up where they ended up at. It’s love fora specific car or interest on a specific feature or need for a specific horsepower that makes a person get a specific car. And so it is with the ones we love… Maybe I’m short and I want my other to be tall to be different or maybe short like me to mutually enjoy our height. I wish I could define true love but it’s probably all those things in a single action and so marriage to that person symbolizes the bond. It also brings all the same tax benefits. Why should people only have Toyotas or Fords, if they want both, give them both. Heck if they want two small cars, a van for the kids and a truck for the weekend rally (WTF is that?) that’s fine. Let them! They paid for the vehicles. Similarly, if you want a lovely person or an ugly one or a tall or skinny or fat or thick or strong other, let us! There’s nothing wrong about it and it’s only our business. There’s nothing between me and my loved ones where any of us care to know what your opinion of us might be. You, the government, are just an asshole getting in the way. Like a dating app… An asshole who wants 50 cents getting in the way.

  • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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    1 day ago

    “I have no liberties because two people of the same sex love each other! Waaah!” Shut the fuck up Alito.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        He’s using the Southern definition. The Southern notion of “liberty” is about ruling over others and owning them, etc.

        That’s why when you see “don’t tread on me” dipshit talking about “freedom” and “liberty” it is so confusing. They are using common terms for something else entirely.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Religious Freedom means you have the right to your religion, yourself.

    Calling religious supremacism your “freedom”, … is called gaslighting.

    Alito is at least being authentic in his gaslighting.

    🙏

    • socsa@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      Religious people do not understand the depth of accomodation we provide them as a society. We already go around tolerating an insane collective delusion in our personal interactions with them, and they’ve leveraged that good will into an attempt to force that delusion onto everyone else.

      Personally I think that’s where the social contract ends. The second you attempt to legislate your religion, my duty to tolerate it in any form ends.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Xtians believe that they deserve special privileges. They don’t recognize that as such, they just think it’s the natural order of the universe. They expect their chosen lifestyle of their special book club to be put up on a pedestal and never even have the precepts questioned.

      The minute any of that unwarranted privilege is eroded in even the tiniest way, they view that as “but mah rights are being trampled!”

    • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Alito has a personal right to belittle, mock, and object to same-sex and same-gender marriage. Just as he also has a personal right to belittle, mock, and object to interracial, inter-reliigous, and childless marriage.

      And we have the same personal right to belittle, mock, and object to his ideas as idiotic bigotry.

      What Alito shouldn’t have is a right to use his personal animus to shape public policy. Except he does, because when the court recognized the constitutional right to abortion back when Alito was a 23-year old kid the whole US right wing gave up on the constitution and decided to try a judicial coup.

      Alito’s entire professional life is pretending that he isnt a proxy for this coup. I’d almost feel sorry for him if his malfeasance hadn’t led to pregnant women dying of eminently preventable complications. (Not to mention W and Trump’s presidencies and all the death and destruction that might have been avoided if we had actually applied the rules.)

      • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        “a form of psychological manipulation where a person makes someone doubt their own memory, perception, or sanity”

        Denying or re-envisioning history is most definitely a form of gaslighting.

  • Sirdubdee@piefed.social
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    21 hours ago

    Why does the government even have to recognize marriages? It seems like govt overreach to be involved in a religious ceremony. Abolish marriage certificates and just set your partner as your emergency contact.

    • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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      13 hours ago

      Why does the government even have to recognize marriages?

      Property ownership and inheritance (which could be done without marriage, but marriage is such a common pattern that it’s convenient to have it).

    • Tetragrade@leminal.space
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      19 hours ago

      It’s a reverse dominance hierarchy to stop high-status people from forcing low-status people into harems. Marriage abolition is counterintuitively not woke at all, imo.

  • billwashere@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    If they don’t like gay marriage don’t have one. It really is that simple.

    Your religious beliefs shouldn’t affect what I can do.

    • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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      13 hours ago

      Your religious beliefs shouldn’t affect what I can do.

      Too bad that some of the worst people think otherwise.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      It’s only religious liberty if it’s my religion getting to decide everything. Otherwise you are oppressing me.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      These are the same people that believe riding a donkey into Jerusalem is enough to fulfill a prophecy about the messiah returning from a victorious military campaign.

      Or that when Isaiah pointed to a pregnant young woman, to use the child she was carrying as a marker of time, that that young woman was a virgin, born 300 years later and was Marry.

      Or any of ~300 other prophecies that peole claim Jesus fulfilled, but are lying about if you just read the original prophecy with anything resembling integrity.

  • Jhex@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    only if this asshole considers a “liberty” to impose his will on others… which of course he does

    Another candidate to be tied in the town square

  • NekoKoneko@lemmy.world
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    “In dissent from that ruling,” he said in the 2018 address, “I expressed my worry that equating the expression of certain views with bigotry – or, if you like, with dignitary harm – would drive believers out of public life.”

    Alito suggests that his prediction has come to pass.

    “Quite suddenly, religious liberty has become controversial,” Alito said in a newly published 2022 speech to the Magnificat Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting Catholic culture and traditions.

    So the lifetime appointee on the most powerful court, the majority of whom are religious believers who willingly impose their will on others, in a governmental and political environment controlled by religious believers in every branch of government, believes that the Obergefell decision “dr[o]ve believers out of public life.”

    Big wiping-his-tears-with-hundred-dollar-bills energy here.

    The cases he uses as examples involve businesses threatened with punishment for refusing to provide services for gay weddings and faith-based organizations harmed by government health or employment regulations without any religious exemption.

    “What we see in these and other cases,” Alito says in the 2022 speech, “is a refusal to live in peace with those who violate the new moral code.” He says the dynamic will “virtually guarantee that the Supreme Court will continue to see a steady stream of religious-liberty cases.”

    To be clear, the “new moral code” that is being “violated” is: Treat other human beings like equal human beings.

    There is no deeper meaning here. He’s upset that he doesn’t view LGBTQ people as deserving the right to equally participate in society, and is therefore the one being oppressed.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      Nobody is better at having a persecution complex/delusion than Christians. Hell their entire religion was founded on a persecution fetish story basically.

    • Slashme@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I wonder whether he thinks it’s OK for a business to refuse services to Catholic customers. Or is that suddenly discrimination again?

  • GutterRat42@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    If I forbid you from eating ketchup because my religion forbids ketchup, you would think I am insane and laugh me all the way to the fridge.

    But somehow, we keep entertaining these morons.

  • Gates9@sh.itjust.works
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    24 hours ago

    These fuckers won’t ever be intellectually or morally honest. They must be discarded from public discourse. Codify everything, pack the “Supreme Court”, if we can’t dispense with it altogether.