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I think a lot of elites simply aren’t very religious themselves and thus are sort of befuddled by religious objections and thus tend to assume it’s about the other people. Like the state leadership of Colorado seems to be assuming that his religious objections are a rhetorical device and a way to say “gay people are yucky”. I think they just honestly don’t understand religion as a belief. To a religious person it’s about obeying God, and thus violating this is out of the question. I tend to find most people in those elite positions tend to be heavily utilitarian and consequentialist — they don’t really start with axioms that you can’t violate, they start with who is affected and how. They’re seeing only the effects — gay couple not getting a website. And that must have been the intention by the religious person, because they chose the actions that denied gays the website.
I think you’re almost certainly overcomplicating a thought process that goes more along the lines of ‘we like gays, we don’t like conservative religious people, anybody smart enough to be a Supreme Court justice must be the same even if they pretend otherwise, so we need to impress on them that this is a really, really important issue’.
I don't think that's quite right. I think they see the supreme court as fundamentally about policy—which is better: A or B? I think we agree that people think like that. Moreover, if they have any knowledge of the facts of the case at hand, they will usually think that their side is correct, because they trust the people on their side to convey things accurately. In that context, the people on the other side of the supreme court are clearly doing what they are doing because they have bad values or corruption, and are finding justifications for the things they want, rather than doing what's objectively correct. They don't need to consider whether they're actually good at reasoning, they only need to think the conservative justices are able to generate some nonsense justification. And so they don't need to conceptualize the supreme court justices as very smart.
At least, for those who aren't looking at the law itself.
I'll also note that it's not as if most conservative people have much higher of an opinion of the liberal justices, although at least the conservatives are more willing to think of the supreme court about law, rather than policy, I think.
As a result of this, I think I'm more likely than you to think that liberals are willing to recognize that the supreme court justices are doing things because of values they have. That is, they'd think that the legal arguments are disingenuous, but think that they have genuine, but wrong, terminal values.
At least, that's how I, a non-leftist, read rank-and-file leftists.
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So their plan to appeal to a Supreme Court judge who’s a conservative Catholic is to be as offensive to people who happen to believe in a religion? Like I don’t see this as a possible political move, or at least not one they thought about. “Hey, court, you know, people only claim religion because they think it means they can hate on gay people,” this doesn’t seem like it takes the protections of free exercise very seriously as it’s completely dismissive of the idea that such a claim could have been made in good faith.
There might, in some cases, be a case to be made that someone is irreligious and is hiding behind religion, if you’re suing on discrimination and they say they’re doing so on religious grounds, then it might be reasonable to point out that this person attends no religious services, or they’re claiming Islam or Judaism and eat ham sandwiches, or something. But a carte Blanche claim of “no religious claims are true, it’s just about hating gays” is completely different.
The idea it seems like lots of progressives have is that the conservative catholic Supreme Court justices(or at least some of them) must obviously not believe in conservative Catholicism because they’re obviously well qualified, intelligent, competent people, just like the thinker of this thought, who after all doesn’t understand how anyone could believe in those ideas. So therefore Roberts(trying to control the rowdier more hardline conservatives to his right) and kavanaugh(vengeance) have some other motive for professing conservative catholic beliefs and generally ruling in accordance with them, and if you can appeal to their inner, true beliefs hard enough they’ll start acting like the good liberals they are deep down.
Now this thought process is clearly wrong, but it doesn’t seem like that’s the sort of thing that would stop anyone from having it. Trump, notably, seemed to have the same belief in reverse around the 2020 elections- it’s not a purely partisan thing.
I mean I think we largely agree I think quite honestly that since the vast majority of the types of people bringing suits to SCOTUS are more or less agnostic consequentialists and generally hanging around other people like themselves that they lack any perspective that being a conservative Catholic means something to that Catholic. And therefore they can’t fathom religion being a reason and assume it must be an excuse for whatever they really want.
Think about it from the point of view of visiting a tribe with a taboo against wearing blue. You probably have never thought twice about the color of your clothing (and given how common the color is, I’m assuming that you’re probably wearing blue now). So you walk up to a member of this tribe wearing blue, a color that in their culture is reserved only for the gods. They’re obviously going to not want to be around you, because from their point of view you’re using something reserved for the gods — it’s blasphemy to them. But you can’t wrap your head around it being about the color of your clothing. It must be xenophobia or racism or something. It couldn’t possibly be that they take this blue thing seriously.
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