In 1971, as Samuel Alito was approaching graduation from Princeton and entry into Yale Law, he wrote the forward in a student taskforce report on “the boundaries of privacy in American society” saying,
“We sense a great threat to privacy in modern America. We all believe that action must be taken … to preserve privacy.”
Two conclusions in the report might have led people, especially Gay ones, to believe upon his nomination to the Supreme Court years later that he would be an ally:
“No private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden”
and
“discrimination against homosexuals in hiring should be forbidden.”
However, his record as a judge before this nomination indicated otherwise.
In 1986, during the opening years of the AIDS Epidemic with all the foolishness that allowed people to die because of bigotry, Alito advised the Justice Department that employers could fire people with AIDS based on a “fear of contagion, whether reasonable or not.”
In 2000, he ruled against the State College school district in Pennsylvania whose anti-harassment policy prohibited harassment on the basis of “actual or perceived race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability or other personal characteristics. ” Because the policy included “name-calling and degrading behavior”, one member of the school board had challenged the new policy on the grounds that his children could not express their Christian view that “homosexuality is a sin.”
Alito ruled that the policy violated free speech, which includes the right to make derogatory remarks on such things as sexual orientation when it comes up because it is a contentious topic.
He did not explain how someone calling another person a derogatory term or launching into a you-are-going-to-hell speech as they are simply walking down the street is part of a discussion
Seemingly in contast in 2004, when two New Jersey parents wanted to enroll their son in a high school outside their area because he had been severely harassed at the school and they did not want him to return to it, the Shore Regional High School Board of Education took actions to prevent that (number of students in a district determines funds). Alito ruled that “most of the harassment focused on … (the student’s) perceived effeminacy” and that bullies constantly called him names, “such as ‘faggot,’ ‘gay,’ ‘homo,’ ‘transvestite.,'” and concluded that the student would not be able to receive an education unless he was placed in a school where he would not be harassed.
This may seem like a good decision, but notice that the action was to remove the victim from the victimizer while nothing was done to the harassers.
Remember his 2000 ruling
In 2001, Alito ruled against Centre County, Pa. because he saw its policy that prevented families with foster children who were HIV-positive from taking in foster children who do not have HIV as a “blanket policy discriminates against the Does because of (their son’s) HIV-positive status even though the probability of HIV transmission, and consequently the risk, is next to zero.”
In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled, in Bostock v, Clayton County, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex-based discrimination, extends to Gay and Transgender workers, but Alito beleives the decision to had been “in my view indefensible”.
“It is inconceivable that either Congress or voters in 1964 understood discrimination because of sex to mean discrimination because of sexual orientation, much less gender identity. If Title VII had been understood at that time to mean what Bostock held it to mean, the prohibition on discrimination because of sex would never have been enacted. In fact, it might not have gotten a single vote in Congress.”
The old” if they get it, we all lose, so deny them” rights killer
In his dissent he explained that,
“The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship. It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Justice Scalia excoriated — the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current values of society.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in this case and Roberts supported it, so it was not a radical left move.
The argument overused against Gay American citizens having the rights all men are endowed with by the Creator without asking for anyone’s opinion, is that if the Gay people had the same rghts as heterosexuals, they would be receiving special rights and privileges.
While my brother may have the right to healthcare, my having that same right is somehow special.
When two things are the same they are equal, neither is special. But that is the go-to claim.
No one should have special rights.
At the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit in Rome, Alito was the Keynote speaker on July 21. After telling his audience,
“If we look around the world today, we see that people of many different faiths face persecution because of religion” and “Religious liberty is under attack in many places because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power. It also probably grows out of something dark and deep in the human DNA — the tendency to distrust and dislike people who are not like ourselves,” he went on to explain,
“It is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection. The challenge for those who want to protect religious liberty in the United States, Europe, and other similar places is to convince people who are not religious that religious liberty is worth special protection. That will not be easy to do.”
Well, yeah, it will be difficult as we see the religious people claiming rights for themselves while denying those rights to the “Other”.
He went on to explain why religion should have special treatment and how to convince people that is best fo all of us with a list that seems rather blind to current events and history.
The benefits to society that justify religious liberty being protected are that it promotes domestic tranquility by providing a way for diverse people to flourish together and the charitable work done by religious groups and people of faith.
Tell that to GLBT people denied charity on religious grounds, or who have been condemned and spit at by the religious in the name of Jesus, literally, and who attempt to get laws passed that allow them to treat people as less than human in the name of that same guy.
He explained that religious liberty has often fueled social reform referring to the involvement of religious groups in abolishing slavery in the United States and Europe, making the obligatory reference to Martin Luther King Jr. who is invoked by white people who think they know the Black experience or use it as an incantation because he was an ordained minister.
Abolition began with Quakers who had been persecuted by mainstream Christian denominations and MLK was a Black minister in a Black Baptist church because the Southern Baptist Convention came into existence to support slavery and did not allow Black membership for quite some time.
“If religious liberty is protected, religious leaders and other men and women of faith will be able to speak out on social issues. People with deep religious convictions may be less likely to succumb to dominating ideologies or trends, and more likely to act in accordance with what they see as true and right. Civil society can count on them as engines of reform.”
I found his line that “Religious liberty and other fundamental rights tend to go together” a little odd as I see Gays, women, and racial minorites losing rights to religious tenets.
He ended his speech with,
“Our hearts are restless until we rest in God. And, therefore, the champions of religious liberty who go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves can expect to find hearts that are open to their message.”
That may be true, but in the present political climate with religion being used to strip people of their God given rights as if they are the ones He appointed to modify His will, we are not seeing what he claims, but we see the champions of religious liberty who go out as wise as doves and as harmless as serpents.
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