Supreme Court

Prompted by the piece in the NYRB detailed at reference 1.

I should say that I write as a lifelong atheist. Roman Catholics may believe what they chose, but, given their numbers in this country, there are limits to the extent to which those beliefs should be allowed to influence public policy or the conduct of public business. And while, in many ways, the church, in particular the Catholic church, has been a force for good over the past couple of thousand years, for example in moderating the behaviour of rapacious knights in armour, in this day and age, I find much Christian doctrine bizarre and some Catholic doctrine, for example that on birth control, abortion, divorce and the celibacy of the clergy, obnoxious. 

The Supreme Court in the US no doubt does good work at the top of the judicial tree. But its nine members are appointed for life and can be a serious drag on progress. And given the central role of their antique Constitution, the US Supreme Court has far more influence over day-to-day affairs than our own Supreme Court. I associate to our House of Lords in the bad old days, which, by way of example, blocked Irish Home Rule for half a century. A House which included, as it happened, both senior judges (the law lords) and senior churchmen (the senior Anglican bishops), along with the hereditary aristocracy.

Appointments to the Court are in large part in the gift of the President and it has come to pass that most appointments can be considered political. The appointee is almost invariably someone whose politics are those of the president of the day. Given the small numbers and the vagaries of life and politics, this can mean that the Court can become very unbalanced, for years, not to say decades at a stretch. So at present, six of the nine Supreme Court judges are Catholics and six of them are conservatives – with five members of this second six being members of the first six, that is to say Catholics. And the US is set to have to live with this for years, however the Biden presidency – himself a Catholic – turns out. A respectable three of them are women, just one of them conservative. While there is one black, another Catholic conservative.

And while it is true that these judges see their job as the application of the law without fear or favour, there are plenty of grey areas in which their private opinions will have force. Not least because so much of what is now done had not been thought of at the time the Constitution was written, back at the end of the eighteenth century, well over two hundred years ago.

All of which is bad news for all those women in the US who want access to birth control and abortion, topics which seem to generate a huge amount of heat there. It seems that nearly all women use birth control and around a quarter of them will have an abortion at some point, this despite around a quarter of the population of the US calling themselves Catholics. This last being perhaps three times the proportion here in the UK.

One can only hope that the influence of the Catholics is moderated by the splits in the church as a whole, by the hatred of some elements of that church for others. With some people of faith – perhaps the sort of people who worry about exactly how many days Noah had to spend in the Ark – getting far more excited about people of slightly different faith than about those with no faith at all, with those beyond the Pale, as it were.

While here in the UK, past master Blair is now a Catholic, as is our fat leader. Faith schools are springing up all of the country. While ONS, on a quick look, does not seem to offer statistics about schools at all. I was unable to find any statistics about the number of children in faith schools. The education part of their site was awash with statistics about COVID and there was some stuff about school children and rather less about school teachers. Whereas, early in my career in statistics, I used to see lots of statistics about education organised by type of school or institution. Maybe I will give it another go at some point.

Article in the NYRB notwithstanding, how all this came to pass remains a mystery to me. What is really driving it all? But there is plenty of stuff out on the Internet, with a sample of three offered below.

PS 1: when will the US get around to retiring geriatric Supreme Court judges? One useful reform that we got around to years ago.

PS 2: have they got at Gates? Bing got into a muddle when I asked for pictures of the True Cross, as snapped above. A species of muddle I don’t recall seeing before – although to be fair, a bit of random clicking and all the pictures popped back into normal view.

PS 3: ironic that it is hard to see that past President Trump, who avidly courted the religious right, has any real religion at all. Unlike his successor on the left. Left, that is to say, by the standards of the US.

PS 4: according to Wikipedia, the Gullah was the language of the family of the black conservative, that is to say Associate Justice Thomas Clarence. The language noticed at reference 5.

References

Reference 1: Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay: What accounts for the paradox of religious ascendance over an ever more secular American society – Linda Greenhouse/NYRB – 2021. July issue. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_the_United_States. 

Reference 3: https://www.supremecourt.gov/. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/gullah.html.