Why we need conservative, pro-life Supreme Court Justices

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Not sure how you can applaud the second ruling. It’s appalling that a Catholic school can now fire a teacher just because they’ve been diagnosed with cancer or they are old.
 
Padres1969 said:
Not sure how you can applaud the second ruling. It’s appalling that a Catholic school can now fire a teacher just because they’ve been diagnosed with cancer or they are old.
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I don’t like the outcome, but it is consistent with the ministerial exception. With this precedent, I expect to see the ministerial exception get abused to the point that something will have to be done to rein it in.
 
dscath said:
Wouldn’t that make conservative justices either hypocritical or hiding the truth?
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I don’t think the conservatives are being hypocritical, actually. The only current justice to opine that Roe and Casey should be overturned is Thomas. All the other justices said in various ways that they respect Roe as an important precedent, and now that they are on the bench they have made it pretty clear they are not interested in overturning that precedent.

I think that is actually fine with most of the conservative politicians that are pushing for more conservative judges and justices. The conservatism they want is more of the Federalist Society, pro-business kind of conservatism, and not the social warrior stuff.
 
TMC said:
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Padres1969:
Not sure how you can applaud the second ruling. It’s appalling that a Catholic school can now fire a teacher just because they’ve been diagnosed with cancer or they are old.
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I don’t like the outcome, but it is consistent with the ministerial exception. With this precedent, I expect to see the ministerial exception get abused to the point that something will have to be done to rein it in.
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But it doesn’t have to be seen as falling within the ministerial exception. It would not have been hard to craft the rule to be:
  • Why did you fire her?
  • She has cancer and we can’t afford the insurance payments.
  • You’re liable under the ADA for disability discrimination.
  • I claim a religious exemption!
  • Okay. Sign here certifying that your religious beliefs require you to abandon the sick.
  • Um . . . .
I haven’t read the case. But, if she really was fired for having cancer, that’s not a religious reason. We have plenty of other times in U.S. law when we figure out what the actual motivation for an act is without inquiring into whether that motivation is reasonable. For example, if you have to testify and don’t want to take an oath — “What I say to you is, do not swear at all” — every state lets you take a solemn affirmation to tell the truth; and you don’t have to debate what Jesus actually meant in that Gospel passage. Similarly, when we had the draft, if you claimed a conscientious objection to military service, the board examined whether you were telling the truth about your belief (are you really against killing, or is that just an excuse to avoid going to war?) and didn’t go into whether your belief made any sense. The courts could easily allow religious institutions the opportunity to prove that the reason for firing an employee was religious in nature (without going into whether that religious reason was correct). A blanket exemption wasn’t necessary to preserve religious freedom.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
liberal justice nominees have no compunction about proclaiming their own “partiality”. The way liberal thought works, their basket of assumptions is the absolute truth, dogma that no one may question. To their minds, they are so obviously “right”, that if you disagree with them, you are a bad person whose point of view need not even be considered. They also have a mentality of “they’ll come around, it’s inexorable, it may take time, but we’re right, and they will eventually see that”. Not the most tolerant creatures on the face of the earth. Let’s put it another way — how often do you meet a liberal who is willing to consider that they might be wrong, that they might need to take a more “conservative” stance on this or that?
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Are you willing to consider that you might be wrong, that you might need to take a more “progressive” stance on this or that? In particular, are you willing to consider whether women have a right to decide if their bodies have to endure a pregnancy?

If not, your accusations against liberals ring pretty hollow. Their “absolute truth” is a lot like your own “absolute truth.” Or are you confessing you are not one of “the most tolerant creatures on earth”?
 
Godfollower said:
But, if she really was fired for having cancer, that’s not a religious reason.
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It does not have to be a religious reason. Under the ministerial exception, any employees with ministerial duties are generally exempted from employment laws. That has been the law for a long time. The only issue decided in this case was who gets to decide what qualifies as ministerial duties that trigger the exception. Although it is not 100% clear, it seems that the rule now is basically that the religious organization itself decides that. So I expect to see cases come up where organizations are claiming that the janitor falls within the exception, and the groundskeeper, etc. Certainly all teachers now fall within the ministerial exception, that much is clear.

So if you teach for a private school with any connection to a religious institution (as most are), chances are you are no longer covered by any discrimination laws.
 
Godfollower said:
The Republican Party makes the same argument to Catholics every election: You have to vote Republican because of abortion, and we (whoever the Republican nominee is) will appoint pro-life justices to the Court, and Roe v. Wade will be overturned.
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That makes no sense at all since it was the Republican appointees who gave us Roe v Wade. No thank you.
 
Padres1969 said:
Not sure how you can applaud the second ruling. It’s appalling that a Catholic school can now fire a teacher just because they’ve been diagnosed with cancer or they are old.
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If that’s true, I don’t find that appalling at all. They should be able to hire and fire for any reason under the sun.
 
RuthAnne said:
Everyone…
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Interesting, so no restrictions on why someone is fired? Firing people for race or religion or gender should be legal (setting aside for the moment whether doing so would be moral)?
 
RuthAnne said:
For ANY reason.
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OK, I understand you believe it should be legal. Just so I understand your position, do you also find it moral to fire people for reasons that are currently considered improper, such as religion or disability?
 
It all depends. If I needed someone to work on Sunday and they refused for religious reasons, i don’t think it would be immoral to let them go. If they were unable to do their job because of an unfortunate disability, it would not be immoral to let them go.
 
Nepperhan said:
What if previous rulings on abortion, under the US Constitution, were correct?
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Soon after the decision was given, John Hart Ely (now one of the most-cited legal scholars in American history) wrote a law review article about it, critiquing the decision. Was John Hart Ely some kind of abortion opponent? No, he wrote in that article “were I a legislator I would vote for a statute very much like the one the Court ends up drafting.” So this is someone who was in complete agreement with Roe v. Wade policy-wise. So, what was his opinion on Roe v. Wade?

“What is unusual about Roe is that the liberty involved is accorded a far more stringent protection, so stringent that a desire to preserve the fetus’s existence is unable to overcome it-a protection more stringent, I think it fair to say, than that the present Court accords the freedom of the press explicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-á-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it. And that, I believe-the predictable early reaction to Roe notwithstanding (“more of the same Warren-type activism”)-is a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years.”

“It [Roe v. Wade] is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”

Despite now being obsolete on a few points, his article, “The Wages of Crying Wolf”, still holds up to this day in terms of pointing out how Roe v. Wade has essentially no constitutional basis.

Honestly, stare decesis seems to be the only thing actually keeping Roe v. Wade around.
It is better to change laws on abortion than to try to stack the courts with friendly judges.
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This would be a great point if not for the fact that Roe v. Wade is the very reason you cannot change laws on abortion.
 
RuthAnne said:
It all depends. If I needed someone to work on Sunday and they refused for religious reasons, i don’t think it would be immoral to let them go. If they were unable to do their job because of an unfortunate disability, it would not be immoral to let them go.
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I may agree with those, but I am more thinking of just letting them go because the employer doesn’t like Catholics, or Jews or because they don’t like Italians, for example. For myself, I am pretty comfortable with most of the current anti-discrimination laws. I think they serve a good purpose.
 
Those might not be “moral” reasons to let someone go but they should be allowed.
 
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