EXECUTED MUSLIM DENIED LAST RITES BY MULLAH

Looks like the halcyon days of Supreme Court justices like William J. Brennan Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, Potter Stewart, William O Douglas, Felix Frankfurter are permanently over, or at least for a very long time.

This is what happens when economic prosperity heads full speed towards a brick wall as is increasingly happening to the US as it begins its irreversible long slide down.

This is the court of Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, of late Antonin Scalia disguised but intensely opinionated, conservative, fundamentalist, (bigoted?) Catholic / Christian judges.

It’s why as NYT wrote in a long and thoughtful piece about 10 years ago that the world has now stopped reading or giving credence to the opinions of SCOTUS.  It is too right wing, too biased, (Christian parochialism?) to be worthy of universal respect as in past eras.  It is the Supreme Courts of Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India (alas, now increasingly of slavishly westernized and deracinated from Indic cultural ethos and pandering to western sensibilities) which are respected and regarded.

SCOTUS on narrow technical grounds just denied an American Muslim the right to last rites by a Mullah / Maulvi in the judgment on Dunn v. Ray.  Domineque Ray, was executed Thursday evening by the State of Alabama. Mr. Ray did not contest the state’s power to kill him, he simply asked that Alabama permit his spiritual adviser to be in the execution chamber to comfort him as the state extinguished his life. Ray is a Muslim, and the prison’s policy allowed him to be attended by a Christian chaplain but not by a Muslim imam.

“Religious liberty for me, but not for thee”.

The word “empathy,” it should be noted, does not mean “sympathy.” Sympathy implies a kind of partisanship — to be sympathetic to a party is to be favorable to their claims. Empathy means something else. It is the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and to understand their perspective even if you have not shared their experiences. It is a white Christian man’s ability to see that the world sometimes operates differently for an African-American Muslim.

It should have been an open-and-shut case. As Justice Elena Kagan noted in a dissenting opinion, “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” If Alabama allows Christian inmates to be attended by a clergy member of their faith, then it must offer the same accommodation to people of other faiths.

Neal Katyal, a former acting Solicitor General of the United States who, by virtue of the fact that he practices before the Supreme Court, must be careful about criticizing its judges too harshly, compared the Ray decision to notorious decisions such as “Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu, and the Chinese Exclusion Act cases.” The National Review’s David French labeled Ray “a grave violation of the First Amendment.”

Nearly a hundred years ago the Ramakrishna Mission Vedanta Society in California was gifted a huge property by a wealthy devotee in her will.  Her family filed suit.  The openly and blatantly racist and religiously bigoted judge (there are scads of them even in federal courts of the Confederate South) set aside the bequest on totally specious grounds and awarded the property to the family.  It looks like SCOTUS under Trump is rapidly returning to the Dred Scott days of viewing slaves as property.