I wrote a diary a mere 2 days ago:
SCOTUS: Religions can discriminate, since it's not prejudice if you call it a religion.
I said in the comments that this will get worse, and hey presto:
US Catholic bishops advance communion document, setting up potential rebuke of Biden.
Wow, that was damn quick.
SCOTUS has a majority of conservative Catholics on its roll-call, so any legal objection on constitutional grounds will be dead in the water. This is a direct political attack on the legally/duly elected President of The Unites States of America, no matter what way you cut it.
Now I’m a Buddhist and my partner is a devout Catholic, her first words were “bloody idiots”, I will ask our local priest tomorrow about his thoughts, I enjoy worrying him [he is quite progressive actually, for a priest].
I have long argued, although not a constitutional lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, that the wall between church and state has become so thin as to be non-existent. Damn the founders that after all knew what damage religion can do in the political sphere did not make it crystal clear.
The bare minimum cost for this blatant political meddling is to hit the Catholic Church in the only way they truly understand, the pocket book.
- 1 Removal of charitable status of all related charities.
- 2 Taxation on revenue.
Then they can decide which way they want to play this, the mere threat should be enough.
The Pope should act and send them off to a distant hermitage to contemplate their politics.
It's not as if the Catholic Church had any recent scandals to deal with.
It’s long overdue for another Reformation, this time definitively separating religion from politics and vice versa. Start by removing god from the pledge of allegiance [as the original] and our money.