A while back, I tweeted that I was intrigued by the anti-woke contention that "wokism" was a religion precisely because no one making the claim seemed to have thought through what nominating it as religion would require in terms of accommodating it in public spaces.
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This is because the mainline conservative opinion on these matters is that society should allow people and institutions to discriminate if that discrimination is based in earnest religious conviction. Lefties disagree, but that's the explicit conservative position!
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It's the conservative opinion on LGBTQ issues, and, if you talk to queer people, most of us will tell you that it also describes how queer people are usually expected to defer to some forms of devotion: disagree, but be polite and respectful. It's their religion, after all!
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Some tedious people told me I was blowing things out of proportion and that no one expected LGBTQ people to do that and, certainly, no one was suggesting that religious belief justified otherwise illegal discrimination. Fools, or maybe charlatans, but they made the argument.
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Comes now the SCOTUS opinion in Fulton v. Philadelphia, in which a religious adoption agency was challenging the constitutionality of Philadelphia's requirement that they not discriminate against LGBTQ people. They say it violates their 1A protections.
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The ruling was 9-0 in their favor that it did, but we should be a little careful here. At stake was a precedent in Oregon v Smith (1990) that said that states could forbid discrimination provided it was a content-neutral prohibition based on action and not belief.
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The 9-0 ruling in Fulton didn't overturn Smith. It's a narrower holding that says that the statute created too much discretion for the city that eroded the bans content-neutrality. I would interpret it to say the law could easily be rewritten to be constitutional.
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However, Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, issued a concurrence that would overturn Smith, and it argues that the 1A prevents governments from banning religiously-based discrimination (among other things). Not surprising! They're conservatives making the conservative argument.
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The conservative position extends well beyond this, of course. Many conservatives endorse the teaching of Christianity in public schools and, at the least, would say an outright ban on the mention of Christian doctrine, even if only descriptive, was an egregious violation of 1A.
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So I'm curious, again, to press anyone who labels "wokism" as a religion to analyze the overly broad laws that ban something called "CRT" from classrooms, laws that prohibit the very mention of some ideas and are not written to be content-neutral in the least.
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It's one thing to argue that schools ought not endorse CRT, but it's another thing to claim that CRT is part of a "wokist" religion that can be permitted simply no quarter at all in American schools. By the conservative standard, that goes too far and would violate the 1A.
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End of conversation
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