Quote:The Justice Department on Sunday dipped its toe in another dispute between a church and government officials seeking to enforce public health orders for the pandemic.
The Justice Department filed a statement of interest in a case brought by a church in Virginia. Lighthouse Fellowship Church sued in federal court after facing criminal citations for holding a service that violated Virginia’s ban on 10-plus person gatherings.
As lockdown orders continue across the country, a growing number of religious organizations are fighting those ordinances in courts. Those churches so far have found a Justice Department willing to take their side over that of local or state officials.
TPM
This has William Barr's fingerprints all over it.
We generally consider that the religious right in the US is predominantly Protestant/Evangelical in makeup and that is so and has been since prior to the Reagan administration. Catholic voters are different,
shifting voting between the two parties over time.
But there is a highly influential portion of the Catholic community who share with Evangelical communities a distinct and explicit notion that government must be directed by and subservient to a set of traditional moral notions and values. Though they would bristle at a description of themselves as theocrats, that is indeed what they are. And William Barr stands about as far towards theocracy as one might get which his speech at the Federalist Society in November makes explicit (google for text or video of the speech).
That he gave this speech to the Federalist Society is no surprise. That entity has many individuals as members who share Barr's religiosity and visions of "proper" governance. Scalia was a seminal figure here and we now have four or five Supreme Court justices who are each tightly aligned philosophically.
It seems an irony that the right wing fulminations against "elites" are spewed out as a constant rhetorical white noise while the movement is itself, in so many ways, a clear manifestation of elitism. These people I'm referencing represent an elitism that is little different from, for example, the aristocratic sector of British society and politics. Highly educated, often from wealthy and high society families and social circles and with little affinity for popular culture and with strong tendencies to reject and repress social change and moral re-configurations.
But it is not really an irony at all. It is more accurately understood as a presentation (or mis-presentation) of motives and beliefs about democracy for an American audience and as a means to convince Americans, who prize their culture as an instance of anti-elitism which rejects Brit or European old world cultures, that something more populist is afoot in America. But the last thing these folks want is rule but citizens who aren't them - because they represent the best of America (or even the world).
Given the makeup of the present SC, people like Barr are now pushing cases towards the court which they believe, with good reason, will now find in their favor and which will return America to a much more theocratic, authoritarian society.
