When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, one of the first groups to worry about President Trump’s replacement for her was atheists.
I have nothing against atheists. Frankly I’m halfway there myself at the present time. So no sarcasm is meant by this thread at all. I want to make that clear.
But I am still not clear. How is Justice Barret going to make life harder for you? You live your life, most people leave you alone (I assume, I hope). What’s the worst that could happen? Cite an example. I am probably not the only person who wonders. Because as I said, you certainly have my support FWIW.
I will suppose you mean well, but this is a really terrible thing to ask.
It’s the kind of question ethnic minorities, women, religious minorities, etc have been asked to do (“prove to me you aren’t just making this up with some evidence”) and often followed up with disbelief (“oh that’s just one exception, I can’t believe it would happen as a general rule”), and even if you mean well, it demonstrates the sort of benign discrimination experienced by a lot of marginalized groups in the US since before its inception.
Considering several states still have active laws forbidding atheists from holding public office or act as a juror or witness in trials, this one is pretty easy to answer.
Now, those laws generally aren’t enforced and are currently considered unenforceable, but having fundamentalists (or near-fundamentalists) in charge of determining what is constitutional or not would be a major concern going forward.
Because even though I’m a middle-aged white male US citizen with a nice job, and am therefore not really at personal risk from most of her decisions, I have no desire to live in the speculative-fictional world that Margaret Atwood imagined if people like Barrett and her supporters were in power.
She’s also another textualist/originalist in the Scalia mold, which she’ll likely use to justify all of her decisions until such point as that stance would cause her to make a decision that she personally would find disagreeable, and will then immediately abandon all principle.
It is rather obvious that no one speaks for all atheists…possibly due to fact that the IAS(International Atheists Society) had to postpone elections due to the Covid Problem.
There are very few things that atheists will universally agree on, which is completely understandable since the only thing they truly have in common is a lack of belief in a specific type of entity. With that said, there are many things where they certainly find some consensus. Sticking to your nitpick, there are far far far more conservatives who don’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned than there are pro-life atheists. So I find your particular argument mostly invalid and not particularly germane unless the OP wanted complete unanimity for all responses, but you do you.
Religious questions come before the Supreme Court pretty often. For instance, there was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., in which the court held that a private corporation that offers health insurance may be exempt on religious grounds from having to provide coverage for birth control. The ACA allowed such employers to avoid paying for coverage of birth control by signing the coverage over to the government, but that wasn’t good enough for Hobby Lobby. The case is actually more complicated than that, and there were other cases that followed it, but I don’t want to write an essay.
As an atheist, I don’t want the Supreme Court to enable the restriction of rights and privileges on religious grounds. The law didn’t require Hobby Lobby to pay for birth control for its employees. What the Supreme Court did was allow Hobby Lobby (and other employers) to restrict its employees’ access to birth control based on the religious beliefs of the employer. In other words, the decision allows employers to impose their religion on their employees.
Having Amy Coney Barrett on the court increases the likelihood of such decisions in the future. I prefer justices who believe that freedom of religion doesn’t include the freedom to jam one’s religion down the throats of others.
Why would that be? She is most likely pro-life, given her background. And she has the power to force her beliefs into law if four justices concur with her (which they have shown a likelihood of doing on Roe v Wade). Thus it is the pro-choicers who have reason to be concerned.
There are many of us who are pro-choice Christians, of course. But the type who speak in tongues tend to do what those in power tell them rather than read the Bible or think for themselves. They’ve been told that abortion is an abomination from God that is one of the worst sins, and they believe it. It seems unlikely Barret is pro choice.
As for the general question: this is but one of many where the main arguments involve privileging the beliefs of a dominant religion. There are plenty of situations where Christians of her type tend to try and force their religion on others. Remember the RFRA stuff, trying to make it legal to use religion to discriminate? Remember all the anti-trans bills? Remember the birth control issue?
Atheists may not agree on everything, but they tend to at least agree that we want a secular government, free of religious influence. Having someone who is the type of Christian who tends to be a Dominionist is not conducive to that. They don’t want the type of Christian who wants to “put God back into America”–which Barret seems to be.
What is frustrating to me is that this is an issue where we more liberal Christians, people of other religions, and atheist’s are all in agreement, meaning there should be more of us than them. Thus this shouldn’t be a problem in a democracy. Yet, here we are.
Czarcasm gave you an example, but you dismissed it because it doesn’t speak for ALL atheists.
I’ve got news for you - there isn’t any one group or organization that speaks for ALL atheists. Why are you asking a question when you will not accept a legitimate answer where someone provides you a link to a group that expresses the concerns of some atheists about Amy Coney Barret? It’s not like there’s an organization out there that speaks for ALL Christians, or ALL of any other group, much less all atheists.
It’s reasonable to read the question in the op as asking what ACB is likely to do that would specifically impact atheists because of their atheism. One person did suggest a possible answer, but I’d like to know if there are any others.
But it’s also a legitimate answer to the question to say that the reason many atheist groups are worried is because they are allies of other causes, which ACB’s rulings are likely to harm.
