By MIKE MAGEE
The 1st Presidential debate is just around the corner. What should be Jake and Dana’s 1st CNN question. Here’s a suggestion:
What’s up with the Alito’s these days?
Justice Sam weighed in with tipping the American scale (by virtue of his decisions) toward “godliness,” while a seemingly unhinged flag-flying Martha-Ann invited the world inside their marriage, declaring “He never controls me.” Good to know.
Making it clear that her visceral reaction to a neighbor’s PRIDE flag was faith-based, she revealed a short-fuse and a long memory. As she said, “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag because I have to look across the lagoon at the pride flag for the next month. I said (to Sam), ‘When you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up.’”
Harvard sociologist, Robert Putnam, and his co-author, Notre-Dame political scientist David Campbell, made it clear in 2010 that something was up with gender, religion and politics in their publication, “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.” In two sweeping surveys reported in the book, they revealed a change in attitudes that began to gain steam in 1970. To their surprise, “By 2006, majorities of every religious tradition except Mormons had come to favor women clergy. Nearly three-quarters of Americans said that women have too little influence in religion, a view that is widely shared across virtually all religious traditions and by both men and women.”
A recent AEI survey this year that catalogued religious affiliation of Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1980), Millennials (1981-1996), and Gen Z (1997-2012) showed that women (in much greater numbers than men) apparently have had just about enough when it comes to religious subjugation. Only 14% of the baby boomer women were self-described religious “nones,” while 34% of Millennials and a whooping 39% of Gen Z’s were turning their backs on male-led religions.
The problem, experts say, tracks back to the concept of “complementarianism”, a belief that the Bible supports strictly different roles for men and women, and that “wives should submit to their husbands.”
Subjugation of women historically has taken many forms. The most recent has been the elimination of health care access with the Dobbs decision and reversal of Roe v. Wade. But placing a lid on women’s autonomy has a rich history in America. Take for example divorce. It was outlawed in most states south of the Mason-Dixon line until the mid-19th century. As legal historian Lawrence Friedman explained, “Essentially husband and wife were one flesh; but the man was the owner of that flesh.”
In 1847, Wisconsin newspaperman and editor of the Racine Argus, Marshall Mason Strong, warned in an editorial that the “domestic sphere” was under attack with men being “degraded, the wife unsexed, and children uncared for.” Strong lamented the loss of women’s “finer sensibilities” with “every trait of loveliness blotted out.”
Two centuries later, the majority of women are having none of it, delivering political defeat after political defeat to religious conservatives after the Dobbs decision. That decision was the culmination of a carefully planned and executed conservative takeover of the Supreme Court with Justice Alito in the lead. His intent, according to Yale legal scholar Neil S. Siegel, was to protect “Americans who hold traditionalist conservative beliefs about speech, religion, guns, crime, race, gender, sexuality and the family. These Americans were previously majorities in the real or imagined past, but they increasingly find themselves in the minority.”
What do the Alito’s fear most? They fear that traditionalists like themselves will be “branded as bigots.” Justice Alito said as much in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges (same sex marriage). He wrote with some sense of drama “Those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes. If they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
His campaign to “protect majorities-turned-minorities” was also on full view five months before the 2016 Presidential election in his dissent after the Court declined to hear the case of a Washington State pharmacist who refused to fill prescribed contraceptives on religious grounds. Stormans, Inc. v. Wiesman, left standing according to Alito, was “likely to make a pharmacist unemployable if he or she objects on religious grounds to dispensing certain prescription medications…If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have cause for great concern.”
AEI has little encouragement to offer the Alito’s.
The survey’s conclusion is rather stark: “None of this is good news for America’s places of worship. Many of these young women are gone for good. Studies consistently show that people who leave religion rarely come back, even if they hold on to some of their formative beliefs and practices. The decline in religious participation and membership has provoked a good deal of concern and consternation, but these latest trends represent a four-alarm warning.”
And therein lies the problem. The recent actions of the Alito’s simply dig the hole deeper, as they await a reckoning with demographic fate. For the Alito’s, “the moment has revealed the man (and the woman).”
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and a regular THCB contributor. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical-Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)