Are Justices Kavanaugh & Barrett feeling the threat of expansion? | Eastern North Carolina Now

Posted on Zerohedge.com by Tyler Durden Via TechnoFog's "The Reactionary" Substack

"Law professor (and prolific writer) Josh Blackman has an interesting piece in Newsweek, where he observes that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have “warned that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett lack backbone.”

He provides as an example the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which the Court was presented with the question of whether the City of Philadelphia violated the First Amendment after it stopped referring foster children to a Catholic foster care agency after the agency “would not certify same-sex couples to be foster parents due to its religious beliefs about marriage.”

Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett weren’t willing to take that step. (In its February 2021 decision, the Supreme Court held the City of Philadelphia violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment but the Court did not go far enough for religious freedom advocates.)

Justice Gorsuch, in his concurring opinion, called out the Court’s lack of courage:

“Dodging the question today guarantees These cases will keep coming until the Court musters the fortitude to supply an answer.”

Blackman notes this “personal attack no doubt reflects simmering tensions within the Court.”

He also observes how Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh (contrary to Thomas and Gorsuch and Alito) argued that California’s singing ban on churches could remain in place during the COVID pandemic. Barrett “thus used her first separate writing on the Court to rule against people of faith.”

Then there is the case of Barronelle Stutzman, a Christian florist from Washington state who is being punished by the state for declining to create a floral arrangement for a same sex wedding."

Full article here 

I remember Barrett saying during her testimony about the oaths she would take as a Supreme Court Justice and about up holding the Constitution and failing to do so would be a violation of her oath.   Seems in many ways she is failing to honor her oath to up hold the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution.