The Supreme Court

I have rarely been a huge fan of contemporary Supreme Court decisions.  I suppose the Bush election one was positive, but a bit sketchy, and the Hobby Lobby win was great, but it has mostly been bad news coming from the court as far back as I can recall.  But there have been a string of positive developments, and nearly a daily basis recently, that are worth noting.

It started with the decision against New York's overly restrictive gun laws, which had been rescinded in an attempt to prevent a ruling against them, but the Supreme Court acted anyway, to strengthen protections for the 2nd Amendment.  While this seems very tone deaf given the media's current narrative about gun violence, I am confident that it will be positive in the long run,  If the statistics about 10K gun related homicides annually are accurate, it would still take 1000s of years to at that rate to see the number of deaths we see in China in the 50s or Russia in the 40s, after they disarmed their populations.  While each of those deaths is a tragedy, I would choose the current hundreds or thousands of deaths over millions of deaths at the hands of tyrannical governments every time I have the opportunity.

Next came the historic overturning of Roe vs Wade.  Now while many would act like this decision was a ban on abortion, all it did was remove a previous ban on legislation limiting or restricting abortion.  And trigger laws that did go into effect as a result of that decision were the result of the legislative process, which is how laws and rules are supposed to be made.  The existing "rules" were not laws, just legal precedent set by previous cases, which had been determined not be interpreting existing laws, but creating new rules from scratch.  The Gay Marriage decision was similar, not base on any existing legislation, just making up something new.  The court is charged with "interpreting" law, and the one thing an interpreter can not do, is change the definition of a word.  (Imagine how that would affect a financial negotiation taking place across a language barrier.  To 'interpret' is to accurately translate and communicate the speaker or author's intent into a different context or language.)

Lastly, there is the case of the coach who was fired for praying on the field after a game.  I have read some theological views again the value of public prayer, which I can get behind.  But that doesn't negate the "freedom" to do so in a free country.  I would truly be opposed to the coach requiring his players to join him, but even his opponents don't accuse him of that.  Their closest claim is basically that peer pressure encourages the players to get on that bandwagon, which might be true.  But no one had a constitutional right to be protected from peer pressure, each is still free to make their own decision in those situations, and be judged by their "peers" as a consequence of their actions.  And that also leads us into the question of what constitutes religion?  Is basic theism religion?  If so, "In God we trust" would be unconstitutional.  But, if so, logically it would also follow that atheism must be treated as a religion, and that would prevent government, and therefore public schools, from teaching or promoting atheism, or anything that stems from it.  Which is a change I believe many liberals would be opposed to.  So they might be better off accepting a narrower view of what constitutes "religion."

Anyhow, seeing positive news coming from the Supreme Court is a nice change of pace, but it will be interesting to see the long term results of those decisions.  But I will take the good news while I can get it.