Martin DyckmanNo matter that the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered it, the state Supreme Court wasn’t going to let a black man attend the University of Florida law school.
Writing in 1955, Justice W. Glenn Terrell claimed that Florida’s defiance in support of segregation fulfilled divine intent.
“When God created man,” Terrell said, “he allotted each race to his own continent according to color, Europe to the white man, Asia to the yellow man, Africa to the black man, and America to the red man, but we are now advised that God’s plan was in error and must be reversed…”
Did it occur to Terrell that he, a white man, was usurping the red man’s land? That whites had dragged blacks from “their” land to this one against their will? Perhaps his bigotry made him unconscious of the irony.
What made him that way?
Clues can be found amidst Terrell’s voluminous papers, which went to Florida State University after his death. One file contains dozens of intensely racist pamphlets, many of them written from a religious perspective and prompted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school segregation decision.
Some sample titles: “The Bible Answers the Race Question,” “Segregation, God’s Plan and God’s Purpose,” “God Gave the Law of Segregation (as Well as the 10 Commandments) to Moses on Mount Sinai,” and “Rebuilding the Tower of Babel.”
In “God the Original Segregationist,” a Texas pastor wrote that “he put the black race on a huge continent to themselves…if segregation is wrong, GOD almighty stands condemned…”
Did those preposterously unscientific documents influence Terrell’s thinking or did he collect them because they agreed with his lifelong prejudices? It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he really believed desegregation offended his religion.
Some people still believe that.
But for the half century since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they have been forbidden to act out such beliefs in their capacities as employers, innkeepers, restaurant owners or educators.
No matter what some people may think God intended, they can’t discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin.
They can’t, that is, unless the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision is precisely the slippery slope of which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned in her detailed dissent.
If the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act can be disregarded on religious grounds, is there a similar argument against having to rent an apartment to an unmarried couple? To gays? To an interracial couple? To atheists? Jews? Muslims?
State legislators are already coping with proposed laws intended to protect photographers, bakers and others who would claim religious pretexts for refusing to cater a gay wedding. These bills haven’t been passing. In the wake of Hobby Lobby, they will.
The reactionaries in control of the court have shown over and over that they don’t know or even care where to stop. Their ideology trumps any respect for precedent or common sense.
When the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Constitution’s commerce clause was the principal issue. Religion didn’t enter into it. The court said that Congress had the power to forbid discrimination affecting interstate commerce. (That distinction explains why strictly “private” clubs can still get away with it.)
But in the Roberts Gang’s first crack at the Commerce Clause, it ruled that Congress could not use it to compel people to have health insurance. The Affordable Care Act survived only on the chief justice’s strained interpretation of Congress’s taxing power.
The only saving aspect of the Hobby Lobby decision is that the court did not mangle the First Amendment. Instead, it misinterpreted a law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). By revising that law, Congress could correct the court’s error, although that’s politically unlikely.
The RFRA was intended to stop government from interfering unreasonably with religious practice. It wasn’t meant to help people impose their religious beliefs on others. It’s the difference between forcing people to practice birth control, as China does, and reserving that choice to the individual, as the United States used to do before Hobby Lobby.
Justice Samuel Alito and his colleagues in the majority pretend that it will be a simple matter for the government to provide contraceptive coverage to the employees of the many thousands of employers that will seek to exploit the decision. They are fooling only themselves.
And when people begin suing to stop the use of their taxes for such a purpose, how will the court rule then?
With this court, there is no predicting.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
