Welcome to Gilead?
Could the Republic of Gilead envisioned in author Margaret Atwood's iconic novel The Handmaid's Tale become a reality in the not-so-distant future?
Here we are now in 2024, and the so-called “Christian” right is ascending.
One would assume after all we supposedly learned about authoritarian regimes historically exploiting religion, we wouldn’t be here.
The key words are “supposedly learned”.
Yet here we are.
Now that there’s a Christian nationalist two heartbeats away from the nation’s highest office, and the nationalist l movement got what it had been fighting half a century for when the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) overturned the Roe vs. Wade decision, right-wing evangelicals are ramping up their destruction of public education, aka “school choice”.
The 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision that desegregated schools began the proliferation of private religious schools and all-white “academies” that morphed into today’s charter schools — private schools funded with taxpayer money supposed to be entirely for funding public education.
The “dark money” the SCOTUS decided constitutes “free speech” has brought us a system of legalized political bribery. It is also behind the school voucher movement.
It is that same movement funded with billionaire cash responsible for the current push to form the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s attempt to create the nation’s first entirely taxpayer-funded religious institution.
Behind this is Leonard Leo, the morbidly wealthy founder and former director of the right-wing Federalist Society.
Joan McCarter of The Daily Kos described Leo in a recent piece:
Thanks to multimillion-dollar campaigns in support of the right-leaning nominees he [Leo] hand-selects, [he is] the architect of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court. He has also been responsible for reshaping select federal district and appeals courts since the George W. Bush administration. Leonard is at the center of a vast dark-money web that he’s put to work reshaping American society, with the help of his friends on the Supreme Court.
Heidi Przybyla wrote in Politico:
Leo’s network organized multi-million-dollar campaigns to support the confirmation of most of the court’s six conservative justices. Leo himself served as adviser to President Donald Trump on judicial nominations, including those of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The window for this takeover was opened wide in 2022 with the Carson v Makin case in which the SCOTUS decided public money can be applied to religious schools.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote in her dissent:
[In just five short years this Court has] shift[ed] from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars. This decision continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.
Then came the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, in which the 6–3 SCOTUS ruled a football coach was permitted to lead public prayers on school grounds and after games.
For that case, Justice Sotomayor explained:
[This decision] elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all.
In doing so, the Court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing States to entangle themselves with religion, with all of our rights hanging in the balance. As much as the Court protests otherwise, today’s decision is no victory for religious liberty.
University of Massachusetts Amherst legal studies professor, Paul Collins, told Politico:
They [the so-called Christian conservative legal movement] recognize the opportunity to get a state to fund a religious institution is a watershed moment. They have a very, very sympathetic audience at the Supreme Court. When you have that on the Supreme Court you’re going to put a lot of resources into bringing these cases quickly.
If in the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School case the United States Supreme Court goes the way of the two aforementioned cases, could the Republic of Gilead envisioned in author Margaret Atwood’s iconic novel The Handmaid’s Tale become a reality in the not-so-distant future?