Supreme Court Just Protecting White Supremacy

What have the conservatives on the Supreme Court unleashed with their stripping Muslims and non-white voters of their civil and human rights?  The same thing that always happens when the government winks at white/christian supremacy: anti-minority violence.

Think Progress:

Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940) should have been an easy case.

Unlike many modern religious liberty cases, where religious conservatives demand the power to limit the rights of others, Gobitis involved two children who were expelled from a public school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The two youths were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they believed that “such a gesture of respect for the flag was forbidden by command of Scripture.”

As a matter of law, the Gobitis children should have prevailed. Generally, the First Amendment does not permit the government to force individuals to speak against their will. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” the Supreme Court later held in a similar case, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

And yet, Gobitis now stands as the paradigmatic example of how the Supreme Court can turn its back on a vulnerable group — and unleash the wolves of authoritarianism in the process.

A society committed to “ultimate values of civilization,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “may, in self-protection, utilize the educational process for inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty, whatever may be their lesser differences and difficulties.”

“National unity,” Frankfurter added, “is the basis of national security.”

The Gobitis decision was not a sweeping denial of the shared humanity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It did not strip Witnesses of all their rights to seek protection from the law, or declare them to be enemies of American society. Yet it may as well have done so, because the public reaction to the decision was swift and harsh.

Gobitis came down in June of 1940. By the next September, according to the ACLU, more than a thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in 236 different incidents nationwide.

Solicitor General Francis Biddle warned that “self-constituted bands of mob patrioteers are roaming about the country, setting upon these people, beating them, driving them out of their homes.”

A lawyer who belonged to the faith lamented that hundreds of his fellow Witnesses were “beaten, kidnapped, tarred and feathered, throttled in castor oil, tied together an chased through the streets, castrated, maimed, hanged, shot, and otherwise consigned to mayhem.”

In one of these incidents, which is recounted in historian Shawn Francis Peters’ book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution, Witnesses in a small Pennsylvania town were harassed, arrested on frivolous charges, set upon by mobs of fifty men or more, beaten, kicked, and dragged through the streets, then held and questioned by police for hours before they could seek medical treatment for their injuries.

In another incident, which took place just days after the Gobitis decision, vigilantes burned a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place of worship in Maine, then rioted for days.

SNIP

One again, in other words, a Supreme Court decision making a relatively narrow incursion on minority rights fostered a much larger attack on those rights. State lawmakers’ reaction to Crawford was neither as violent as the aftermath of Gobitis and Brown II nor as transparently lawless. But Crawford may provide the biggest warning of all about what could happen in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim Ban decision.

The story of Gobitis was a story of authoritarian elements within the general populace viewing a Supreme Court decision as a license to lash out at a disfavored minority group. The story of Crawford, by contrast, is the story of anti-democratic elements who wield the official power of the government deciding to push the envelope after the Supreme Court signaled that they were likely to get away with it.

Trump v. Hawaii is a case about an authoritarian, anti-democratic president. And it is a case about a racist, who does not feel bound by the Constitution, and who likes to lash out at vulnerable immigrants.

There’s no telling what he may do if the Supreme Court emboldens him further.