In the wake of the divisive Alabama Supreme Court ruling that grants personhood to embryos, Harvard Law School star and constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe savaged the Court’s Chief Justice saying that Tom Parker “violated his oath to uphold the Constitution.”
Chief Justice Parker “broke right through the wall separating church and state,” Tribe wrote, noting references in Parker’s decision to “the wrath of a holy God,” the Book of Genesis, and the prophet Jeremiah — allusions Tribe cited without having to mention that these sources don’t serve as valid precedent in U.S. courts.
Parker’s unfettered religiosity — not even disguised in legalistic attire — equating “IVF with infanticide,” Tribe writes, amounts to a breach of duty. The roiling Alabama Supreme Court decision is rooted in something closer to Sharia law than in traditional constitutional American jurisprudence.
Parker is a Christian who reportedly subscribes to the Seven Mountains ideology, which holds that true believers should seek to exert influence on seven main aspects of society: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. This Christian duty to influence is primary, the ideology dictates, taking precedence over man-made things like laws.
Media Matters for America recently amplified an interview Parker did in which he said: “God created government, and the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others, it’s heartbreaking.”
Alabama CJ Tom Parker broke right through the wall separating church and state when he invoked “the wrath of a holy God,” the Book of Genesis, and the prophet Jeremiah to equate IVF with infanticide. He violated his oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. https://t.co/msnbQBUDj7
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) February 23, 2024
The separation of church and state has always been a contentious constitutional issue — politically minded philosopher Martha Nussbaum explores it indepth in Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality — but jurisprudence based purely on religious doctrine has not succeeded in the U.S.
Pertinently, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a former Harvard Law student of Tribe, contends below that “theocrats who try to establish their own sect over everyone else” — a fair description of the Parker/Alabama decision — are the biggest threat not just to democracy but to religious freedom itself.
The Framers taught us that the biggest threat to religious freedom comes from theocrats who try to establish their own sect over everyone else.
That’s why we have two religion clauses in the First Amendment. pic.twitter.com/FI4fUqkeg1
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) October 25, 2023
On another occasion, Raskin issued a pithy description that demonstrates the respective historical roles of religion and the rule of law in American society, saying “We don’t place our hands on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”
It is the opposite, of course, though not in Alabama this week, as Tribe asserts.
Tribe’s reputation and influence in the world of constitutional law are acknowledged across political borders. Conservative former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig — in the news recently for filing an amicus brief at SCOTUS on the removal of Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado — wrote last year that “Laurence H. Tribe has been the Nation’s preeminent constitutional scholar for the past half-century.”