Piety and fraud are as American as burgers and fries, so it’s no wonder Missouri GOP Senate candidate (and state attorney general) Josh Hawley, his mentor, former Missouri GOP Senator (and Ralston-Purina heir) John Danforth, and Supreme Court nominee (and accused sexual assaulter) Brett Kavanaugh are using “religious freedom” as an excuse to discriminate against women.
Hawley, who’s running a set of breathtakingly racist anti-immigration TV ads against Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, is a huge fan of both Kavanaugh’s and Trump’s. This presumably includes Trump’s attitude toward women, since Hawley has dismissed allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh by Prof. Christine Blasey Ford, sniffing that “Democrats have played politics with this whole process. They don’t care about the truth.”
Hawley subordinates investigating sexual assault to installing an extremist anti-choice justice on the Supreme Court, an identical copy of the position taken by the man who’s mentored and guided him, John Danforth. Of the assault allegations, Danforth said, “I feel so terribly sorry for Kavanaugh and what he’s going through. Here’s a man who’s had a marvelous reputation as a human being, and now it’s being trashed. I felt the same way about Clarence.”
That, of course, is Justice Clarence Thomas, arguably one of the most unfit members of the High Court in at least the last half-century. In 1991, when Anita Hill charged Thomas with repeated sexual harassment and was trashed by the same Senate Judiciary Committee that’s preparing to ambush Prof. Ford when she testifies on Thursday, Danforth led the cheerleading squad on the sidelines. He called Thomas “the real victim” in the same way he dismisses allegations against Kavanaugh now.
Danforth and Hawley have different styles. Hawley’s a sharp-elbowed 38-year-old right-wing ideologue, while Danforth is a genteel 82-year old with the avuncular charm of Mister Rogers and the policy positions of Donald Trump. But both want to restrict the rights of women using religious sanctimony as cover.
Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest, was known to his Senate colleagues as “Saint Jack” for his alleged ethical rigor clothed in piety, and he still trails a miasma of sanctity that gives his pronouncements a certain throw weight. Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics uses both his name and his money to stage “nuanced” discussions of religion in public life. Through the decades, Danforth’s support for right-wingers like Hawley, Kavanaugh, Thomas, and John Ashcroft favors the Moral Majority conservative white Christian version of religion in politics, not the social justice gospel of black churches nor the liberation theology of the Hispanic Catholic church.
Hawley became Danforth’s acolyte, successfully arguing that “religious freedom” was more important than a woman’s rights before the Supreme Court. In what’s become known simply as “the Hobby Lobby case,” Hawley was part of a team that convinced the court that an employer’s “religious freedom” could determine what health insurance benefits it gives employees.
The Hobby Lobby chain, with 822 stores (nine in the St. Louis region), is owned by the Green family of Oklahoma City, headed by David Green, a white evangelical Christian conservative. Green’s evangelical fervor led him to spend a half-billion dollars to build The Museum of the Bible just down the street from the U.S. Capitol. Green spent $1.6 million to buy over 5,500 “Biblical” artifacts that were looted from Iraq in the chaos after the U.S. invasion, and was forced to pay a $3 million fine and return them. According to many archeologists, including Iraq expert Dr. Amr Al-Azm, this was no mistake, and Green “clearly” knew he was buying antiquities stolen from Iraq.
Hawley argued before the Supreme Court that Hobby Lobby should be allowed to deny female employees insurance coverage for contraception because the owners had “religious objections” to some contraceptives. The Court agreed, so now employers are free to deny all sorts of benefits to workers if, somehow, those benefits offend the business owner’s religious dogma.
Discriminating and calling it religious freedom goes back to the schisms in the Baptist and Lutheran churches before the Civil War, when pro-slavery congregations went their own way, and continued through the Mormon’s (only recently recanted) dogma that black people couldn’t join the church because their dark skin was “the mark of Cain.” Whether anti-gay or anti-female, that same strain of bigotry infects much of America’s public religious life still.
Judge Kavanaugh’s conservative judicial activism doesn’t overtly use religion. But his beliefs align with conservative white Evangelical and Catholic dogma. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Kavanaugh wished there “were no Constitutional right to abortion.” In his confirmation hearings this month, he falsely claimed the “morning after” birth control pill is the same as abortion. Both of those positions – outlawing abortion and restricting female contraception – dovetail nicely with Hawley and Danforth’s beliefs.
As Hawley once wrote, “Government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is it purpose. And Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God.” And since Hawley has sued both to limit contraceptive coverage and to allow insurance companies to once again deny coverage if you have any pre-existing medical condition, it would seem that his kingdom of God isn’t covered by Obamacare.
Obamacare, the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, voting rights, and reproductive rights are all on the chopping block should Kavanaugh be confirmed to the Supreme Court. Whether that happens depends on what happens Thursday, when the 11 GOP white men (median age 65) who make up the Senate Judiciary Committee grill Kavanaugh’s accuser, Prof. Ford.
Much like Hawley and Danforth, all of them seem to have already made up their minds that Kavanaugh will be on the court, no matter what happens. And the driving force won’t be judicial ethics or precedent. It will be a conservative (almost exclusively) white Christian agenda aimed at controlling women.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
