Brad and Dan discuss four main stories on this week's roundup:
1. The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has led to Amy Coney Barrett as the frontrunner to replace her. Brad outlines the history and contours of the charismatic Catholic community to which she swore an oath and asks how it affects her nomination.
2. Through a discussion of Locke and American history, Dan helps us understand why protecting public property is always such a priority in cases involving the destruction of human life. Why was her apartment complex more valuable than Breonna Taylor's life?
3. The peaceful transfer of power, the GOP's ongoing efforts to suppress voting, and the threat of election insecurity.
4. Following on a new piece by Chrissy Stroop, we ask: Have "respectable" evangelicals lost control of the extremist movement they built?
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My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
It's good to see you, Brad, even if it's been a tough week in a lot of ways.
Yeah, it has.
I think we're all just reckoning all the time with crisis upon crisis.
Obviously, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death is a major blow for many reasons and we're going to talk about that.
Verdict came down this week, and we're going to talk about that, too.
I think, personally, you and I are in the teeth of the semester, so we're feeling a little tired, and I know you continue to be a parent who is helping kids learn online, so I know that's a thing for you, and you've got four people in your house on Zoom all the time.
You know, I'm sure that's a thing for you.
Anyway, I'm in California.
It's going to be 92 degrees tomorrow.
You're in Massachusetts.
You feeling the fall there yet?
Apple cider doughnut time?
It's apple cider doughnut time.
We were, but we actually are like 81 degrees today, but it drops back down.
Yeah, so it's a proper fall, not that that mushy California stuff you have.
And even better than that, we're not, you know, being threatened to be pushed into the sea by raging fires.
So in all seriousness, Yeah, this weekend could be could be bad.
So we'll see what happens there.
We're going to talk about the Senate.
We're going to talk about Mitch McConnell.
We're going to talk about the Supreme Court.
I'm going to talk about Evangelicals.
So, quick story, Dan, we used to live on Capitol Hill in D.C.
and it was a fun neighborhood to live in.
It's historic, beautiful architecture, great museums and restaurants.
It was a really fun place to live.
We had a tiny basement apartment, so that was the downside.
We lived in like 300 square feet.
However, walking your dog in that neighborhood was always adventurous, because you would see, like, Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, like, trying to get his kid into a car seat, or you'd go get a drink at happy hour, and here's Debbie Wasserman Schultz, sort of with her entourage.
And I was not there, but my partner had a night where she was walking the dog, not dressed for, you know, public outing, like, kind of pajama pants, and, you know, just trying to let the dogs around the block, and then Get back in and make dinner kind of time.
And she's walking and all of a sudden a huge black SUV pulls up.
Two guys jump out and they stop her.
And she's just sort of standing there with like two chihuahuas on a leash in pajama pants and just like what's happening?
And Mitch McConnell jumps out of the car and
runs into a house and that you know it takes a couple of minutes because he's he's taking his time and whatever else and my wife's sitting there or standing there you know behind the the security detail holding this bag of dog poop as you do and when you're walking your dog as one does and I'm not going to go further I'm not going to extend this metaphor Dan and I'm not going to say things that will be put on YouTube and used to defame me but
I will just say it seems like a fitting picture to me that the only time anyone in my family has run into Mitch McConnell personally, they were holding a bag of dog poop.
So let's leave it there for now.
It's early in the day.
If we were recording this in the happy hour, then perhaps my comments would go further.
Let's leave it there for now.
All right.
Dan, this week we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
It was a crushing blow.
It happened actually a week ago today, really.
I'll just introduce some thoughts here and then throw it to you.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became sort of famous as a justice for many reasons, but one of them was just her lifelong crusade to secure equal rights under the law for all people, including women.
And there's some nice verbiage here from Joe Pinkster at The Atlantic.
Her litigation wasn't about a series of isolated inequities.
Ginsburg's core argument was that equal protection under the laws promised by the 14th Amendment covered discrimination based on sex.
One unconventional but shrewd strategy she used was to focus on how such discrimination harmed men.
So there's a lot of cases earlier in her career where she actually was defending men and their rights to things like if their wife was in the military, they deserve the spousal allowance for income.
If there was a case where a man's wife died and he wasn't being given the social security benefit, and she argued that that was the case.
Well, why did she do all that?
I mean, obviously she wanted to get justice for those men, but it opened up pathways for her then to build a larger
Framework for securing equal protection under the law for women in the workplace and in everywhere else she was the co-founder at the ACLU of the women's rights project and She said this women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom All people should enjoy Also should also note Dan that she was one of our Jewish justices which there are our
Several, but still not many in terms of the long history of our court.
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