The Right Abandoned Civility a Long Time Ago So why is it always the left that's being told to pipe

The Right Abandoned Civility a Long Time Ago
So why is it always the left that’s being told to pipe down?
By Katha Pollitt
[link:https://www.thenation.com/article/right-abandoned-civility-long-time-ago/|


Freedom of religion is the right’s legal superpower. Right now, if your religion, as interpreted by you, says it’s a sin to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, and your religion says you should humiliate a woman in front of her 7-year-old rather than fulfill her prescription to end a nonviable pregnancy, and your religion says your employees shouldn’t be able to get birth control through their health insurance because God told you it was really abortion, although science says it is not, the Supreme Court says go right ahead. Your right to act like an uninformed bigot trumps the rights of LGBT people and women and workers and anyone else who gets in the way of your own personal Jesus.

Claiming that religion gives you the right to harm your fellow Americans probably works best if you are Christian. Only Christians get to impose their religion on others. A Hindu wouldn’t get very far with a lawsuit to shut down the beef industry. As for Islam, Muslims should be grateful to be allowed to live here or even to visit, although according to the Supreme Court’s recent decision, the Muslim ban isn’t really a ban on Muslims (see Venezuela and North Korea), even if President Trump said over and over that that’s exactly what it was. A single reference to Hitler from one civil-rights commissioner in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case was cause for the Supremes to overturn lower-court rulings against the Christian baker, but Trump’s obsessive tweets against Muslims were irrelevant, because he and his administration said other things too.