The Current US Supreme Court Supermajority: A Threat to Science and Secularism

Edward Tabash Well-known atheist debater in the US Constitutional lawyer, Chair - Center for Inquiry

As chair of the board of directors of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), which publishes this magazine, I and CFI General Counsel Nicholas Little have filed numerous briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court detailing why the religious Right wing is wrong when it asserts that government can favor religious belief over nonbelief and that government must allow religious objectors the right to avoid complying with laws that are binding on the rest of us.

The 6–3 religious Right majority on the Supreme Court issues rulings that defy scientific evidence, rejects science as part of the effort to undo church-state separation, and dismisses scientific evidence generally to achieve other ideological objectives.

We must now confront the awful tragedy that the one institution of government that we could most reliably trust to protect our personal freedoms and make decisions based on reason, from the late 1940s onward, has now become a weapon for imposing religious tyranny and ignoring the very science it used to revere.

Defining Scientifically Based Knowledge