LeGaL: Today’s ruling upholding Trump’s Muslim Ban undermines this country’s most basic principles of religious freedom and equality
This morning in a 5–4 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s third Muslim ban.
LeGaL joined an amicus brief in this case, highlighting how the ban threatens the lives of LGBT Muslims.
For many of us, today’s ruling left us feeling heartbroken and helpless. The decision reminds us of Korematsu, the SCOTUS decision upholding Japanese-American imprisonment.
As Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg note in their dissent:
Ultimately, what began as a policy explicitly “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” has since morphed into a “Proclamation” putatively based on national-security concerns. But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the Proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.
We agree.
Notably, Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg point out the disconnect between the majority’s ruling in this Hawaii v Trump and their holding in Masterpiece Cakeshop.
“Unlike in Masterpiece, where the majority considered the state commissioners’ statements about religion to be persuasive evidence of unconstitutional government action, the majority here completely sets aside the President’s charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant. That holding erodes the foundational principles of religious tolerance that the Court elsewhere has so emphatically protected, and it tells members of minority religions in our country “‘that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.’”
Today’s ruling does not uphold this country’s most basic principles of religious freedom and equality. It places the lives of many of the Muslims in the targeted countries at risk, including LGBT Muslims, and fosters hate and intolerance in the United States.
