VIDEO: Justice Alito disses wokesters, warns religious liberty in danger

The second annual Notre Dame Religious Liberty Summit, a project of  Notre Dame Law School's Religious Liberty Initiative, wrapped up in Rome a week ago. One of the featured speakers was Samuel Alito, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was Justice Alito who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

In international legal circles, it has long been considered impudent and incompetent for jurists to comment on the decisions of courts of other countries. Following the release of the Dobbs decision, several foreign politicians and celebrities took it upon themselves to decry it. They included Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and the Duchess of Sussex's husband Harry.

Justice Alito got a lot of laughs mocking them, saying he "had the honour this term of writing I think the only Supreme Court decision in the history of that institution that has been lambasted by a whole string of foreign leaders who felt perfectly fine commenting on American law."

But, he said, "I’m not going to talk about cases from other countries. All I'm going to say is that, ultimately if we're going to win the battle to protect religious freedom in an increasingly secular society we will need more than positive law." That was the focus of his speech, which you can watch here.

 

The key point of Justice Alito's speech was his warning that religious liberty is "under attack in many places, because it is dangerous to those who want to hold complete power." The threats to religious liberty in many countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East is obvious, but, the jurist said, in the USA, Europe and other economically advanced countries, the challenge is the increasing turning away from religion.

"Polls show," he explained, "a significant increase in the percentage of the population that rejects religion or thinks it's just not all that important, and this has a very important impact on religious liberty, because it is hard to convince people that religious liberty is worth defending, if they don’t think that religion is a good thing that deserves protection."

Reflecting on Justice Alito's speech, we would do well to remember what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in a State of the Union address just eleven months before Pearl Harbor. In what is now known as his Four Freedoms speech, he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:

Freedom of speech * Freedom of worship

Freedom from want * Freedom from fear

Those freedoms, or the first two at any rate, are no less under attack today than they were in 1941. The liberal elites tell us that we should sacrifice freedom of speech and freedom of worship for reasons of equity, diversity, and inclusion, so as to achieve freedom from want and freedom from fear. 

Make no mistake! What the "wokesters" wish to impose on us is not a world free from want and fear, but a new world order of the tyranny of the secular state, which is the antithesis of the "free world" for which millions died and are dying today.