By: John Archibald
This is an opinion column.
Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker was downright gleeful.
He quoted Genesis in his sermon — I’m sorry, his concurring opinion — in the Alabama ruling that turned in vitro fertilization on its head by defining frozen embryos as children.
He quoted 17th-century Dutch theologian Petrus Van Mastricht. Ya know, good ole Van Mastricht. He quoted a 16th-century Bible – because older is closer to God, maybe – and quoted the Sixth Commandment, thou shalt not kill.
He quoted Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin and one of Roy Moore’s old pals at the Foundation for Moral Law in Montgomery. He wrote of the “wrath of God.”
The people of Alabama, he said, decided all this was public policy.
“It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’”
Did I say it wasn’t a sermon? It was definitely a sermon.
To which the Alabama Supreme Court, with the exception of Justice Greg Cook, who dissented, shouted a half-hearted but still resounding amen.
Pausing fertility treatments across Alabama, and the hopes of couples struggling desperately to conceive.
Make no mistake about it. Alabama is a theocracy.
And Tom Parker, a guy who in 2006 berated his court colleagues because they chose not to defy a U.S. Supreme Court order barring execution of people convicted of crimes as juveniles, is its cleric in chief.
Parker has long campaigned on the notion that Alabama judges shouldn’t follow U.S. Supreme Court rulings they didn’t agree with. All that while calling out “activist liberal judges” for things he disagreed with – gay marriage, punishing his pal Roy Moore – and responding with blatant, moralistic activism.
Alabama is a dangerous theocracy.
He is self-anointed as the divine guide to interpreting your laws through ancient religious texts and his own 17th-century filter. You are subject to his delusions, his interpretation of God, his inner mandate, despite your pesky First Amendment right to believe your own religious truth, or to believe nothing at all.
He is not alone. He has a bunch of amens and a couple awomens on the court to back him up now, in ways that were unimaginable when fellow GOP justices, along with now-congressman Gary Palmer, lambasted him for judicial activism over the death penalty dispute in 2006.
On the day the court announced its embryo ruling last week, Parker – this reported by the publication Media Matters – appeared on the show of Johnny Enlow, a man described by that publication as a QAnon conspiracy theorist who promotes the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on fundamentalist Christians to reclaim the mountains of government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.
Parker was all in, saying God “is calling and equipping people to step back into these mountains right now.”
The Alabama Democratic Party could not resist, if it even wanted to. It is frozen like an embryo, but without a designation of life.
So Alabama tithes at the church of Tom Parker. Whether it wants to or not.
The Pew Research Center reported a decade ago that 49% of Alabamians call themselves evangelical Christians. But that means 51% called themselves something else, from Methodist to Mormon to none of the above.
Those voices, those choices, are muted as extremists become mainstream. That, I guess, is the goal.
It shouldn’t be public policy.