Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker indicated on the show he was a proponent of the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” an explicitly theocratic doctrine at the heart of Christian nationalism.
Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who wrote the concurring opinion in last week’s explosive Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos have the same rights as living children, recently appeared on a show hosted by self-anointed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist.
Parker was the featured guest on “Someone You Should Know,” hosted by Johnny Enlow, a Christian nationalist influencer and devoted supporter of former President Donald Trump. Over the course of an 11-minute interview, Parker articulated a theocratic worldview at odds with a functioning, pluralistic society.
“God created government,” he told Enlow, adding that it’s “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”
Everything is about perspectives and everything has nuance that must be taken into account. Yes, that can be really fucking annoying and sometimes works against our hopeful outcomes and does cause our good soundbite moments to be tarnished. There is not a singular universal argument in favor or against every single possible concept we create as a thinking society. To some extent, everything as we conceptualize it is malleable.
Your whole argument looks wholesale more about rejecting politics to embrace idealism. Which is a good thing in my estimation, and seems better situated to have outcomes more inline with what you, and we all, may be looking for out of life in general. Basic human rights aren’t political, they’re an ideal that goes beyond the limitations of politics.
So in that way, the following works exactly the same towards your preferential outcomes:
Reject politics. Embrace Idealism. Solidarity forever.
Okay so if you reject politics you literally can’t get judges appointed. 👀
With that out of the way-
“Rights”, as a concept, are inherently political. A right is literally a political carve-out that enshrines a mandate and creates a political obligation to uphold it. Idealism can be employed to support certain rights, but rights themselves can only exist through politics.
I can appreciate the logic and the fervor behind your positions.
I will argue a step further zooming out that Basic Human Rights are inherent without politics at all. Knowledge comes before politics.
If anything, politics demotes rights from inherent to defined and limited. Which, simply put, sucks.
Politics is a game, don’t ever forget that. We are all in the game and have to keep playing as long as everyone else keeps playing. It’s all bullshit layered on top of bullshit, rules laid out by someone that came before with rules added by someone after that, and later again someone else to make up more rules.
Some of the bullshit works great and helps overcome life’s struggles and adversities. Some bullshit brings us all down together and is ruinous to us as a species. Some bullshit even tends to be ruinous to the entire ecology of life on our tiny blue dot in the universe.
Just be careful to not get too caught up in the bullshit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve voted in every election since I was old enough to vote and I do have a certain feeling of responsibility towards civic duty for the sake of a civilized society (and more-so now, for my children, which does help reinforce that ideal). I also try to engage with the news of world and am generally self aware enough to be thoughtful, rational, and capable of compromise.
I don’t vote for politics, I vote for ideals.
Cheers.
I am thoroughly enjoying this conversation and topic, both of you. Thank you.