The Muslim ban ruling legitimates Trump’s bigotry

I wrote this for The Guardian.

The US supreme court has upheld the Trump administration’s Muslim ban. By doing so, the court has genuflected before a deeply bigoted president and has sacrificed constitutional freedoms in the process. It’s almost impossible to describe the mixture of rage and vulnerability that I feel knowing that the ban, a dagger in the heart of the first amendment principle of religious neutrality, is now law.

At the center of the court’s 5-4 decision is a degree of deference to the executive branch that is tantamount to nearly blind obedience. Trump’s many bigoted statements and actions denigrating Muslims are well known. And yet the supreme court decided that none of that matters when considering the constitutionality of this ban. This conclusion legitimates Trump’s bigotry by ripping up the Establishment Clause, one of the constitutional protections of religious freedom, into a thousand little pieces….

Read the rest here.