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Sunday, December 05, 2021

Neil Gorsuch's terrifying paragraph

I am terrified by a paragraph that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a few weeks ago.  You should be, too.  He and two other justices think that the Constitution forbids states from imposing, on religious dissenters, the kind of vaccination requirements that freed the United States from diphtheria, measles, and polio.  If these judges have their way, those diseases are coming back.

I explain in a new column at The Hill, here.

This column is something of a formal experiment, in which I try to offer to the nonspecialist reader the kind of thing I do in the classroom, examining a block of text with care and extracting its meaning and implications.  It is uncommon in nonacademic writing, where one doesn't often find a block quote as long as the one I use here.  But the public needs to know about this particular paragraph.