If This All Ends With Some Gross Conservative SCOTUS Swinger Boner Scandal, We Are Throwing Up Forever
We didn't say we'd be surprised, though.
Oh boy, news just keeps coming out about all the conservative activists who have inappropriately prayed and wined and dined and braided hair and shared underpants with the partisan hack Supreme Court justices who have declared themselves the king of staring at America's genitals and yelling at us about what we're allowed to do with them. This is a way bigger scandal than Brett Kavanaugh's stupid ugly Supercuts hair standing up on his neck because he's scared of some protesters outside the steakhouse.
Rolling Stone broke the story last week of a prominent employee of the Liberty Counsel hate group — you know, the beclowned religious Right shrieking factory that defended that asshole Kentucky county clerk who wouldn't issue marriage licenses to gays back in the day — who got herself caught on a hot mic bragging that she literally prayed with conservative Supreme Court hacks. The magazine describes Peggy Nienaber as "Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court." The magazine explains that she said, "We’re the only people who do that." By "that," she meant praying with sitting Supreme Court justices. Not praying upon or praying for . Praying with .
Of course, as Rolling Stone noted, this wasn't just a "wow, that is some inappropriate shit" moment, but also suggested pretty severe conflicts of interest, since as the org's name implies and as its reputation attests, Liberty Counsel is a highly litigious group of fascist Christian garbage grundles who frequently bother the Supreme Court with lawsuits and with amicibriefs. Samuel Alito's"My Boner, My Rules" YouTube commentmajority opinion in the Dobbs abortion case literally cited Liberty Counsel.
RS put it in other words:
In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.
Those are some words!
She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”
Whoa if true! She said they did it the Monday after the Court confiscated the country's bodily autonomy by overturning Roe . (Gross.) She said in the video she wanted her comments "totally off the record." We can see why, considering the confessing she was doing.
Mat Staver, who runs Liberty Counsel — he is the white-haired open-mouthed douche who defended Davis and who you see on TV all the time, a man Wonkette once described as a guy "who always looks like he's just been caught dildoing himself to furry porn" — says Nienaber is a full of shit liar. Of course, he would say that.
“It’s entirely untrue,” Staver tells Rolling Stone. “There is just no way that has happened.” He adds: “She has prayer meetings for them, not with them.” Asked if he had an explanation for Nienaber’s direct comments to the contrary, Staver says, “I don’t.”
Nienaber also now says she definitely did not say the things she said. “I do not recall making such a statement. I listened to the livestream, and I did not hear such a statement.” But then she walked back her walk-back and re-clarified that she only meant she did this many years ago, not now, because COVID.
Golly, who to believe, the religious Right charlatan who knew they were talking to a journalist or the religious Right charlatan who bragged on a hot mic but then walked it back and then walked back the walkback and then walked back the walked back version of the walkback?
Ooh Maybe We Should Believe THIS Guy!
Thing is, though, Rob Schenck, the former religious Right luminary who created Faith & Liberty — or rather, its predecessor, called Faith and Action in the Nation's Capital — told Rolling Stone that his group totally did that, starting in the 1990s and continuing until the 2010-sies when he left. Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Dead Antonin Scalia are specifically namechecked. The entire point of that organization was to ban abortion, and getting up close and personal with judges was a big part of that. ( RS notes that Schenck famously "shov[ed] an aborted fetus in a plastic container into the face of former President Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign." He is that guy. He is not like that anymore.)
Schenck is the subject of a Politico piece that came out this weekend about "Operation Higher Court," which was his old group's "extensive program to influence Justices Thomas, Alito and Scalia through meals and entertainment." And that is why we are like oh my GOD if this story eventually takes a turn for Shame Boner City and includes, like, conservative justices swinging and pegging, then we are going to throw up everywhere but we won't exactly be surprised.
Because it's always the ones you most expect.
But for now the story isn't about that. It's about this:
Rob Schenck, an evangelical minister who headed the Faith and Action group headquartered near the Supreme Court from 1995 to 2018, said he arranged over the years for about 20 couples to fly to Washington to visit with and entertain Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and the late Antonin Scalia.
Love it when people arrange for couples to fly to our town to entertain us. Single and ready to mingle? Fuck that, more like double and ready for trouble.
Schenck, who was once an anti-abortion activist but broke with the religious right in the last decade over its aggressive tactics and support for gun rights, said the couples were instructed before the dinners to use certain phrases to influence the justices while steering clear of the specifics of cases pending before the court — for example, to “talk about the importance of a child having a father and a mother,” rather than engage in the particulars of a gay-rights case.
Damn, these people sound fun.
“We would rehearse lines like, ‘We believe you are here for a time like this,’” which is a reference to the Old Testament Book of Esther in which the Hebrew woman born with the name Hadassah becomes queen of Persia and succeeds in preventing a genocide of her people.
Is that the book of Esther in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Read the whole thing. It spends a lot of time on one couple in particular, Don and Gayle Wright (Don is dead now), who not only did the fancy dinners with the justices but apparently also did hunting and fishing trips with Scalia and hosted Scalia at their place in Jackson Hole.
All the couples “knew they were being coached” and adhered to a “casual reporting procedure” in which they offered feedback on their dinners with the justices and their wives, Schenck said.
The Wrights were the most heavily involved of all the couples. “They set the standards,” Schenck said. “They were the most active, the most engaged.”
Sounds hot.
Schenck has done a major about-face and is no fan of his own earlier work. He also emphasizes that he can't testify on what his former group has done since he left and after it became part of Liberty Counsel. But he appears clear-eyed about what kind of Court we have on our hands right now and how his work helped bring it about, as he explained to Rolling Stone :
“Prayer is a positive exercise, until it’s politicized — and too many prayers that I and my colleagues offered in the presence of the justices were political prayers,” he explains. He also believes the work “contributed to the internal moral and ethical corruption of the justices at the court,” he says.
He now calls the overturning of Roe v. Wade a "social catastrophe." And maybe that's why he's blabbing so much to the media right now about all this kind of stuff.
As for what kind of undue stinkiness is yet to come out about the current conservative majority and whatever inappropriate dalliances they may be having with Liberty Counsel employees or anybody else, we guess we'll just have to steel ourselves and be ready.
Maybe keep a barf bag by our desk.
A Gross Postscript
Oh hey, in related news, did everybody hear that a whole different DC evangelical hate group, the Family Research Council, reclassified itself in 2020 as an "association of churches," because apparently that's the new popular thing to do for evangelical hate groups, to reclassify themselves as an "association of churches" so they don't have to face public scrutiny the way regular law-abiding 501(c)(3)s do?
The American Family Association did it this year. Liberty Counsel did it in 2018. Of course ProPublica notes that Liberty Counsel was called a "church auxiliary" before that, which meant it got "many of the same exemptions that churches get" already.
So you'll want to read that whole thing too if you have the stomach for a 7,500-word news brief from ProPublica.
This country is so fucking broken.
[ Rolling Stone / Politico ]
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