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Concerned as we rightly are about the immediate human cost of Lori Gilbert Kaye’s awful murder and the trauma inflicted on the Poway and national Jewish communities, hardly anyone has delved into the theological causes behind Earnest’s actions, as confused as they may be.

Given the ease with which the discontinuation of this policy was accomplished—two pages, three signatures—it’s worthwhile to ask: why now?

The truth is that the ”forced-birth” mentality of those determined to eliminate abortion access is far closer to the Nazi philosophy of dehumanization and oppression.

Catholicism is usually seen as being at the forefront of the anti-choice movement that would take moral freedom away from the pregnant person and consign it to male-dominated churches, legislatures, and courts. But a 15th century saint reveals that it was not always so.

In the 1990s, Barr attacked the very concept of secular government and in one speech said advocates of secularism “are clearly fanatics.” Barr’s advocacy of “God’s law” is especially alarming.

Taking ownership of an ideology that has spawned—and will continue to spawn—extremist groups or lone wolves might be the best to way to eradicate it.

While TST is not the first Satanic organization to obtain this status, it is the first group that clearly intends to deploy this status in legal challenges. TST’s demands for equal treatment under the law are going to be much harder to dismiss from here on out.

In 2010 the district court correctly decided that the National Day of Prayer violated the First Amendment: “Its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function.” On appeal, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not disagree—it couldn’t—but it tossed the case.

In right-wing circles, theories about cultural Marxism in the era of Trumpism come entangled with other anti-Semitic theories, often arguing that George Soros and a shadowy “globalist” cabal are working to dissolve national borders and sovereignty into a totalitarian-communist “New World Order.”

When Trump claims that women and their doctors are wrapping, rocking, and then cruelly executing babies, he is engaging in a complex narrative rhetoric designed to both titillate and mobilize those in power against those whom they hate.