Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's difficult to consider someone a legal scholar when she puts sarcasm quotes around "same-sex marriage" and has the grandiosity to declare that she, not the Supreme Court, is the final interpreter of the Constitution -- and all this just in the first pages of the book's introduction. Jenna Ellis is a Christian nationalist. Our liberal democracy doesn't work for her, the US has lost its way, and we need to ditch precedent -- especially cases that solidified the wall of separation between church and state -- and she and those like-minded need to step up and "return" the nation to a mythical past that never existed. (Such idealization of the "past," when no one questioned gender and gender roles, when men exercised authority over government and families, when "outsiders" -- gays, racial and religious minorities, socialists -- were isolated, denied equal rights, and kept in place by religious intolerance, is the stuff of fascists, bul I'll say no more about American fascism.) Bizarrely, Ellis writes "the law is our codified morality" and "the law is therefore always inherently moral." Even high school students have enough life experience to know this is not true. Law and morality do sometime overlap, but anything beyond that recognition is too far a stretch to be credible. There are many acts that are legal but immoral (banks closing seemingly dormant accounts and seizing their assets, without notifying account owners, comes to mind) and there are many moral acts that are illegal (leaving water bottles in the Sonoran Desert to save the lives of immigrants who crossed the border). I'm not alone in rejecting Ellis' notion. The Supreme Court does too: "this Court’s obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate its own moral code" (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003). Lawrence v. Texas shines a light on why "The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution"'s crux is flawed thinking. When Lawrence's precedent Bowers v. Hardwick was decided in 1986, 25 states had laws prohibiting sodomy. (The fact that nine of the 25 states criminalized only "homosexual sodomy" should have been enough for Ellis to recognize a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, but no.) The 25 states that prohibited sodomy expressed "what a society values and its morality," which necessarily means sodomy was immoral in those states. Yet we are left with 25 other states whose "codified morality" expressed the opposite -- that sodomy was moral (or at least not immoral) because no law prohibited it. This paradox cannot stand, especially for Ellis who believes in "objective morality." When Lawrence overruled Bowers, the number of states prohibiting sodomy had shrunk to 13, with four of these banning gay sex specifically. Did sodomy switch from immoral to moral immediately when the Lawrence decision was announced? I would say gay sex (and "heterosexual sodomy") were moral to begin with, in that morality is based on eliminating or minimizing harm to others, and no one is harmed during consensual sex. Ellis, no doubt, disagrees. Ellis' arguments fail because she confuses the Supreme Court we have with the Supreme Court she wishes we have, just as much as she confuses religious prescriptions and proscriptions with morality and immorality, respectively. This is the result of choosing to be cocooned within evangelical Christianity, revisionist history, and far-right media, among other influences, which are also the root of her intolerance of all she deems intolerable and offensive. God has called Ellis to her mission, which means compromise and even empathy are no-go zones. No one has standing to question "God's law" and moral standards. This is Ellis' sincerely held religious belief, but "[i]t matters not that [her] belief was a part of [her] professed religion; it was still belief, and belief only" (Reynolds v. United States, 1878). As assertive Ellis is in insisting she is historically and constitutionally correct, "it was still belief, and belief only."