From May through August of 2022, Professor Sherry Colb wrote an impressive series of essays in furious response to what soon became Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a nearly final draft of which had been leaked before its official publication date. In All Hail Justice Coathanger, Gunning for Involuntary Pregnancy, and finally Alito and the Free Exercise of Christianity, along with seventeen more essays published at Dorf on Law and Verdict along the way, Professor Colb marshaled her formidable analytical skills in a sustained and devastatingly successful effort to expose the gaping holes in the reasoning of the Supreme Court justices who formed the Dobbs majority—jurists whom she described at various points as “liars in robes,” “power judges,” “theocrats,” and much more. Focusing her ire most intensely on the author of the majority opinion, Samuel Alito (whom she dismissed with a quick SA, preferring not even to use his full name, a lead that I will follow here), she mocked “that wretched piece of writing” and repeatedly pointed out his rank hypocrisy and his obvious disdain for women.
Because U.S. courts have long been highly deferential to religious claims, and because the Dobbs Court is dominated by a group of political activists who were chosen for the bench specifically because they hold in common a particular set of political (especially religious) beliefs—beliefs that they are more than willing to impose on everyone else—the task of critiquing their handiwork presents a dilemma: to play nice (continuing our legal system’s longstanding respect for “sincerely held religious beliefs” by treading lightly) or to be blunt. Professor Colb wisely chose the latter. She was especially well equipped to do so, because she happened to have grown up in—and, much more to the point, had accumulated a deep knowledge of—what she called “my religion,” which is “not that of a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court—the religion that regards a zygote as a person.”
Professor Colb could criticize so-called Judeo-Christian ideology because she knew it backward and forward. But she was not in fact arguing from a religious viewpoint, because she saw through the hypocrisy and misogyny inherent in what she called “[t]he religion of my youth.” Indeed, she had seen through it while she was still a young girl, writing at one point: “I don’t buy it, just as I didn’t buy it at ten years old.”
In this Article, I assess how the Colb essays push back against the no longer creeping theocracy of the American conservative legal and political movement. In so doing, I will consider how much one’s particular religious belief system matters in reacting to the tragically wrong conclusion that Alito and his fellow theocrats reached: that because this Supreme Court majority views them as necessary vessels to carry out their vision of God’s plan, women can—indeed, they must—be forced against their will to endure pain, a high likelihood of medical complications, and death.
Professor Colb reached powerful and reasoned conclusions, using her knowledge of religion to parry the Court’s illogical and inhumane arguments. I was reared in a different religious tradition, and my experience suggests that one can also reach those conclusions via other routes. Even so, calling out the hypocrisy and arrogance of people whose entire “brand” is an avowedly sincere and unwavering commitment to the Christian God’s supposed commands is important, and we should celebrate the fact that Professor Colb was able, even during her final months, to shine such an uncompromising light on the work of a tyrannical religious minority that gained power over women’s bodies and lives through illegitimate means.
To read this Article, please click here: Feminism, Theocracy, and Righteous Anger: Sherry Colb Unbound.
icon and
select "Add to Home Screen."