The Right-Wing Culture Warriors Who Are Becoming Federal Judges
The highlights of the résumé of Josh Divine, President Donald Trump’s nominee to a federal district court vacancy in Missouri, are standard-issue conservative legal movement stuff: a clerkship with Justice Clarence Thomas; a stint in the office of Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley; continuous membership in the Federalist Society since 2013, when he started as a 1L at Yale Law School.
Today, Divine is Missouri’s solicitor general, a role that has allowed him to put the powers of his office to defend anti-trans legislation, fight President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, and support legal challenges to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a common medication used in abortion. In 2024, Divine sought to file a lawsuit on behalf of the state of Missouri to thwart New York’s criminal prosecution of Trump, who has now returned the favor by tapping him for a life-tenured gig.
His columns argued for a ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape; bemoaned the scourge of “bias and possible hatred against Christianity”; and explained moral opposition to homosexuality by grouping it with opposition to bestiality, polygamy, and “any form of sex that goes against the biological design of procreation and the nurturing of a family.”
In a 2012 column about the prosecution of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Florida, Divine criticized “the media” for identifying Zimmerman as “white Hispanic,” which he described as “a ploy toward branding the situation as racist profiling.” Divine was also perplexed by the term “white Hispanic” itself: “What does that even mean?” he asked. “Is President Obama a white black man? What about a Halfrican-American?”
“I am a zealot,” Divine wrote in October 2010, arguing that “pre-born humans have had their inalienable right to life stripped from them” by “abortion mills” running a “lucrative business.” In September 2011, he argued that the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate “forces insurers to essentially provide the equivalent of abortions,” since birth control can prevent implantation of a “genetically unique human zygote, which may be between five and seven days old when birth control ensures its death.” A month later, he compared the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade to its infamous decisions in Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson—a frequent talking point among conservative activists prior to the Court’s decision to overturn Roe in 2022.
Divine reserved some of his harshest criticism for Planned Parenthood, which he said “has been shown to aid sex traffickers” and “disproportionately targets minorities for abortions.” In April 2011, he voiced his frustration that Planned Parenthood hadn’t been hit with criminal charges for “false advertising” or “intentionally misleading the public”—a failure he attributed to the fact that “much of the judicial system is agenda-based.” As Missouri’s solicitor general, Divine has had the privilege of defending the state legislature’s attempts to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.
In January 2011, Divine defended the free speech rights of a local DJ who decided to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by reading a white supremacist essay critical of the late civil rights leader; in his column, Divine mourned the “political-correctness dogma that has permeated society,” and argued that the DJ’s citation to a white supremacist source “does not discredit the information” contained therein.
In April 2010, he explained that it would be “impossible” for Christians to “just leave their religion at home,” since Christians “in particular” are “obliged ethically to impose their beliefs on others.”
Finally, like many of today’s Republican politicians, Divine repeatedly rejected the notion that bigotry might animate any of his beliefs. In the story about the radio DJ, for example, Divine argued that the word “hate” had become “nothing more than an ad homonym [sic]”; when discussing abortion, he described the anti-choice movement as motivated not by “hatred,” but by “science and compassion.” In a column justifying opposition to same-sex marriage, he argued that “hate” and “ignorance” are “rarely ever used as legitimate complaints,” and “exhibit the emotional immaturity of those who use them.” Most opponents of same-sex marriage are not homophobes, he added, but are merely “opposed to a group receiving extra benefits.”
https://ballsandstrikes.org/nominations/...columnist/
The highlights of the résumé of Josh Divine, President Donald Trump’s nominee to a federal district court vacancy in Missouri, are standard-issue conservative legal movement stuff: a clerkship with Justice Clarence Thomas; a stint in the office of Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley; continuous membership in the Federalist Society since 2013, when he started as a 1L at Yale Law School.
Today, Divine is Missouri’s solicitor general, a role that has allowed him to put the powers of his office to defend anti-trans legislation, fight President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, and support legal challenges to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a common medication used in abortion. In 2024, Divine sought to file a lawsuit on behalf of the state of Missouri to thwart New York’s criminal prosecution of Trump, who has now returned the favor by tapping him for a life-tenured gig.
His columns argued for a ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape; bemoaned the scourge of “bias and possible hatred against Christianity”; and explained moral opposition to homosexuality by grouping it with opposition to bestiality, polygamy, and “any form of sex that goes against the biological design of procreation and the nurturing of a family.”
In a 2012 column about the prosecution of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Florida, Divine criticized “the media” for identifying Zimmerman as “white Hispanic,” which he described as “a ploy toward branding the situation as racist profiling.” Divine was also perplexed by the term “white Hispanic” itself: “What does that even mean?” he asked. “Is President Obama a white black man? What about a Halfrican-American?”
“I am a zealot,” Divine wrote in October 2010, arguing that “pre-born humans have had their inalienable right to life stripped from them” by “abortion mills” running a “lucrative business.” In September 2011, he argued that the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate “forces insurers to essentially provide the equivalent of abortions,” since birth control can prevent implantation of a “genetically unique human zygote, which may be between five and seven days old when birth control ensures its death.” A month later, he compared the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade to its infamous decisions in Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson—a frequent talking point among conservative activists prior to the Court’s decision to overturn Roe in 2022.
Divine reserved some of his harshest criticism for Planned Parenthood, which he said “has been shown to aid sex traffickers” and “disproportionately targets minorities for abortions.” In April 2011, he voiced his frustration that Planned Parenthood hadn’t been hit with criminal charges for “false advertising” or “intentionally misleading the public”—a failure he attributed to the fact that “much of the judicial system is agenda-based.” As Missouri’s solicitor general, Divine has had the privilege of defending the state legislature’s attempts to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.
In January 2011, Divine defended the free speech rights of a local DJ who decided to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by reading a white supremacist essay critical of the late civil rights leader; in his column, Divine mourned the “political-correctness dogma that has permeated society,” and argued that the DJ’s citation to a white supremacist source “does not discredit the information” contained therein.
In April 2010, he explained that it would be “impossible” for Christians to “just leave their religion at home,” since Christians “in particular” are “obliged ethically to impose their beliefs on others.”
Finally, like many of today’s Republican politicians, Divine repeatedly rejected the notion that bigotry might animate any of his beliefs. In the story about the radio DJ, for example, Divine argued that the word “hate” had become “nothing more than an ad homonym [sic]”; when discussing abortion, he described the anti-choice movement as motivated not by “hatred,” but by “science and compassion.” In a column justifying opposition to same-sex marriage, he argued that “hate” and “ignorance” are “rarely ever used as legitimate complaints,” and “exhibit the emotional immaturity of those who use them.” Most opponents of same-sex marriage are not homophobes, he added, but are merely “opposed to a group receiving extra benefits.”
https://ballsandstrikes.org/nominations/...columnist/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
