Nothing helped Donald Trump win over reluctant religious and social conservatives more than his oft-repeated promise to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia with someone cut from the same cloth. Yesterday, he made good on that pledge by nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Voters who held their noses and voted for Donald Trump in the hope that he would “save the Court” have reason to feel vindicated. At least for now.
In over a decade as a federal judge, Gorsuch has been a reliable defender of constitutional and statutory protections for religious freedom: notably, he stood against the Obama administration’s refusal to treat the Little Sisters of the Poor as a religious organisation. Gorsuch is author of a book arguing against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, in which he takes as a fundamental principle “the idea that all human beings are intrinsically valuable”.
