Murderer gets imam to watch his execution

The NY Times Editorial Board writes:

When the Supreme Court turned a blind eye to President Trump’s hostility toward Muslims last summer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned, in dissent, that the majority was undermining the Constitution’s “foundational principles of religious tolerance.”

In so doing, she said, the court was sending a message to “members of minority religions in our country that they are outsiders, not full members of the political commu­nity.”

Late on Thursday, the Supreme Court again sent that message, this time to a Muslim death-row prisoner, Domineque Hakim Marcelle Ray, who was awaiting execution in Alabama for the 1995 rape and killing of a 15-year-old girl from Selma. ...

On a 5-to-4 vote, the high court on Thursday allowed the execution to proceed. The imam, Yusef Maisonet, watched Mr. Ray die from behind glass. ...

“Under that policy, a Christian prisoner may have a minister of his own faith accompany him into the execution chamber to say his last rites,” Justice Kagan wrote. “But if an inmate practices a different religion — whether Islam, Judaism, or any other — he may not die with a minister of his own faith by his side. That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality.” ...

And thus, the Supreme Court compounded the moral failure of its travel ban ruling. In each case, Muslims were diminished. “He wanted equal treatment in his last moments,” said Spencer Hahn, one of Mr. Ray’s lawyers, after Mr. Ray’s execution at 10:12 p.m. on Thursday. “We are better than this.”

The Establishment Clause says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion,

That means Congress may not declare Presbyterianism the national religion, in preference to Catholicism. It does not say what side of the glass a Moslem imam should be when a murderer is executed.

The core principle is not "denominational neutrality". Even if it were, Islam is not a denomination. It is debatable whether it should be called a religion. It is more of an anti-religion.

Kagan is on the Court because she is a leftist Jewish single woman, sympathetic to lesbians. The NY Times likes her for her hostility to Christianity.

Their position is that the Jews on the Court have a moral obligation to force the USA to import millions of Moslems, and to let Moslems celebrate one of their condemned murderers. We have enough murderers already, without bringing in Moslem murderers, and we should not have to respect their murderous beliefs.