If that sounds like a wild, histrionic exaggeration, I get that. But I am going to demonstrate that this is well within the realm of possibility.

But first things first: As is usually the case, MAGA’s definition of words and phrases is very unlike what normal people understand them to be. Oftentimes, MAGA’s definitions of key terms like “liberty” and “impartiality” are nearly the opposite of how normal people define them.

The late Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia – hailed as an ideal model judge by MAGA for future judicial nominees – made his contempt for religious liberty very plain in 1990. In Oregon Employment Division v. Smith, Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court.

The facts of the case called for a narrow ruling that would address situations of the same or similar nature. But Scalia, ever the anti-liberty right wing judicial activist, turned what could have been an appropriately narrow ruling into a sweeping ruling that all but knocked out the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause entirely.

See, prior to Scalia’s sweeping devastation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, the earlier liberal Supreme Court had established a broad, expansive doctrine known as the Sherbert-Yoder Doctrine. From 1963 through 1990, when the liberal Supreme Court was at its height, true religious liberty protections were at their strongest and broadest. It was the right wing of the Court, led by Scalia, that effectively knocked the Free Exercise clause out of commission.

Today, MAGA seeks a very self-serving redefinition of “religious freedom” that 1) allows them to actively do harm to others based on their asserted religious convictions, and 2) only applies to adherents of their favored religions. The Sherbert-Yoder Doctrine would never have allowed claims of religious liberty or rights of conscience to authorize the doing of harm to others. But the MAGA Doctrine, as I will call it, seeks exactly that.

In 2011, MAGA, acting through the Michigan Republican Party, quite literally included a rider to a state anti-bullying bill that (get this) would have allowed and authorized the bullying of children if right wingers were the ones doing the bullying!

Fortunately, after intense public criticism, Michigan’s anti-bullying bill was passed intact, without the cruel amendment. But the fact that MAGA even tried to attach such a cruel rider tells us all that we need to know about MAGA’s malevolent intent.

In Illinois, right wing pharmacists had begun literally stealing patients’ prescriptions for contraceptives – by not only refusing to fill them, but physically confiscating the prescription itself so that no other pharmacist could fill it! Imagine walking up to a pharmacist, prescription in hand. Pharmacist takes your prescription away, refuses to fill it, and destroys it, all because your birth control “goes against his conscience.”

Fortunately, Illinois went even further to protect women’s rights, passing a law in 2022 that allowed other pharmacists to dispense hormonal birth control without a doctor’s prescription.

But see where this is going? The right wing believes that their “rights of conscience” should include the “right” to engage in the destruction of others’ property, in this case the destruction of a lawfully issued prescription for hormonal contraception.

But even that is just the beginning. According to NBC News: More than 1 in 8 LGBTQ people live in states where doctors can refuse to treat them. In 2023, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed into a law a bill that critics allege would literally allow right wing doctors to let LGBTQ people die.

Now, MAGA can try to deny, whine, weasel, twist and shout their way out of facing up to this reality, but every single reader with a trace of sense can plainly see where this is going: “It’s My Right to Leave You to Die Because Your Existence Goes Against My Conscience!”

This is the “MAGA Doctrine” of “religious liberty.”