Mayor Pete Buttigieg used a discussion about the border to accuse Republicans of religious hypocrisy during Thursday night’s Democratic debate. During the second night of Democratic debates, moderators asked how many of the candidates on stage would make illegal border crossings a civil rather than criminal offense. Every candidate on the stage said they would.

Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, jumped on the question to take a shot at Republicans over recent reports that the Trump administration continues to separate children from their families and houses them in squalid conditions. Without acknowledging that President Trump has said that he is concerned about the situation at the border and that Vice President Pence called the situation “totally unacceptable” and called on Congress to provide more resources for border security, Buttigieg attacked Republicans as hypocritical over the issue.

Buttigieg said, “The Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion,” and then acknowledged that Democrats don’t talk about religion as much because of their commitment to the separation of church and state. Then, he continued his line of attack on Republicans, saying “We should call hypocrisy, and for a party that associates itself with Christianity to say it is okay to suggest that God would smile on the division of families…

The U.S. Supreme Court declined Friday to revive Alabama’s ban on a specific grisly abortion procedure, but not before Justice Clarence Thomas criticized the institution for its moral logic. 

The case involved a 2016 Alabama law prohibiting dilation and evacuation (D&E) abortion — a late-term procedure in which an unborn baby is torn apart limb by limb, until the womb is empty. Pro-life critics, including Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, have labeled it “dismemberment abortion.”

The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the law, although two of the three judges indicated they would have upheld the law but were bound by Supreme Court precedent.

Thomas joined his colleagues in affirming the circuit’s decision but said the Supreme Court eventually must face the fallout from its past abortion decisions.

“The notion that anything in the Constitution prevents States from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible,” Thomas wrote.

He quoted the circuit court’s decision in describing the procedure in excruciating detail: “It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. It can, however, survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off. . . . At the end of the abortion — after the larger pieces of the unborn child have been torn off with forceps and the remaining pieces sucked out with a vacuum –…