Portuguese Colonization, Catholic Faith, and the Relativization of Secularism in the Jurisprudence of Brazil’s Supreme Court

Ana Cristina Melo de Pontes Botelho is a research professor at the Center for Comparative Constitutional Studies and a collaborating professor at the University of Brasília.

The Role of Portuguese Catholic Colonization in the Emergence of the Brazilian Nation

With the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, Franciscan priests and members of other religious orders were sent to catechize the indigenous inhabitants of the region. The Portuguese brought with them the culture of the June festivals dedicated to various saints, including Saint John, Saint Peter, and Saint Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese Catholic priest and friar of the Franciscan Order, who died on 13 June 1231.

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Private Beliefs, Public Platforms and the Rule of Law

Sohail Wahedi is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Erasmus School of Law in the Netherlands and the 2022 Niels Stensen Fellow at the University of Toronto

This post is also a part of an ongoing discussion about Religion and the Rule of Law.

Introduction

In January 2021 Twitter decided to delete the account of one of its fervent users, Donald Trump, who insisted on spreading disinformation about election frauds during the 2020 Presidential elections.  A significant number of people will remember Trump as one of the most surprising political leaders in the history of the U.S. Not only because he was a champion of “fake news,” battled for fewer immigrants,  framed his legal and political opponents as “losers,” “stupid,” or “double-faced,”  but also because he—as “the King Social Media”—got deleted from Twitter.

Although some have supported Trump’s Twitter ban because of his use of social media in a way to target political opponents and to mobilize his supporters, others,  such as German chancellor Angela Merkel, have been very critical of the ban, calling the suspension “problematic” because of the importance of free speech in a real democracy. This free speech dimension and the considerable precedential force of the Trump Twitter ban has urged constitutional law scholars to scrutinize the power public platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter possess to intervene in matters of civil liberties.

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