WHAT IS IT ABOUT THESE PIZZA-CHAIN GUYS AND REPUBLICAN EXTREMISM?

You know that Herman Cain was once the CEO of Godfather's Pizza. Franchised pizza is also involved in the lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act that failed a court test yesterday:

The appeal, which was heard by the panel on June 1, came in a challenge filed by the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative public interest firm in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Wikipedia tells us about the Thomas More Law Center:

The Center was founded in 1999 by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, and Richard Thompson, the former Oakland County, Michigan, prosecutor known for his role in the prosecution of Jack Kevorkian, and who now serves as the Law Center's President and Chief Counsel.

Monaghan has also taken his pizza money and founded , a couple of strictly anti-abortion institutions of higher learning, the Ave Maria School of Law and Ave Maria University:

In early 2002 Monaghan sought to establish the Ave Maria University[22] in Ann Arbor, at Domino's Farms, the large corporate office park that he owned and leased to Domino's Pizza. The plans included a 250-foot crucifix - taller than the Statue of Liberty.[2] Local officials refused to approve the zoning change, forcing him to look elsewhere for a site. Eventually community leaders in Collier County, Florida, offered him a large undeveloped tract of land thirty miles east of Naples, Florida to develop the university.

In February 2006, ground was broken for the new Catholic university and town, Ave Maria, Florida.... Monaghan said in 2005 that any town retailers would not be allowed to sell contraceptives or pornography, a statement which drew legal and moral criticism from the ACLU.[24] Threatened with lawsuits, Monaghan and the developers went on a national PR campaign in March 2007 to retract the notion that Catholic doctrine could ever be enforced as law.[25]

The best-known case the Thomas More Law Center has pursued is perhaps Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to defend the foisting of intelligent design on schoolchildren.

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The press thinks there's the tea party over here and the religious right over there. The press thinks that opposition to the health care law derives from a whole new crop of activists, people who've broken free of the old late-twentieth-century right-wing crowd. That's nonsense. It's old wine in new bottles. Thomas More is a Catholic institution, but the advocates of intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania, were passing around a book called The Myth of Separation by David Barton, a tireless Protestant advocate of right-wing theocracy. Rick Santorum was once on the board of Thomas More; Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas have been affiliated with the Ave Maria School of Law. It really is a vast right-wing conspiracy.