President Donald Trump declared Dec. 29 the anniversary of the Roman Catholic martyr St. Thomas Becket, honoring the 12th-century English bishop as “a lion of religious liberty.”

“Thomas Becket’s death serves as a powerful and timeless reminder to every American that our freedom from religious persecution is not a mere luxury or accident of history, but rather an essential element of our liberty,” the president’s proclamation said. “It is our priceless treasure and inheritance. And it was bought with the blood of martyrs.” //

The president’s proclamation heralds Becket as the precursor to “numerous constitutional limitations on the power of the state over the Church across the West,” particularly the Magna Carta, which declared that “[T]he English church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished and its liberties unimpaired.”

These decisions, in my view, don’t go far enough. The idea that the government, by the mere order of an unelected functionary, can shut down churches is antithetical to the American experience. The Supreme Court needs to move beyond the “if they do it to Costco, they can do it to you” rule to a handling stance that says the state cannot, under any circumstance, regulate church attendance.

The Supreme Court sided with a rural Colorado church Tuesday that challenged the state Democrat governor’s COVID rules restricting building capacity in some parts of the state.

The 6-3 decision overturned lower court rulings that had upheld Gov. Jared Polis’s church gathering limits to a maximum of 25 percent or 50 people, whichever is fewer, and ordered lower courts to re-examine the case.

Blue State Deplorable
3 hours ago edited
More liberal insanity. The fault rests with the homeowner defending his or her property and family, not the intruder intent upon appropriating another’s property or, worse, doing bodily harm. How warped and naive can you possibly be Congresswoman?

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Castlesofstonesoulnglory
3 hours ago
Translation : You must attempt to outrun a bullet before firing your own. Home invaders don't come in with a baseball bat or a knife, so you'd better be very, very fast.

The decision before the court was described this way by SCOTUS Blog:

(1) Whether the provisions of Executive Order 202.68 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) that limit in-person “house of worship” attendance to 10 or 25 people, but allow numerous secular businesses to operate without any capacity restrictions, violate the free exercise clause; and (2) whether the courts below erred in concluding that Jacobson v. Massachusetts and South Bay Pentecostal Church v. Newsom require the application of a deferential, rational-basis review in all cases challenging government action taken in response to a public health emergency, even when fundamental rights such as free exercise are at stake. //

Cuomo’s argument for lockdowns before SCOTUS provided no evidence that religious gatherings were actually spreading the disease.

Justice Gorsuch comes roaring out by taking a flamethrower to the Chief Justice — not on just one issue but on two. To me, his language borders on intemperate and likely to leave a mark on the relationship between the two. I agree with Gorsuch on the merits of his points, but I’m still a bit taken aback by the force with which he advances them here on a petition for emergency relief. //

Why have some mistaken this Court’s modest decision in Jacobson for a towering authority that overshadows the Constitution during a pandemic? In the end, I can only surmise that much of the answer lies in a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis. But if that impulse may be understandable or even admirable in other circumstances, we may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack. Things never go well when we do.

As someone who has read a lot of Supreme Court cases over more than three decades, this is close to “blow torch and pliers” territory between two Justices ostensibly aligned from a jurisprudential point of view. This five-vote majority — not coming from a case before the Court but rather in response to an emergency petition — changes everything now pending in lower courts regarding coming challenges to lock-down orders that may be imposed by governors in the days and weeks ahead.

Do not overlook Gorsuch’s view that “shelter-in-place” orders are an “attack” on the Constitution. This is a religious liberty case, but the overt hostility of Justice Gorsuch is revealing, and I suspect it is going to extend to other burdens imposed on individual liberties by the orders.

In Douglass’s abiding vision, America was the proper home for black Americans, their only realistic alternative, and also the locus of their highest ideals. //

Mark Twain copied a friend’s remark into his notebook: “I am not an American; I am the American.” To be the American, the exemplary or representative American, is a claim very few Americans could plausibly make. Twain could. Benjamin Franklin could and did. Abraham Lincoln could but didn’t, although admirers made the claim for him. Surely some number of others could, too. But among all Americans past or present, no one could make such a claim more compellingly than Frederick Douglass.

Like his country, Douglass rose from a low beginning to a great height. Like his country again, he won his freedom in a revolutionary struggle, by his own virtue, and against great odds, and he matured into an exemplar of universal liberty, admired the world over. Also like his country, Douglass the individual was divided by race.

Unlike America, Douglass could hardly think of himself as “conceived in liberty.” But even in this respect — especially in this respect — he represents a larger American promise. The son of a white slaveholder and a black slave, Douglass became, along with Lincoln, post-Founding America’s most important exponent of the natural-rights argument summarized in the Declaration of Independence. Pursuant to the same principles, he became America’s most prominent representative of the aspiration toward racial integration, reconciliation, and uplift.

One must emphasize: he became that. It didn’t come naturally to him. To become the great apostle of those aspirations, Douglass had to overcome a sentiment about and among black Americans that is recurrently present in U.S. history, powerful in his day and again in ours — the feeling or conviction that to be black is to bear an identity antagonistic to American identity. //

Douglass was a strong believer in the power of speech. This was a man who almost literally talked his way from the bottom to near the top of American society. But he didn’t think speech was all-powerful, and he didn’t think that the fostering of a healthy sense of American identity was merely a matter of persuading people, white or black, to believe in American principles.

To cultivate a genuine sense of American identity requires more than agreement with its principles. It requires a sense of belonging and affection. It requires a love of America as one’s own. On this point and others, Douglass was a good American disciple of John Locke.

In Locke’s well-known reasoning, we own our own labor, and we own what we make. This can apply, however, not only to material property but also to political and patriotic affiliation. What Douglass wanted to teach his fellow citizens, his black fellow citizens, in particular, was that we can build America, and in building or rebuilding it, we can make it our own.

We can improve it by our labor, he argued, culturally and morally no less than materially. To do this, we need first to improve ourselves. We need to cultivate what he called the “staying qualities,” fostering a faith in ourselves and our country. This is why hopefulness is a moral imperative, for Douglass, and why a spirit of alienation is so dangerous. //

We live in a time when many Americans have forgotten our principles, or never learned them, or learned to revile them; when many young people, young men especially, grow up in the belief that they have no grounds for hope for their future and no reason to identify with their country; when many of our educational institutions have become purveyors of alienation and disintegration, teaching that America is an evil, hateful society and that speech to the contrary must be vilified and suppressed.

At such a time, as we search for models of understanding and inspiration, it is a vital imperative for us to recover the moral and political vision of Douglass. In the long history of African-American political thought, there is no more forceful proponent of the cause of integration, and there is no more insightful analyst of the varieties and dangers of national and racial disintegration.

“No people can prosper,” Douglass reiterated late in life, “unless they have a home, or the hope of a home” — and “to have a home,” one “must have a country.” America, in Douglass’s abiding vision, was black Americans’s proper home, their only realistic alternative, and the locus of their highest ideals.

By its white and black citizens together, America must be cherished and perfected as a genuine home for all, not merely by the accident and force of necessity but as an object of rational and sentimental identification. For Douglass as for Lincoln, their common country was, through it all, the last best hope of earth.

The government’s case for dismissal of MIDN Standage’s lawsuit rests almost solely on “unlimited discretion” and exhaustion of administrative remedies. As MIDN Standage’s attorney Jeff McFadden pointed out, the government completely failed to rebut any of the facts supporting the First Amendment claim and focused almost entirely on why the case should not be heard. The judge focused at length on the exhaustion issue and said she needed more time to analyze the issue further.

Christian educators can watch one of their students for hours on end, but if they teach a child math during that time, they could be arrested.

“I have to say to the Orthodox community tomorrow, ‘If you’re not willing to live with these rules, then I’m going to close the synagogues.'” //

Cuomo’s threat to close synagogues is wrong. It should be unacceptable. In a healthy and functioning society, a governor threatening a particular faith with having the power of the state brought down upon them to force them to worship according to the diktat of the governor would be met with condemnation and disobedience.

This is where President Trump wins the support of this fairly traditional Catholic.

Martin Luther is reputed to have said he’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian. In that vein, I don’t need for Trump to approve of my religion or my faith practices, but I do need for him not to bring the force of the federal government to bear in order to stamp them out. Trump understands that things that are not terribly important to him are vital to others. I’d much rather have a president who could care less about my faith and leave me the hell alone than one who, like Biden, purports to share it and spends all of his waking hours undermining its practice and reducing what should be a central part of our lives to the Obama-esque “freedom of worship.” Making our reason for existence (see Matthew 22:35-40) into an arcane set of practices hauled out for a couple of hours during the week.

The left, on the other hand, has made secular politics its faith. As the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett progresses, the degree to which that has taken place will be undeniable. A little earlier today, a Joe Biden adviser said that eventually believing Christians and Jews and Muslims should be barred from holding government office because they are simply not sufficiently tolerant.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JeremyMcLellan/status/1310747940596654080

Over the weekend, I made the same argument about how Black America should respond to Trump’s newly announced Platinum Plan. (READ: Some Critics of President Trump’s Platinum Plan to Revive Black America Are Asking All the Wrong Questions.) I really don’t care what Trump says or thinks. I care very much about what he does. Like with abortion, President Trump has done more in four years to safeguard the ability of people of faith to live their lives based on that faith that George Bush did in eight. If The Atlantic thinks that this shabby hit piece will convince anyone voting for Trump to either vote for Biden or stay home, they are sorely mistaken. We know what is at stake, and we will crawl over broken glass to cast our votes for President Trump on November 3.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/09/26/critics-trump-platinum-plan-black-america/

Attorney General William Barr said Wednesday that he believes the American public has misinterpreted the actual meaning of “separation of church and state" during a speech at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast (NCPB).

“Militant secularists have long seized on that slogan as a facile justification for attempting to drive religion from the public square and to exclude religious people from bringing a religious perspective to bear on conversations about the common good,” Barr said during the virtual ceremony that had been postponed since March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Barr said he believes that “traditional morality” has diminished, to be replaced by people who are “actively hostile” in advocating for the separation of church and state – threatening core principles in the country's democracy.

God help us all

They will never learn.

Two things can be true about the Rittenhouse situation.

What’s the best way to stifle environmental opposition? A massive lawsuit.

We've just discovered a new Obama judge

'Stay out of religious schools' seems to mean just that //

This is how he demolishes the claim pushed by the Morrissey-Berru and Biel that they did not serve as ministers of any kind:

They were Catholic elementary school teachers, which meant that they were their students’ primary teachers of religion. The concept of a teacher of religion is loaded with religious significance. The term “rabbi” means teacher, and Jesus was frequently called rabbi.

And finally

…When a school with a religious mission entrusts a teacher with the responsibility of educating and forming students in the faith, judicial intervention into disputes between the school and the teacher threatens the school’s independence in a way that the First Amendment does not allow.

Today, by 5-to-4, with John Roberts shockingly joining the four conservatives on that court, the US Supreme Court ruled that blocking state aid to religious schools, if such aid was available to private schools, in general, was unconstitutional. This is from Roberts’s opinion:

A state need not subsidize private education, but once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.

That was 100% good news.

A myth has grown up that providing an education to children must be done by the government via a system of government owned and operated schools. Along with that myth a corollary has developed that any use of state revenue to support non-government schools deprives government schools of resources. This is patent nonsense. Tax dollars for education are to educate children and it doesn’t matter where that education takes place or who does it so long as it happens. If a child goes to a private school, the government school reaps a windfall. They not only don’t have to teach a child, they get to keep the taxes that child’s parents pay while the parent have to tuition in addition to the taxes.

This case, however, tends to have greater import.

Justice Neil Gorsuch went out of his way to demolish the idea that ‘free exercise of religion’ was the same as the Obama-esque ‘freedom of worship.’

Most importantly, though, it is not as if the First Amendment cares. The Constitution forbids laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion. That guarantee protects not just the right to be a religious person, holding beliefs inwardlyand secretly; it also protects the right to act on those beliefs outwardly and publicly. //

Even today, in fiefdoms small and large, people of faith are made to choose between receiving the protection of the State and living lives true to their religious convictions.

Of course, in public benefits cases like the one before us the stakes are not so dramatic. Individuals are forced only to choose between forgoing state aid or pursuing some aspect of their faith. The government does not put a gun to the head, only a thumb on the scale. But, as so many of our cases explain, the Free Exercise Clause doesn’t easily tolerate either; any discrimination against religious exercise must meet the demands of strict scrutiny. In this way, the Clause seeks to ensure that religion remains “a matter of voluntary choice by individuals and their associations, [where] each sect ‘flourish[es] according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma,’” influenced by neither where the government points its gun nor where it places its thumb. McDaniel, 435 U. S., at 640 (opinion of Brennan J.) (quoting Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 313 (1952)).

Montana’s Supreme Court disregarded these foundational principles. Effectively, the court told the state legislature and parents of Montana like Ms. Espinoza: You can have school choice, but if anyone dares to choose to send a child to an accredited religious school, the program will be shuttered. That condition on a public benefit discriminates against the free exercise of religion. Calling it discrimination on the basis of religious status or religious activity makes no difference: It is unconstitutional all the same.

"What we're really seeing here is the power that small groups have to weaponize these large internet entities against people that they don't like," he said. //

“Google in this case, I think embarrassed by the whole situation came up with the spin that it’s because of our comment section,” Domenech said. “That’s something that actually undercuts all of their arguments about Section 230, which Attorney General Barr addressed with Maria [Bartiromo] this weekend, in a way that I think clearly sets up a situation where that aspect of our law is going to be reformed.”