The shame is that this man is acting alone. ///

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Free exercise of religion is in one of those Amendment thingies, isn't it?

Democrats are showing voters everyday why they should vote Republican in November.

If the state can forbid its exercise, it is not a right //

None of this is benign. If religious services can be shut down for the fanciful fear of some viral outbreak and religious practices modified by executive fiat, then religious freedom ceases to exist. Had this regime been in effect during the Jim Crow era, black churches would have been ordered shut for fear of violence…a fear much more founded in reality than our current panic over Wuhan virus.

The state has decided that religious practice is not “essential” during an “emergency.” That is not the state’s decision to make.

That’s why these practical matters are also completely beside the point. No government official has any legitimate authority to tell Christians how Jesus’s body and blood must be prepared or served. That is individuals’ religious prerogative. Christians have historically never allowed any secular government to dictate our religious practices, even during pandemics. And this religious prerogative is secured by Indiana’s state constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

“All people shall be secured in the natural right to worship ALMIGHTY GOD, according to the dictates of their own consciences,” says Indiana’s state constitution. “No law shall, in any case whatever, control the free exercise and enjoyment of religious opinions, or interfere with the rights of conscience” (emphasis added). //

There is no medical or public health reason to ban churches from their own religious activities within the same parameters that apply to other organzations, such as the 10-person limit. Even that limit in Indiana has been discriminatorily applied against religious worshippers. It still does not apply to places like grocery stores, which are allowed unlimited numbers of shoppers.

The state has decided that religious practice is not “essential” during an “emergency.” That is not the state’s decision to make.

That’s why these practical matters are also completely beside the point. No government official has any legitimate authority to tell Christians how Jesus’s body and blood must be prepared or served. That is individuals’ religious prerogative. Christians have historically never allowed any secular government to dictate our religious practices, even during pandemics. And this religious prerogative is secured by Indiana’s state constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

“All people shall be secured in the natural right to worship ALMIGHTY GOD, according to the dictates of their own consciences,” says Indiana’s state constitution. “No law shall, in any case whatever, control the free exercise and enjoyment of religious opinions, or interfere with the rights of conscience” (emphasis added). //

Some people believe that there are more important things than physical health. Freedom. Protecting the nation’s poor and its future by not destroying our economy and tax base that uphold myriad already strained social welfare programs. Worship. Christians especially have historically placed obedience to God above their physical safety and very lives. We are in fact commanded to do so. For us, “to die is gain.” This elevation of health above all else has quickly become a competing god.

A new poll found that a majority of millennials want the moral equivalent of eating a Tide pod. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Campaign for Free Speech found that just over half of Millennials felt that the First Amendment — your right to free speech — should be altered a bit so that “hate speech” is punishable by law: More than 60 percent | Read More »

I enjoyed the running joke of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the great Dickens novel Bleak House, back when I first read it.

Little did I know that one day I and the magazine that I love would effectively be caught up in a version of that interminable case, courtesy of a litigious climate scientist with zero regard for the First Amendment. //

Jarndyce v. Jarndyce was a lawsuit over an inheritance that ran on for generations, eventually accumulating so many legal fees that it wiped out the estate in question, making all the litigation pointless. //

This is a little like Mann v. National Review, which has droned on for seven years with little or no action, except the litigation emphatically has a point. Michael Mann is the climate scientist famous for his “hockey stick” graph of climate change over the ages, whose purpose in suing us is clear enough — to bleed us of time and, most importantly, resources, in order to punish us for having the temerity to harshly criticize his work.

There is a major struggle going on right now over the fate of religious freedom in this country. It is safe to say that the left is actively hostile to religion once it leaves the doors of the church (many are hostile even before then but I’ll give the entire mob of them the benefit of the doubt) and they have adopted FDR’s obscene Freedom of Worship... //

This is the kind of whistling past the graveyard that drives me nuts. This decision was not a victory for religious liberty, rather it simply ratified a roadmap for zealous anti-Christians to stamp out religious liberty. A better ruling would have hammered home that an organization cannot be forced from the public square because of its beliefs. What this ruling did was put the bigots on notice that they have to find other reasons, that they have to keep their meetings private with no minutes taken, that they can’t actively appeal to anti-religious bias.

In short, rulings like this simply point people like Nessel to how white politicians in the South after Brown vs. Board of Education worked to keep black Americans from voting, from holding jobs in certain professions, and to keep schools segregated despite the Supreme Court rulings. We’re not done here. Not by a long damned shot. We’ll have to fight this battle again and again and eventually we’ll face people who aren’t idiots and judge who isn’t sympathetic.

Courts will not be able to ignore the reality that education is speech and that states are imposing unconstitutional content and viewpoint discrimination.

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This isn't a camel's nose under the tent, this is the whole bloody beast //

This is one of those situations where the Trump administration has proven an adherence to constitutional protections and to individual freedom that no one would have anticipated in 2016.

There is no legal reason for this document as “incitement” and “conspiracy” are already crimes. While one may not agree with bizarre political manifestos, whether by Unabomber Ted Kaczynbski or by Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, the idea that they should be forbidden from posting their thoughts because they are dangerous should scare the living hell out of anyone with a pair of firing synapses. The world is full of “dangerous” books. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was one of them. Machiavelli’s The Prince and Milton’s Paradise Lost have been declared subversive and banned an one time or another. //

More to the point, you don’t defeat bad or stupid ideology by banning it and giving it a cachet of being counter-cultural. You defeat it by forcing it into the open, by debate and by convincing people that the ideas are wrong. But no one in this group cares about what the Christchurch shooter posted on line. Their objective is to be able to refuse to debate issues they’d rather avoid…like the impact of unfettered immigration…by declaring the very question to be hate speech produced by some phobia recently discovered by a leftwing sociology professor.