This op-ed in today’s YDN first argues, rightly, that reasonable conservatives should be more concerned with recruiting skilled men and women to join the army than with casting them out for their sexual orientation, and then argues, wrongly, that reasonable liberals should see the JAG core’s right to Yale Law-sponsored interviews, rather than the Law School’s right to enforce it’s non-discrimination policy, as a first ammendment issue. The factual error at the heart of the piece is in the suggestion that law students and military recruiters were – up until the Pentagon’s $350 million blackmail scheme last year under the Solomon ammendment – being denied their right to association. JAG recruiters, like prospective students, Jews for Jesus, and leafletting undergrads, are free to associate with law students who want to meet with them on campus. What the Pentagon is threatening the termination of a third of a billion dollars worth of lifesaving research to demand is that the Law School sponsor those interviews through its on-campus interview program – and the Law School is right to resist the pressure. The suggestion that political protest is self-indulgent, and institutions can only be changed by the elect that’s granted membership in them, belies the history of this University, let alone the US army.
Tag Archives: court
Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s absurd and self-interested defense of the imposition of (21 tons of) the ten commandments on the state’s judicial system was an offense against the best values of this nation. But this poem, which he delivered recently before thousands, is an offense against the English language:
While truth and law were founded on the God of all Creation,
Man now, through law, denies the truth and calls it “separation.”
No longer does man see a need for God when he’s in full control,
For the only truth self-evident is in the latest poll.
But with man as his own master we fail to count the cost,
Our precious freedoms vanish and our liberty is lost.
Children are told they can’t pray and they teach them evolution,
When will they learn the fear of God is the only true solution?
Our schools have become the battleground while all across the land,
Christians shrug their shoulders—afraid to take a stand.
Fortunately, his fellow Justices demonstrated in a ruling today a stronger grip on the law:
Writing that they are “bound by solemn oath to follow the law, whether they agree or disagree with it,” the justices said in a signed statement that the State Supreme Court must abide by a federal court order mandating the removal of the 5,280-pound monument of the Ten Commandments that Justice Moore had installed one night in 2001.
A federal judge had ordered Justice Moore to have the monument removed by midnight last night, saying the granite block, known as Roy’s Rock, violated the separation of church and state.
The associate justices, who acted before Justice Moore arrived for work this morning, ordered their building’s manager to erect a partition to screen the monument from public view in the lobby, which was done. But when Justice Moore arrived, according to people who have been in contact with him today, he ordered the manager to take it down and threatened to jail the other justices.
From the Times:
A federal appeals court has upheld Alaska’s curbs on soft-money political donations to candidates for state office, holding that the State Legislature had a right to enact the restrictions in 1996 to restore the public’s faith in government.
The 3-to-0 ruling on Tuesday by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting in Seattle, overturned a federal district court that had found the curbs unconstitutional. The latest ruling comes as the United States Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on Sept. 8 on the McCain-Feingold law barring political parties from raising soft money for federal candidates.
Glad to see this court reject the twisted conception of political bribery as protected speech. I once had a classmate suggest to me that a laissez-faire campaign finance system was democratic because the winner was the candidate who the most people wanted in office – this echoes Ari Fleischer’s take on Bush’s fundraising a few months back. Someone should remind the Bush administration that we already have – in theory – a system for figuring out whom the most people would like to see elected: the vote. And ideally, everyone gets the same number of those. There are some troubling provisions in McCain-Feingold regulating speech (i.e., not money) in the period before elections, deserving of critical review, but I’m yet to understand on what grounds my donating money to every viable candidate in understood exchange for largesse in office is protected symbolic speech but my paying money to a prostitute for sex or a dealer for drugs is not. That said, McCain-Feingold remains a largely ineffective (and sometimes – as in the case of the doubled individual contribution limit – dangerously counterproductive) stab at the problem. Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres suggest one alternative here.
Cheney says in the debates marriage rights are for the states to decide, and then Bush last month calls for a federal marriage ammendment. Now, from the AP, yet another demonstration that the “federalism” of the Republican Right represents a defense only of “states’ rights” to be more conservative than the federal government:
California and other states that want to make marijuana available to sick or dying patients are flouting federal drug laws in much the same way that Southern states defied national civil rights laws, a senior Bush administration lawyer said.
From HRW – speaking of war crimes…
The United States recently withheld military assistance from 35 democratic countries because of their resistance to bilateral immunity agreements (BIAs), which exempt U.S. citizens from the first global court to try those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. These agreements, in the form requested by the United States so far, are not only contrary to article 98(2) of the ICC treaty but also to international law as
they defeat the “object and purpose” of the Rome Statute…
Latvia has joined the EU and 9 other EU accession states, as well as a growing group of countries that have reaffirmed their principled stance against impunity by refusing to sign a BIA with the United States. EU’s strong position regarding BIAs was renewed last June 15 with the adoption of a new Common Position that called on EU member states to assist states in withstanding U.S. pressure to sign a BIA.
The United States’ punitive measures often go above and beyond the mere implementation of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), a piece of anti-ICC legislation passed by Congress last year. A senior Latvian diplomat told Human Rights Watch that the Bush Administration has even decided to withhold $2.7 million in promised supplemental funding to support Latvian troops in Iraq. At the same time, the United States will still financially support Lithuania’s participation in Iraq although additional military aid is still being withheld.
This blackmail (of “New Europe,” no less – or has Latvia become Old Europe since the Iraq War?) is presumably defended by the contention that the International Crimminal Court, the most elaborate, multinational project of its type ever carried out, and with checks and balances often exceeding those of the US Justice system, is hopelessly arbitrary, vindictive, and partisan – unlike the approach for assessing, approaching, and adjudicating threats to international law represented in, say, the Bush Doctrine.
The ACLU of Pennsylvania (one of the places I’ve been interning this summer) scored an important victory today when District Judge Robert Kelly ruled, in our favor, that forcing students – public and private school both – to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day or have their refusal reported to their parents is a stark violation of students’ rights. The overruled sponsor’s measure, State Rep. Allan Egolf, had a less than inspiring defense of his idea:
“I thought there wouldn’t be any problems with it,” Egolf said. “We just wanted to make it so the kids had the opportunity to learn the pledge and what the flag means to our country and what it stands for. If you don’t learn it in school, where are you going to learn it?”
This argument, like many made in defense of school prayer, seems to demonstrate a willful disregard for the distinction between studying an idea and practicing it. It’s about as convincing as the state’s lawyer’s argument in court: “The Pledge of Allegiance is only 70 or so words long anyway.”
Kelly, relatively conservative himself, was much more perceptive:
This letter home, Kelly wrote, “would chill the speech of certain students who would involuntarily recite the speech or [national] anthem rather than have a notice sent to their parents.”
Kelly also wrote that Egolf’s comments from the House debate had made it “obvious that he views refusal to recite the pledge or anthem as something negative for which disciplinary sanctions would be warranted.”
Justice Jackson, seventy years ago, said it best however:
To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions.
That it took a District Court ruling to stop the state of Pennsylvania from forcing all children to declare their allegiance to the flag or be told on to their parents (presumably because such subversion would demonstrate to the parents a failure in their conditioning of their progeny) doesn’t make our institutions look too hot either – although that much better than if, as many expected, Judge Kelly had ruled the other way.
Ann Coulter’s latest column demonstrates all the talents that have so endeared her to her fans – farcically forced fury, painfully flat humor, recklessness with facts and incoherent logic. A choice selection:
Absurdly, liberals claim to hate J. Edgar Hoover because of their passion for civil liberties. The left’s exquisite concern for civil liberties apparently did not extend to the Japanese. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up Japanese for the internment camps, liberals were awed by his genius. The Japanese internment was praised by liberal luminaries such as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black. Joseph Rauh, a founder of Americans for Democratic Action – and celebrated foe of “McCarthyism” – supported the internment.
There was one lonely voice in the Roosevelt administration opposed to the Japanese internment – that of J. Edgar Hoover. The American Civil Liberties Union gave J. Edgar Hoover an award for wartime vigilance during World War II. It was only when he turned his award-winning vigilance to Soviet spies that liberals thought Hoover was a beast.
Here Coulter employs a favorite tactic – citing illiberal choices made or perpetuated under Democratic administrations and using them, despite contemporary criticism from the left or pushes from the right for even more draconian moves, as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the left as a whole (she does this masterfully with segregation, for example). The fact that FDR, bowing to the pressures of fear and jingoism within and outside of the government, betrayed the values of the left and trampled on the Constitution and principles of human decency in signing Executive Order 9066 simply demonstrates that FDR was neither as courageous nor as Left as history makes him out to be. The fact that a man like Daniel Pipes, who refuses to condemn internment, is considered a distinguished scholar and an ally of this administration in foreign policy, and that a man like Howard Coble (R-NC), who came out in support of the camps last February, chairs a house subcommittee on domestic security raises troubling questions about the agenda this administration (Republican, for those of you keeping score at home) wants to lead this country. Coulter, for her part, spent her last column gloating about a Department of Justice report acknowledging abuse of immigrants detained after September 11 as evidence that the government isn’t letting details like the constitution get in the way of the Bush Doctrine (but this is the same woman who maintains both that we should “bomb their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity” and that conservatives are the most compassionate suffering people in the world). Coulter, in fact, seems not to have ever met a regressive policy towards immigrants that she couldn’t countenance, spin, and celebrate – but at least she’s against internment camps… Congressman John Rankin famously declared, “I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawai’i now and putting them in concentration camps…Damn them! Let’s get rid of them!” He was also instrumental in securing the place of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in American Government.
The final lines excerpted above raise the self-parody to an even higher plane. Faced with the information she provides – the leftist ACLU praised Hoover for opposing FDR assault on civil liberties and condemned him for later launching his own – a logical person might conclude that the left supports protecting civil liberties – maybe even that some on the left are willing to condemn political allies who pursue regressive policy and work with political opponents for shared progressive goals (the ACLU’s coalition against the PATRIOT Act – one of Coulter’s favorite pieces of legislation – is a contemporary example as well). Instead, Coulter judges the left as hypocritical for supporting Hoover’s left-wing moves and opposing his right-wing ones. One can understand why this might bother Coulter – for her, personality trumps politics every time.
Today marks a long-overdue but nevertheless greatly welcome reversal of the High Court’s 1986 defense of Sodomy Laws. It’s a notable loss for the “Religious Right” that was so central to the Republican Party of the Impeachment Era, and increasingly seems to be on its way out in favor of the foreign policy hawks and domestic libertarians (and the single-issue grassroots campaigns of the NRA). The response on the right ranges from Sullivan’s celebration to Will’s argument that sodomy laws are wrong but a purely local issue (like segregation?) and a constitutional right to privacy is a step on a slippery slope to damnation (like interracial marriage?), to some inspired Lamentations from the Christian News Service:
In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul says men whose “foolish hearts were darkened” exchanged the truth of God for a lie. His warning about man’s wisdom has apparently gone unheeded in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down an anti-sodomy law in Texas — effectively telling states they can no longer punish homosexual couples for engaging in activities the Bible says are “unnatural” and sinful.
Fortunately for AgapePress, the Supreme Court is yet to rule on whether the right to privacy includes other Biblical prohibitions like eating fish without fins and scales (same Hebrew word – to’evah – as is used to describe homosexuality).
“Under our constitutional republic, it is the place of the state legislature, acting through its duly elected representatives, to decide what is moral,” [American Family Association Chief Counsel Steve Crampton] says. “For a handful of un-elected judges to impose their views of morality is not law, it is tyranny.”
Actually, today would be a shining example of what a Supreme Court should do – hold a nation’s legal system to its own best values. Crampton may be thinking of this.
A Florida attorney believes the decision handed down will awaken Americans who want to preserve traditional marriage. Mat Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, says the decision will galvanize the majority of Americans who want to preserve family values but who have ignored the radical agenda of homosexual activists.
“This particular decision essentially is a shot over the bow and a wake-up call that I believe will galvanize the sleeping giant of the majority of Americans who believe in traditional family values and traditional marriage so that every American will get involved in this cultural war,” Staver says.
“If we don’t, in the next decade or two, we could lose traditional family values and marriage in this country.”
See my parents’ marriage, as I testified in March, is holy because of the love with which it’s infused, not because they get legal recognition our gay friends don’t. It’s sad to me that some people see anything that expands and democratizes the legal institution as chipping away at the worth of the personal bond. It’s a shame to see people convinced that their marriage needs to compete for significance and exclusivity.
Staver also says the decision underscores the importance of the next Supreme Court appointment.
Indeed. Bring it.
P.S.: In case there was any confusion, Justice Scalia wants us to know that he has nothing against gay people personally. Well that’s a relief. It’s easy to lost track of his personal preferences when you get so caught up in his exercise of power as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States… But I’m sure some of his best friends are gay, right? Well, let me clear up any confusion now by sharing that some of my best friends are people like Justice Scalia…
Josh Eidelson 