Though the bill’s title, the “First Amendment Defense Act” [FADA], suggests that it would preserve values enshrined in the First Amendment, nothing in that amendment permits religion to be used as a shield for discrimination, and the Supreme Court has consistently rejected claims to the contrary.
Maurice Bessinger was a bigot who owned a chain of barbecue restaurants in South Carolina. He believed that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with its ban on whites-only lunch counters, “contravenes the will of God,” and he brought a lawsuit seeking a religious exemption from this law. The Supreme Court disagreed in Newman v Piggie Park, ruling unanimously that Bessinger’s claim was “patently frivolous.”
Similarly, when Fremont Christian School claimed a right to give inferior compensation to many of its women employees because of its religious belief that “in any marriage, the husband is the head of the household and is required to provide for that household,” a federal appeals court rejected the school’s request for an exemption from anti-discrimination law.
Additionally, in a case that is strikingly similar to the kind of benefits FADA would give to religious objectors who engage in discrimination, Bob Jones University claimed that it should continue to receive tax subsidies despite its religiously motivated policy that “students who date outside of their own race will be expelled.” The Supreme Court rejected this claim as well, explaining that “the Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education.”
FADA would authorize a different kind of discrimination — primarily anti-LGBT discrimination as opposed to race or gender discrimination — but the overarching principle remains the same. The First Amendment simply does not give religious objectors a license to violate civil rights laws.
—Ian Millhiser
Congress’ Response To Orlando Shooting Is To Try To Legalize Discrimination
Tim Kaine has a somewhat centrist history on banking and trade which is worrisome to progressives for whom these issues are their litmus tests. So, in these particulars, Kaine isn’t a particularly progressive choice.
Against a rising chorus of concern about increasing income inequality, some economists are pushing back, suggesting that it is not income inequality we should be concerned with but rather income mobility. Income mobility describes the ability of individuals to move up and down the income ladder over some period of time. As long as mobility is healthy, they argue, society can remain egalitarian in the face of inequality, because the poor can move up and the rich down.
This movie [
Obama has before compared the drone program to dealing with a sniper on a roof of a building who is pointing the rifle at children on a playground. And he say, you know, “I understand what the ACLU’s objections are and human rights people and stuff. But do we need to go to a judge to get authorization to take that shooter down before he kills a bunch of kids on a playground? No we don’t.” And I think… everyone in this room agrees with that. If you have someone who’s going to kill a bunch of kids, and they’re a sniper, and they’re not responding to any kind of attempts to get them to put the rifle down, people in this society overwhelmingly would say, “Yes. If we need to kill that person we’ll kill them.”
There is a difference between focus and exclusion. If something matters, this does not imply nothing else does. If I saw “Law Students Matter” it does not imply that my colleagues, friends, and family do not. Here is something else that matters: context. The Black Lives Matter Movement arose in a context of evidence that they don’t. When people are receiving messages from the culture in which they live that their lives are less important than other lives, it is a cruel distortion of reality to scold them for not being inclusive enough…
Bloomberg is really pushing the frontiers in journalism. In order to give readers a balanced account of a proposal by Representative Peter DeFazio to impose a 0.03 percent tax on financial transactions (that’s 3 cents on every hundred dollars) it went to the spokesperson for the Investment Company Institute, the chief investment officer from Vanguard, and an academic with extensive ties to the financial industry. It also presented an assertion on the savings from electronic trading from Markit Ltd. Based on this diverse range of sources, Bloomberg ran a headline: “Democrats assail Wall Street with plan that may hit mom and pop.” …
Police are civilians. They are the civil power. They are not soldiers. They are subject to the rule of law adjudicated within civilian courts — not military justice. They are tasked with special powers and thus burdened with specific responsibilities and duties — but they’re civilians. They answer to mayors and (civilian) police commissioners and city councils and ultimately the public.
None of this means that a split, should it come, is something anyone in the Labour Party should welcome. It would be unspeakably selfish and venal, conducted for the most narrow, shortsighted and base of motives. And the mere fact that it would be intended to trash Labour, to hurt it so badly that it returns to obedience, should inspire rage and contempt.
Over the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about President Obama’s secret kill list. Yet still we know virtually nothing about its implementation. Despite mild Congressional scrutiny and ACLU lawsuits directed at the shroud of secrecy, some basic questions remain unanswered. How do you get on the list? Am I on the list? Who put me on the list? How do you get off the list? Can you get off the list?
I have come here today not to talk about the past but to focus on the future. That future will be shaped more by what happens on November 8 in voting booths across our nation than by any other event in the world. I have come here to make it as clear as possible as to why I am endorsing Hillary Clinton and why she must become our next president.