Well, in the last two days much has come to light about what the government has been doing, supposedly in the cause of protecting us from terrorism. Some we already knew, for example the fact that agencies were collecting and storing bulk phone data. But we did not know the FBI has been using over […]
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The United States Supreme Court heard another important case Wednesday, April 22, Horne v. Department of Agriculture. Under a 1937 New Deal era Marketing Order scheme, the Federal government gets to confiscate outright whatever percentage of a raisin crop is deemed necessary to keep raisin prices high, or high enough. Henry Horne, a raisin grower […]
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Overcriminalization before the Supreme Court
21 Apr 2015
Overcriminalization is in the Supreme Court news this week, according to Jonathan Keim, writing in the National Review Online in the April 19 issue. Keim tells us that five cases to be heard by the Court thus week concern the issue of overcriminalization statutory law. This issue is one I have followed since it came […]
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A Different/Similar Take on the Indiana Law
01 Apr 2015
This blog serves as somewhat of a response to Mark Smith’s blog. It is different however in that it deals primarily with legal and broader theological issues. By now most know something about the stir in Indiana—I can feel the reverberations from across the border—concerning the recently passed state law protecting those with religious […]
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Ted Cruz, Rights and the Media
30 Mar 2015
Looks like the Media—short for Mainstream Media or MSM—are at it again, this time getting hot and bothered over Ted Cruz’s speechifying about our God-given rights, exceptionalism, and all that. The so-called “God-made” Constitution left several of the MSM hooting with ridicule. Their reaction of course was (predictably) to say that the Constitution and the […]
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Charles Murray at Cedarville University
13 Mar 2015
The ideas of most humans are formed by their basic worldview combined with their existential circumstances. I believe this fairly self-evident statement applies in particular to the talk given by Dr. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute at Cedarville University, Thursday night, March 12. Murray is a brilliant man and his talk was a […]
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The Freedom to be Racists
11 Mar 2015
University of Oklahoma President David Boren has expelled, so far, two students involved in the vile, racist chants that have garnered national media attention. The problem, as pointed out by Eugene Volokh and David French, is that Boren’s actions are almost certainly unconstitutional. In essence, the government is unable to punish speech, and this was […]
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The National Labor Relation Board recently made a judicial ruling (yes, it is an administrative agency, but agencies do act like courts frequently) concerning the rights of faculty at private colleges and universities to unionize. The actual decision is somewhat complicated and I have not yet read it in full, but the upshot of it […]
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The New York Times recently editorialized on the decline and fall of Atlanta Fire Department Chief Kelvin Cochran. Cochran, deeply religious, lost his job primarily for publishing, and distributing to some of his staff, a book in which his adamant opposition to homosexuality was clearly articulated. The Times‘ editorial sees no free speech or religious freedom […]
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Free Speech and the Death of Charlie Hebdo
07 Jan 2015
According to early reports, the three gunmen who slaughtered an office full of French cartoonists and two police officers, said, as they departed the scene, “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed…” Charlie Hebdo, the magazine, is essentially dead at the hands of religious zealotry. For what, you might ask, did Mohammed demand revenge? The publication […]
Bert Wheeler
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