Religious Persecution

Finland Member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola stood (still stand?) accused by Finnish prosecutor Anu Mantila of the heinous hate speech crime of quoting from the Bible.

Finnish district courts said, no, and acquitted the two. The prosecutor objected and took the cases to a Finnish appellate court—where the two were once again acquitted. Räsänen:

It isn’t a crime to tweet a Bible verse, or to engage in public discourse with a Christian perspective. The attempts made to prosecute me for expressing my beliefs have resulted in an immensely trying four years, but my hope is that the result will stand as a key precedent to protect the human right to free speech.

Dangerous Settlement

Bob Updegrove, a Virginia-based photographer, has settled his case against the State of Virginia and its Virginia Values Act, which barred “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, public and private employment, public accommodations, and access to credit. The Act includes denying folks their right to demur on the basis of their religious beliefs.

Citing the recent 303 Creative LLC v Elenis Supreme Court case, Updegrove’s case was ultimately dismissed by both parties in appeals court on the agreement that he would not be forced to take part in same-sex weddings.

FISA and Search Warrants

The House Judiciary Committee is moving to seriously revamp FISA, the Act that was set up to deal with    widespread privacy violations by the Federal government during the Nixon administration.  It was intended to enable the government to surveil foreign persons and to limit the government’s surveillance to those foreign persons, and it includes a secretive and secret court to enable issuance of search warrants supporting that surveillance. The Act was promptly abused by the FBI and the Feds’ intelligence agencies to spy on us ordinary Americans, also, most recently during the runup to the Trump administration and continuing throughout that term, and since.

Federalism and State Taxes

A Wall Street Journal editorial opens with this:

One great benefit of America’s federalist Constitution is policy competition among the states. Voters in Florida don’t have to live under New York’s laws, and Americans and businesses can vote with their feet by moving across state lines.

The editors proceeded to a description of State-level tax laws and the mobility of us Americans and our businesses in leaving States with high taxes in favor of States with, often markedly, lower taxes. But that lede overstates the case.

The 9th Circuit Got This One Right

A recent Wall Street Journal opinion concerned the question of when, or whether, a political figure who creates a personal social media account(s) can bar members of the public from interacting with those accounts. In

Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and TJ Zane, elected school board members in California, used personal Facebook and Twitter accounts they created while running for office to campaign and inform constituents about education news. The officials blocked two parents for making “repetitious and non-responsive comments” on their pages.

In O‘Connor-Ratcliff v Garnier, the 9th Circuit said the two board members could not do that.

Private Citizens and Firearms Licensing in Israel

Israel has some firearms licensing requirements that would greatly please the Leftists in our nation. The particular requirement of interest to me is this one:

Firearm licenses for private citizens in Israel are typically only granted to individuals who can prove a need for extra security in their line of work or daily life.

And those who do succeed in getting licenses are limited to 100 rounds of ammunition at any one time.

Israeli citizens live in a small nation surrounded by terrorists that routinely and frequently attack that nation, particularly targeting civilians and civilian gathering spots. That’s their need for extra security.

Bad Mistake

Federal DC District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over former President and current Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s (R) trial on “election charges,” has issued a gag order limiting what Trump is allowed to say on matters associated with that trial. Her gag order should be found, on appeal, to be strongly unconstitutional—based on Chutkan’s own characterization of her order.

His presidential candidacy does not give him carte blanche to vilify public servants who are simply doing their jobs[.]

Trump’s status as a Presidential candidate is wholly irrelevant to this. Trump’s status as an American citizen is.

The Way to End Racism is to Stop Doing Racism

And that includes ending racial gerrymandering.

On Friday a Fifth Circuit panel heard arguments in a Voting Rights Act lawsuit (Robinson v Ardoin) that seeks to force Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority Congressional district. The case was put on pause while the Justices considered a challenge to Alabama’s map. Now the plaintiffs are using the Court’s Alabama ruling (Allen v Milligan) to advance an extreme racial gerrymander.

Never mind the 14th Amendment’s injunction that nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Or the 15th Amendment’s Art I:

Favoring Illegal Aliens over American Citizens

That’s the position of Illinois’ Progressive-Democratic Party Governor JB Pritzker.

We have taken some of the programs that have pre-existed the crisis and adjusted them to help with the migrant crisis. Let me give you one example, our rental assistance program. We have provided some of that rental assistance money, which wasn’t originally intended to be about asylum seekers, for this challenge.

Pritzker is deliberately, cynically taking money intended to help American citizens, Illinois citizens, who are economically straitened and using it for illegal aliens instead. Because illegals are more important than citizens.

Choosing not to Understand

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has broadened an existing injunction that bars various Federal agencies from colluding with social media to censor speech to include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The court wrote, in part,

CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had “switchboarded” was true or false….
Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently. Rather, the platforms’ censorship decisions were made under policies that CISA has pressured them into adopting and based on CISA’s determination of the veracity of the flagged information. Thus, CISA likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ content-moderation decisions and thereby violated the First Amendment[.]