There is No Difference

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Nathan Diament, Orthodox Union Advocacy Center Executive Director, wrote eloquently of the importance of St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, Colorado’s effort to force Catholic schools to accept as students those who reject, or whose parents reject, the school’s religious mission. He also asked a couple of questions:

What if the state doesn’t explicitly exclude religious schools? What if it attaches conditions that force religious schools to choose between accessing public benefits and compromising their values?

The answer to these seems crystalline to me.

Applying criteria as a condition of participating in a program with which an institution cannot comply and maintain its character and mission is precisely the same as explicitly excluding that institution.

That’s OK, if not necessarily good, if the conditions are applied to private enterprise. No business has an intrinsic right to any particular business model or practice.

It’s entirely different, though, when the conditions are applied to religious institutions. Churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, whathaveyou have precisely that intrinsic right to operate under their specific practice. That inalienable right is clearly acknowledged in our Constitution’s First Amendment bars against government interference with an institution’s and its members’ right freely to exercise their religion (or lack of such) and the equally explicit bar against government establishing a government-devised or -run religion or religious entity, whether to compete with or to supplant other religious or areligious establishments.

An Answer

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Although it would take quite a bit of time to bring to fruition. The problem is getting low cost natural gas to the good citizens of New England. President Donald Trump (R) has proposed the beginnings of a solution.

New Englanders pay some of the highest energy costs in the nation, and the Trump administration says the Constitution Pipeline—a project New York successfully blocked once before—is the answer. New York, however, appears to remain stubbornly committed to stopping it.

The Constitution Pipeline would transport natural gas from Pennsylvania to New York. A complication in the matter is that all five of the New England States are just as adamantly opposed to pipeline development as is New York. Trump is looking at designating the pipeline a national security matter and forcing is construction, but that’s of sometime utility.

An alternative, or perhaps parallel, solution is to use the Federal government’s authority to appropriate State lands and its 5th Amendment power to seize, with just compensation, private lands as necessary to assemble the rights of way the pipeline would require to pass through New York and into each of the New England States.

Then let the State government men and women justify refusing to let their respective constituents to have access to that cheap energy that now sits on those constituents’ figurative doorsteps, needing only their local utilities’ abilities to hook those pipelines into the distribution’s last miles.

None of the moves won’t solve this winter’s problem, but they would address future winters.

An Unjustifiable Delay

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It’s unconscionable, too. Utah District Court Judge Tony Graf is looking at setting a 2029 trial date, even as late as the end of January 2028, for Tyler Robinson’s trial, the man accused of murdering Turning Point USA‘s Charlie Kirk. This is absurd, as his widow, Erika Kirk, has said.

The defense attorneys are claiming that they

have to sift through tens of thousands of files the prosecution turned over to them. They will need to conduct extensive investigations into Robison’s life to seek mitigating factors that could influence his sentence if he is convicted, and they also need to devote “substantial time” to issues such as jury selection…[,]

and they need those three(!) years to get ready.

Leave aside that seek[ing] mitigating factors that could influence his sentence if he is convicted is strictly and solely a matter for the sentencing phase if he is convicted. Any time spent on that, were he acquitted, would be a blatant waste of time and of the State’s money, and it does not need to be spent at all during trial prep and trial. The defense lawyers are just nakedly stalling.

If Graf is to take the defense’s move seriously, he needs first to demand to see those defense attorneys’ and their staffs’ time sheets in the 10-minute increments that law firms typically use to accumulate their billable hours. What else are these worthies working on besides Robinson’s case that would take up so much time that they actually need three years or more years just to get into jury selection?

We have these doofers commonly known as computers, have had them for some decades. We’ve also got these software packages, AI apps, many of which are tailored for the needs of lawyers and their research. Whatever happened to the general push for a speedy trial for defendants? Aside from that, does not the victim/victim’s survivor also deserve a speedy trial?

Kirk’s lawyers are much closer to the mark with their push for an October 2027 trial date. Graf should set the trial for that October and sanction those defense lawyers for their evident indolence and rule further that their behavior lays no ground for an ineffective assistance of counsel appeal.

“Not to my Knowledge”

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When then-DNI James Clapper said that under oath during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in response to a question regarding whether the Federal government was using FISA to collect communications that it knows are entirely domestic, he was plainly lying, as lately released information has revealed.

When Progressive-Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar (MN) said that [the first 30 seconds carries the exchange; the rest of the 8 minute video is just The Hill‘s “analysis” and commentary] in a cable news interview in response to a question about whether she had married her brother, she may or may not have been lying. On watching the video of that exchange, it seemed to me that she and her pressman interviewer were bantering and make fun of the whole question of her immigration status (opinions may vary on that), but it’s not possible to tell whether she was lying (and if she was, there’s a big so what attached: she was talking to a pressman with no particular legal need to be truthful).

DNA evidence that has been collected during the recent raids on her DC residence and those of some of her family members will shed some dispositive light on her genealogical relationship with that man, but it will take patience to wait for the outcomes.

It was reported in the press some years ago that the two were half-siblings, and it was “widely reported” that at that time the half-sibling nature of their relationship was “well-known.” The press, though, has never provided any evidence of either of those claims, most especially of the latter; we’re just supposed to believe their smiling faces’ unsubstantiated pronouncements.

Proximately, though, what’s carefully missing from today’s press hoo-raw about Omar’s “not to my knowledge” (from both the Left and the Right side of the press) is any information about the history of the woman and the man: were they raised together in the same family household, or had they been widely separated at birth or while still babies or toddlers? If the latter, it’s entirely plausible that the two didn’t recognize each other as siblings at the time they met and then married. If the former, she’s lying (though subject to that so what).

At this point, we have too little information, and the press (and too many Congressmen) are wasting too much of our time fixating on this bit at the expense of covering her many and already manifest failures as a politician.

There’s an additional contaminant in this question. It’s also been claimed in the press (yeah, yeah) and in government immigration circles that Omar married “her brother” in order to facilitate his legal entry into the US. It’s a contaminant because whether he was her brother or not is wholly irrelevant to this. Sham marriages intended to circumvent immigration law is itself a felony. Omar is already being investigated, albeit only desultorily, on that ground.

Bigotry and Virtue Signaling

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Making land acknowledgments purporting to recognize the inequity of modern political, social, and economic successes have been in vogue among the Left and Progressive-Democratic Party political jurisdictions for some years. The recently done land acknowledgment from Los Angeles County provides a clear and canonical example, its repeated bodice-ripping mea culpas are especially illustrative: We respectfully acknowledge… and We acknowledge… and We recognize….

What’s instructive, though, is the utter lack of proposed solutions in these so-called acknowledgments. “We’re so sorry about all this; sucks to be you, good luck.”

That’s not just hypocrisy by these Leftists and Progressive-Democratic Party members; these…statements…demonstrate the same racist bigotry, if far more invidiously, as the Left’s and Party’s insultingly bigoted premise that black Americans are intrinsically inferior and desperately need the plethora of special treatments from Government, from “affirmative” action programs to race-based (now sotto voce) selections into universities and employment, in order to be able to operate, much less compete, in the same world as the rest of us.

Virtue signaling. Too bad, so sad. Carry on.