Category Archives: rights

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 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.

Gun Control

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This one in Bend, OR. A mass-shooter wannabe, after firing into nearby cars, broke into a locked elementary school by shooting out the door locks. The violence began around 1300 last Thursday. More precisely,

The violence started and ended within minutes, with police saying they received an initial call at 12:59 pm local time and then arriving at the scene with the suspect dead at 1:02 pm.

A teacher armed with a cell phone as a throwing object and her own physical courage and a bystander armed with a firearm had responded and stopped the mass shooter and his butchery by the time the police arrived. The teacher had followed her thrown phone by charging and tackling the shooter. She was still struggling with him (I speculate in an ultimately losing effort) when the bystander arrived and shot the shooter, killing him.

The shooter had already killed three children and another teacher and severely wounded another child and teacher; his butchery was cut short at that point by those two civilian first responders, one of whom was armed.

Yet, gun control…persons…insist on disarming and keeping disarmed civilians already on scene—the true first responders—in favor of police, who won’t arrive for some few minutes (three of them in the present case, which is a fast response. For those in the peanut gallery, the police failure in Uvalde, TX, was an extreme exception; most police response times in urban areas are quite good, in the range of 3-7 minutes.). These gun control persons don’t seem to care that the butchery will continue apace until the police do make it to the scene.

Go figure.

A Clear Statement

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The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on protecting women’s sports from male participation by gender identity last Wednesday. Progressive-Democratic Party committee members boycotted the hearing a’fter the committee’s Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D, IL) pooh-poohed the risk of boys and men playing against girls in girls’ sports, calling the hearing a vendetta against trans athletes.

This is Party’s overt, clear statement in favor of boys and men playing in what used to be girls’ sports, denying those girls the privacy of their own bathrooms and locker rooms, denying those girls the self-confidence that comes from competing against other girls and winning or otherwise doing well rather than being dominated by the boys and men against whom they’re competing—to use that term very loosely in this context. It denies girls access to the accolades, scholarships, and money that would otherwise accrue to them from success.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party. It proudly adds misogyny to their platform.

Naïve or Ignorant?

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Former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R) and Donald Boudreaux, an econ prof at George Mason University, centered their op-ed in Monday’s WSJ on the premise that if the Republican party gets suitably drubbed this fall, the remnants will revolt against President Donald Trump’s (R) tariffs and revert to Reagan-esque free trade economics. On regaining majorities in the House and Senate, there will be a Republican backlash against Mr Trump’s tariff policies and those policies suitably altered or rescinded.

I’m hard pressed to determine whether these two, who should know better, are really that naïve or they’re that ignorant.

An ascendant Progressive-Democratic Party, whose leadership has sworn to fundamentally change our nation and our economy will set about doing exactly that. Beginning with their elimination of the Senate’s filibuster, they will transform our nation’s republican democracy structure, a structure that protects minority party rights and authorities, into a popular democracy, a one-party structure that ignores minority party imperatives. Popular democracies in this way are indistinguishable from authoritarian- or tyranny-run nations. They will continue their “transformation” with packing the Supreme Court, installing a majority of activist Justices instead of Justices sworn to defend our Constitution and to apply it and any statutes before them as they are written rather than as the newly installed activists, or their Party masters, want them to be written. Party has long opposed election laws that limit the franchise to citizens; once they’re in control this time around, they’ll not only control voting laws, they’ll also control vote counting process.

Party has already begun its promised transformation, beginning with that filibuster elimination commitment. It’s continuing with its open clasping of the Democratic Socialists of America to its bosom. The DSA is committed to centralized government control of our private economy, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) fundamental economic transformation. DSA, and so Party, are committed to subordinating our Court system to Congress, although this would be redundant with the packed Court. More long-term, they’re committed to eliminating the Senate altogether, although this may prove unnecessary: with the elimination of the filibuster, the Senate would be indistinguishable from the House—each State would simply have two legislators elected at large along with those elected district by district. This is ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) dream of changing our nation.

With Party control of government, there may well be no further Republican majorities in either house of Congress.