Category: Liberty

Mormonism’s Moment?

By , February 10, 2011 8:58 am

Is the time ripe for a Mormon to be President, or will religion get in Mitt Romney’s or Jon Huntsman Jr.’s way? Sally Quinn asks the question in On Belief, her religious bailiwick at The Washington Post. Eight panelists, including the likes of Barry Lynn who writes,

There really is only one question that needs to be answered: can you faithfully execute the laws of the United States or is there some religious view you hold that you believe transcends that duty?

Which begs the question: Would he, or anyone else, accept the answer, “Yes, I can,” and move on? Or would that question actually be an open door through which the inquisitor would parade his even deeper-held beliefs that “there ain’t no way a Mormon President won’t do the bidding of his (or her) hierarchical superiors in Salt Lake!”

I’ll be back for further comment on this subject.

Political Bias in Academia. Conservatives Hardest Hit.

By , February 9, 2011 2:55 pm

Veronique de Rugy, an economist at George Mason University, has a post at The Corner on bias an academia. This paragraph captures the essence:

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

The Government Lost Citizens United in the First Oral Argument

By , February 7, 2011 12:00 pm

Adam Liptak struggles to find a distinction between corporations in general and the so-called institutional media (which are usually corporations) in particular, in his piece on Citizens United and campaign finance reform. Of course, the is no distinction, or there shouldn’t be.

But that’s beside the point, the point at which the government lost the case. Liptak hints at it in his story when he writes,

Consider this telling exchange between Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and a lawyer for the Obama administration at the first of two arguments in Citizens United. The lawyer, Malcolm L. Stewart, said Congress had the power to regulate corporate speech about political candidates under the First Amendment.

“Most publishers are corporations,” Justice Alito said. “And a publisher that is a corporation could be prohibited from selling a book?”

It was a hypothetical question, but it cut to the core of the meaning of the press clause of the First Amendment. There was a lot of back and forth, and other justices jumped in. In the end, though, Mr. Stewart gave a candid answer.

“We could prohibit the publication of the book,” he said.

But Stewart was not talking about just any book with his answer. No, he was responding to a very specific question about a very specific kind of book.

I was out for a run and listening on my MP3 player to the exchange between Stewart and various Justices on this point (courtesy of the Oyez Project), and I remember saying to myself, “he [Stewart] just lost this case.” And this is where he lost it:

Justice Roberts: If it’s a 500-page book, and at the end it says, and so vote for X, the government could ban that?

Mr. Stewart: Well, if it says vote for X, it would be express advocacy and it would be covered by pre-existing Federal Election Campaign act provisions . . . we could prohibit the publication of the book using corporate treasury funds.

So, did you get that? One request that you vote for candidate X, at the end of a very long book, and zippo facto manulo, the government could ban that 500-page book published by a corporation under pre-Citizens United law, at least according to the government in the first oral argument. No wonder the Court ruled the way it did. No wonder, at least to me.

Liptak is right, however. The government backed away from that argument in reargument. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued the case this time around, and she went nowhere near Stewart’s bold claim. But the damage was done, and in my view, the case had already been lost because, fortunately, five Justices couldn’t see their way clear to ban a 500-page book because of one pitch at the very end, a simple plea to “vote for X.”

Food Prices Up. Egypt’s Future Down?

By , February 6, 2011 2:27 pm

Even Islamists have to eat,” and that doesn’t bode well for the whatever government assumes power as the result of the Egyptian revolution. So says David P. Goldman, aka Spengler.

Speaking of the Middle East . . .

By , February 6, 2011 1:46 pm

You can find Al Jazeera English living streaming here. Now Frank Rich can sleep at night.

Nicholas Kristof Plays Edgar Bergen to His Egyptian Friend, Charlie McCarthy

By , February 6, 2011 1:24 pm

Where’s a friend, when you need a someone to bash Republicans. Civility being the rage and all in the United States, you go to Egypt, which is what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof did when he reached out to “an old friend in Cairo” to reassure him that Egypt would not fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood if Mubarak exited stage right. That woman,

a woman with Western tastes that include an occasional glass of whiskey, . . . thought for a moment and said: “Yes, possibly. But, from my point of view, in America the Republican Party is bad for peace as well.”

But don’t stop there Nick, go for the throat–in your very next sentence,

If democracy gains in the Middle East, there will be some demagogues, nationalists and jingoists, just as there are in America and Israel, and they may make diplomacy more complicated.

I think this is what is called a tri-fecta: 1.) use a mouthpiece to bash your least favorite political party, 2.) make sure that bashing includes equating the Republican party with the Muslim Brotherhood, 3.) then make sure to chime in that there are “demagogues, nationalists, and jingoists” in American, just like those horrible Muslim Brotherhood guys who are busy making “diplomacy more difficult” (for the anointed one, I suppose).

Whatever.

Update: Stumbled upon this post by David Pryce-Jones, Anyone Here Been Raped & Speaks English? a post named after the book of the same title. Seemed an appropriate addendum.

Do We Want the Brotherhood to Take Over Mubarak’s Neighborhood?

By , February 5, 2011 10:21 pm

I support Israel, and I also support a foreign policy that would be more concerned with spreading democracy and freedom and less concerned with supporting corrupt and oppressive regimes in the name of stability. That said, I am not a foreign policy expert. And that said, I am in favor of Hosni Mubarak stepping down as quickly as possible, but no sooner than a transition plan is in place that would make it difficult or impossible for the Muslim Brotherhood to take power.

Why? Well, there’s this, from MEMRI, “excerpts from an interview with Muhammad Ghanem, Muslim Brotherhood representative in London, which aired on Al-Alam TV on January 30, 2011”:

Muhammad Ghanem: Hosni Mubarak and his regime are over, but he does not know it. In the beginning, we said that we wanted Hosni Mubarak to go. Now, we say that Hosni Mubarak, his VP, and prime minister must go. Now there are three of them.

In addition, the commanders of the army are still going back and forth to America. The American position has changed, and we hope that the position of the military will change as well, but reality proves that Hosni Mubarak will not leave unless he is forced to, that Omar Suleiman is more dangerous than Hosni Mubarak, and that the appointed prime minister… They all come from the military, and they share the same interests. Like we say in Egyptian Arabic: They will not bite one another.

I don’t want to speak ill of anyone, but Hosni Mubarak will not hesitate to kill the entire Egyptian people in order to remain in power. This is a maneuver of which we must beware. Hosni Mubarak is trying to stabilize his position. He is in Sharm Al-Sheik, protected by the Zionists, by the state of Israel. There is a helicopter ready to fly him to Israel.

We do not take the situation lightly. The situation is difficult. The Egyptian people will not allow anyone to rob them of their revolution. This blessed revolution will not subside. As the Egyptians are chanting: “We will not go away. This is our country. Mubarak should go.”

[…]

As for the possible return of the security forces – this is inconceivable. If the people see members of the security forces, they will kill them all. These security forces are not part of the Egyptian people. Their allegiance lies with Hosni Mubarak.

[…]

I am absolutely certain that this revolution will not die, and that the next step must be one of civil disobedience. This civil disobedience will generate strife among the Egyptians. This disobedience must include halting passage through the Suez Canal, stopping the supply of petroleum and natural gas to Israel, and preparing for war with Israel.

[…]

And this, excerpts from a sermon in which Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammad Badi urges jihad against the Zionists and U.S. infidels:

“According to the Islamic shari’a that Allah [has bequeathed] to mankind, the status of the Muslims, compared to that of the infidel nations that arrogantly [disdain] his shari’a, is measured in a kind of scale, in which, when one side is in a state of superiority, the other is in a state of inferiority…
“Many Arab and Muslim regimes have not managed to build up their peoples, due to their weakness and their dependence [on the West], and in many cases they have begun to work against the interests of the [Muslim] nation… The lands of the Arabs and of Islam are now plagued with problems because [the Arabs] have lost their [strength of] will, leaving it to the Zionist enemies and their supporters. [The Arab and Muslim regimes] have forgotten, or are pretending to have forgotten, that the real enemy lying in wait for them is the Zionist entity. They are aiming their weapons against their own peoples, while avoiding any confrontation with these Zionists and achieving neither unity nor revival for their nations. Moreover, they are disregarding Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and [their] lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme and the infidels’ word will be inferior…
“Today the Muslims desperately need a mentality of honor and means of power [that will enable them] to confront global Zionism. [This movement] knows nothing but the language of force, so [the Muslims] must meet iron with iron, and winds with [even more powerful] storms. They crucially need to understand that the improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.

Have I said that I’m not Islamophobic? I’m not. I am developing a phobia against the Muslim Brotherhood however.

For what it’s worth, I think the realist philosophy of foreign policy helped create this mess. Whenever I find myself advocating a more neoconservative policy, I have to remind myself that this mess wasn’t created in a day. It will take more than a few days, even years, to clean up. What bothers me is that innocent people suffer in the meantime.

What did Martin Luther King say? “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The Egyptian people deserve true freedom and a democratic way of life. They may have to wait a bit longer to get it or lose it to the thugs who make up the Muslim Brotherhood. But what do I know?

Thomas Friedman, Call Home — Now!!

By , February 5, 2011 12:00 pm

China law to make children visit parents.

Religion in the Public Square

By , February 5, 2011 11:13 am

Elder Dallin H. Oaks recently gave a speech on religious freedom at Chapman University School of Law. He also gave an interview on the subject. Both are worthy–very worthy–of our attention.

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A little background on Elder Oaks, currently an Apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Elder Oaks graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law; clerked for Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; taught at Chicago; and served as interim dean of that law school, as president of BYU (where he also oversaw the establishment of the J.Reuben Clark Law School), and finally a justice on the Utah Supreme Court. He was considered for the U.S. Supreme Court by both President Ford and Reagan.

In his speech, Oaks gives a number of troubling examples of what he is concerned about and why he is calling for religions to join together in protecting religion’s place in the public square:

In New Mexico, the state’s Human Rights Commission held that a photographer who had declined on religious grounds to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony had engaged in impermissible conduct and must pay over $6,000 attorney’s fees to the same-sex couple. A state judge upheld the order to pay. In New Jersey, the United Methodist Church was investigated and penalized under state anti-discrimination law for denying same-sex couples access to a church-owned pavilion for their civil-union ceremonies.  A federal court refused to give relief from the state penalties. Professors at state universities in Illinois and Wisconsin were fired or disciplined for expressing personal convictions that homosexual behavior is sinful. Candidates for masters’ degrees in counseling in Georgia and Michigan universities were penalized or dismissed from programs for their religious views about the wrongfulness of homosexual relations. A Los Angeles policeman claimed he was demoted after he spoke against the wrongfulness of homosexual conduct in the church where he is a lay pastor. The Catholic Church’s difficulties with adoption services and the Boy Scouts’ challenges in various locations are too well known to require further comment. (see sources in transcript)

As Elder Oaks made his case that we–religious believers–need to stand up and speak out, I was particularly impressed by his quotation of his fellow Apostle, the late Neal A. Maxwell:

My esteemed fellow Apostle, Elder Neal A. Maxwell, asked:

“[H]ow can a society set priorities if there are no basic standards? Are we to make our calculations using only the arithmetic of appetite?”

He made this practical observation:

“Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being ‘society’s supervisors.’ Such ‘supervisors’ deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.”

Elder Maxwell also observed that we increase the power of governments when people do not believe in absolute truths and in a God who will hold them and their government leaders accountable.

Blogging the Federalist Papers – #1 (Hamilton)

By , February 4, 2011 5:56 pm

I began blogging the Federalist Papers on January 19, with a post on #47, one of the reading assignments that week for my undergraduate class, American Government and Society. At the time, I had assigned #’s 10, 47, 48, 51, 70, and 78. In the rush of the time, I was only able to blog on #47. Things have settled down now, so I’ll begin in earnest and start at the beginning. Whether you find what I write interesting, I can promise you that the Federalist Papers are just that. And these times that’s a bonus because the Papers are already so essential to understanding the Founding; that they are also a fun read is delightful icing.

By the way, you can find many free copies of the Federalist Papers online in pdf format. For this exercise, I’m using the one put out by Penn State. For those who may not know, the Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the nome de plume Publius.

Hamilton begins #1 with a call for seriousness in the public’s examination of the new Constitution recently drafted in Philadelphia, and he’s not shy in proclaiming the importance of what is at stake:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

He continues,

. . . a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

Possibly because he feels the moment is so important, he’s also not shy about calling to account those who oppose the ratification of the new document, especially those whose motives maybe be base and who want to make sure they can remain big fish in a small pond because they can’t be sure they’ll be allowed to swim in the big one contemplated by the Constitution. Thus he cautions the public to be aware of

a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

He doesn’t stop there, of course. Hamilton is careful to recognize that not all who oppose the new form of government do so out of base motives, that some, even many, do so “actuated by upright intentions”; indeed, he admits,

Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.

But in admitting this, he concedes no ground. He goes on the criticize the opposition’s “loud . . . declamations and . . . bitter . . . invectives.” And then, in a flourish about the value of good government unjustly stigmatized by people he characterizes has having “an over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people,” he argues that we forget that

the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. . . . that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. (emphasis supplied)

I think I know what he means and who those words would apply to today. What do you think?

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