Liberty
stcynic | November 1, 2006The Vatican's observer to the UN addressed the General Assembly yesterday on the subject of religious freedom and made quite a mess of it. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. There was plenty of hypocritical double talk. Like this:
Every individual and group must be free from coercion and no one should be forced to act in a manner contrary to his or her beliefs, whether in private or public, whether alone or in association with others. It is important here to…
stcynic | October 17, 2006Came across these links while surfing and I have to say I'm very disappointed in a person and an organization I've respected in the past for their indefensible position on the issue. The first is Gary Trudeau, who is taken to task by Rogier van Bakel, and rightly so, for his recent comments on the matter. He was asked the following question:
What did you make of the Danish cartoon mess? I understand that you said you would never play with the image of Allah. But did you feel you should have done so out of a sense of professional solidarity, or to make a statement about freedom of speech?
And…
stcynic | October 12, 2006Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, has issued a very strongly worded and entirely justified statement in response to campus protestors disrupting a perfectly legal speech at the university last week. I'll quote the full text below the fold:
Columbia University has always been, and will always be, a place where students and faculty engage directly with important public issues. We are justifiably proud of the traditions here of intellectual inquiry and vigorous debate. The disruption on Wednesday night that resulted in the termination of an event organized by the Columbia…
stcynic | October 5, 2006A speech at Columbia University by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, was overrun by students who objected to his views on illegal immigration in a planned attack to shut down the event. The speech, sponsored by the College Republicans at the school, never took place. And the students who did it are proud of it:
"We were aware that there was going to be a sign and we were going to occupy the stage," said a protestor who was on stage and asked to remain anonymous. "I don't feel like we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. ... The Minutemen…
stcynic | October 4, 2006Agape Press reports on the "ecstatic" reaction of religious right groups:
.Concerned Women for America (CWA) is applauding the passage of the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, a bill sponsored by Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. The legislation prohibits the use of credit cards, checks, and wire and electronic fund transfers in online gambling, which is illegal. Kyl's bill is the Senate's version of H.R. 4411, the House bill sponsored by Republican Congressmen Jim Leach of Iowa and Bob Goodlatte of Virginia. These bills seeks to extend the nation's gambling regulations…
stcynic | October 1, 2006I am absolutely livid right now. Our Republican overlords last night slipped in a ban on all financial transactions that might be involved in internet gambling into a totally unrelated bill and got it slipped through.
Lawmakers stayed up late as well, making sure to throw our country back into the Dark Ages. It became apparent that Republicans spearheaded by Senator First would stop at nothing to prohibit Internet gambling. In a last ditch desperation move, the Senate majority leader was able to attach legislation to ban online gambling to a Port Security bill that had no correlation…
stcynic | September 29, 2006Famed libertarian legal scholar Richard Epstein testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee a few days ago about the detainee bill that was just passed and awaits Bush's inevitable signature. What he said is very important.
Far more is at stake than lawsuits haggling over prison conditions. At stake is the fundamental right of any prisoner to test the lawfulness of his detention. Truth must count. Innocence must matter. An optional system of limited judicial review sidesteps both. Only habeas corpus can meet the need. To strip the federal courts of habeas jurisdiction for…
stcynic | September 29, 2006The case against a British minister for handing out leaflets at a gay pride event has been dropped. Unfortunately, the police are clearly engaging in doublespeak to justify the arrest in the first place.
South Wales Police force has defended its handling of the case, saying the CPS decison not to go ahead with the presecution of Mr Green due to insufficient evidence did not "challenge the legality" of his arrest.
But this is clearly nonsense. He was charged with using "threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress." They have the leaflet he…
stcynic | September 14, 2006I didn't think i could get any angrier about the Republicans' zeal to ban internet gambling; I was wrong. Now Bill Frist is trying to get that ban passed as part of a defense authorization bill so that it can't be voted against:
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is trying use a bill authorizing U.S. military operations, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, to prohibit people from using credit cards to settle Internet gambling debts.
Frist, R-Tenn., and his aides have been meeting with other lawmakers and officials in both the House and Senate to get the measure attached to a compromise Defense…
stcynic | September 13, 2006I told the story yesterday of one of the other sciencebloggers whose son was forced to say the pledge of allegiance by a teacher in North Carolina. I also told of how he and his parents went to the principal and the principal was very sympathetic and said she would talk to the teacher and make sure she understood that no student could be compelled to recite the pledge. So here's the rest of the story and I think it's an incredible ending. On day 2, the teacher told the class that they do not have to recite the pledge and that if they don't want to, they can simply walk out of the class while…
stcynic | September 13, 2006Volokh linked to a PDF file with the actual text of the flyer that the minister they arrested was handing out at a gay event in Wales. I agree with Eugene that it's about as non-offensive as a flyer expressing those opinions could possibly be. It doesn't rant and rave at gay people, it just lays out their views based on their interpretation of what the Bible says about homosexuality. I disagree with those views completely, of course, but I cannot for the life of me understand why the British government thinks there is any cause for even batting an eye at it, much less arresting someone and…
stcynic | September 9, 2006I swear, England is trying their damnedest to make anti-gay rhetoric sound rational and accurate. They're prosecuting a minister for handing out leaflets with Bible verses on them at a gay Mardi Gras event, for nothing other than handing them out:
A police force was caught up in a freedom of speech row after its officers arrested an anti-gay campaigner for handing out leaflets at a homosexual rally.
South Wales police admitted evangelical Christian Stephen Green was then charged purely because his pamphlets contained anti-gay quotations from the Bible.
Mr Green faces a court appearance today…
stcynic | September 7, 2006Internet News reports:
With little more than 20 working days left before the November mid-term elections, the Senate faces a crowded agenda including 13 different funding bills to keep the government functioning when its new fiscal year begins on Oct. 1...
In its first session Tuesday since the August recess, Frist prioritized the appropriation bills, judicial nominee confirmations and halting Internet gambling as his top issues.
"Internet gambling threatens our families by bringing addictive behavior right into our living rooms," Frist said in floor remarks.
Except for internet gambling on…
stcynic | September 5, 2006Both AmericaBlog and TPMCafe have posts up about how the Republicans in 1995 and 1996 refused to give Clinton the power for both roving and warrantless wiretaps in an anti-terrorism bill. And they're right. Clinton wanted both kinds of wiretaps as part of a larger anti-terrorism package and the Republicans amended those provisions out of the bill, claiming that it was a threat to our freedom. Especially telling is this quote from Porter Goss, later named by Bush to head the CIA:
Mr. Speaker, this effort comes in the wake of three horrible tragedies: The bombing of a military installation in…
stcynic | September 1, 2006I've said it before and I'll say it again: as cynical as I am about government, I can't possibly keep up with reality. Last week an appeals court says the government can seize your property without even charging you with a crime, and this week Ohio has a law that allows people to be declared sex offenders without being charged with a crime. Read that again: without even being charged with a crime. And now they want to add people to the public sex offender registry based on that law as well:
An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex…
stcynic | August 29, 2006Radley Balko has a very interesting post about the war on terrorism and why we should not allow it to close up our free society and violate our constitutional protections. He bases this in part on an article by James Fallows in The Atlantic, which I have not read. But I find Balko's logic quite compelling:
The gist of Fallows' thesis is that the terrorists will never conquer the west, and they know that. Public consciousness of the threat, and the absence of a sanctuary in Afghanistan have neutered al-Qaeda. They're now a loose-knit group of desperados acting on their own accord. Fallows…
stcynic | August 28, 2006Gotta love this post by Balko about a woman who embezzled $2.3 million from her boss while spending $6000 a day on lottery tickets. He cites the article about the situation as saying:
Gambling experts say lottery splurges are among the most common types of compulsive gambling.
And deadpans:
And yet the states spend millions promoting their own lotteries, while sending SWAT teams after anyone who dares to challenge their monopoly over games of chance.
I would only add that it's even more absurd than that: they spend millions promoting games that are purely games of chance - lotteries - while…
stcynic | August 28, 2006This story illustrates perfectly the problem at the core of hate speech laws of the type that so many of our Western allies have. I've documented many times what goes on in England whenever anyone reports an anti-gay statement made there. Scotland Yard sends out detectives to investigate. Now I give you the other side of the coin:
A CRIMINAL investigation has been started by Scotland Yard into an advertisement from the Gay Police Association (GPA) that blamed religion for a 74 per cent increase in homophobic crime.
The Times has learnt that the inquiry into the advertisement, which was…
stcynic | August 24, 2006And I regard that as very good news. Last week, Georgia Tech dropped its speech code as part of a settlement in a lawsuit brought against them by the Alliance Defense Fund (and yes, I will agree with them completely on this one despite my opposition to them in most cases). The same thing happened back in May at Penn State, also in response to a lawsuit filed by the ADF. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) does excellent work in this area, pressuring colleges and universities to drop their unconstitutional speech codes and encourage a freewheeling exchange of ideas on…
stcynic | August 24, 2006Here are three items, all found via Radley Balko's blog and all dealing with government overreach. The first is from Chicago, where a group of chefs is suing the city council to reverse a city-wide ban on serving foie gras at restaurants. I don't know that they'll win the lawsuit. The grounds on which they're arguing it don't seem terribly compelling, at least if this report is accurate (it says they're claiming that since the foie gras is produced in France or Canada, it's not up to Chicago to regulate it - that's a pretty weak argument). But I'm glad to see someone standing up to the city…