I have argued for years that huge chunks of our Establishment Clause jurisprudence are exposed by the simple fact that if you switched the word “God” in whatever prayer, symbol, etc. people claim is perfectly fine to “Allah,” the very same people would have a fucking aneurysm.
This is also the most unintentionally funny news clip I’ve seen in awhile. They introduce Mr. Dumb Dumb by claiming that the charge that he “melted down” about this was “clickbait,” and he responds by launching right into demanding a(n obviously baseless) criminal investigation.
I remember when @AoDespair was being pilloried by ignorant mook mobs over that omission in The Plot Against America (a fantastic series, btw), when it was just...historically accurate.
I…I did. If our currency were reprinted to read, “IN ALLAH WE TRUST,” hundreds of millions of people would stroke out, and there would be another insurrection by morning. Our currency should return to its roots and say: “Mind your business.”
Exactly this. This, specifically, is what I’m talking about, and we all know it. 👇
Significantly, even the government’s use of the word “God”—singular—is fairly characterized as an endorsement of monotheism that excludes polytheism and atheism.
This wasn’t a joke! If it were up to me, I would absolutely return our currency to the “Mind Your Business” era. The only slogan I like better than that is “Mind Your *Own* Business.”
For the eleventy billionth time, deciding what speech you want to carry and what speech you want to exclude is an *exercise* of the First Amendment—not a violation of it—and “amending Section 230” won’t alter that reality, because the First Amendment itself protects that right.
Their angle is that while Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other behemoths can afford the compliance costs of Section 230 reform, their would-be competitors can’t. Regulating the competition out of business is a tactic as old as time.
I should note: The problem here is not retroactivity. The Board of Parole just needs to use its uncontroversial, existing authority to give new hearing dates to anyone who is presumptively entitled to release under this new law, which they refuse to do.
To illustrate by example: There are people who will become presumptively entitled to release in July 2021. Many of those people won't be given a parole hearing until 2022 or beyond, though, which means they won't be released for years. That's a BOP choice.
To begin, while the vast majority of laws are presumed (and are) constitutional, that presumption flips—dramatically—in certain contexts. Generally speaking, compelling people to say things that they don’t want to say is one of those contexts.
It’s that flipped presumption—where the Government has to meet the burden of proving that a law is constitutional—that leads to cases like this: tennessean.com/story/news/201…