Thomas Becket died today in 1170.

He was killed in his own cathedral for protecting his Church from government interference.

🧵 We may not see clergy being physically attacked today in the US but government attacks on religious institutions and religious Liberty are absolutely real.

There are many reasons Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life has remained a favorite over the years. It’s a film masterpiece on its own terms. But it also captures a vision of American life that many people relate to, one that doesn’t quite fit either side of our polarized politics. 🧵 In some ways it seems like a film with conservative attitudes: it celebrates rooted communities, conventional family life, ordinary and unglamorous responsibility.

Happy Sunday!

The eclipse of local Blue Laws is one of the ways we’ve elevated consumerism over faith, family, community, and the dignity of work send tweet

🧵 While restrictions on Sunday commerce have been motivated by respect for religion (which SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled constitutional, by the way), this isn’t just a issue of religion vs. secularism. Let’s explore:

We hear objections from some folks along the lines of “if we don’t vote for X, Y will win! It’s too important. I’ll vote for you next time.”

The issue with this logic is that every election cycle is framed this way by the duopoly. At some point you need to take the plunge. A single vote cast is essentially guaranteed to not change the results of a federal election. A vote is a matter of principle. It’s a sign of where your values lie.

Renting wombs is a bad idea, including when straight people do it. This is a tough issue that divides even a lot of folks who support pro-life or social conservative causes. Many of them don’t see any problem with surrogacy. They might say: don’t we like babies? Don’t we support families? And it’s true, those desires are sympathetic ones.

We support "right to repair" legislation for consumer products and capital equipment. We believe more ownership means more economic freedom in the truest sense. If you can't fix it without being bound to the manufacturer's terms, you don't really own it. As an example of what we're talking about: for years John Deere has been trying to make it impossible for farmers to repair their own tractors.

npr.org/2023/01/10/114…

When we talk about an ownership economy, people often say, “That sounds good in the abstract but what does it mean in practice?” The Marcora Law in Italy is a great example. 🧵

yesmagazine.org/economy/2016/0… The law was originally drawn up to save jobs at struggling companies. When a firm is threatening to shut down, the Italian government allows workers to use their unemployment compensation as a lump sump to buy their own workplace and turn it into a worker cooperative.

“Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer… …I do not have the right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better…

There are many reasons Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life has remained a favorite over the years. It’s a film masterpiece on its own terms. But it also captures a vision of American life that many people relate to, one that doesn’t quite fit either side of our polarized politics. 🧵 In some ways it seems like a film with conservative attitudes: it celebrates rooted communities, conventional family life, ordinary and unglamorous responsibility.

“Wasting Your Vote,” a dialogue. 🧵

John Q. Public: I think I will vote for Joe Longshot this November.

Debby Duopoly: Why would you do that, John? Don’t you know that’s just wasting your vote? I think a vote for Avaricious Incumbus III is the only realistic choice. John: Why is my vote a waste if it better reflects my views?

Debby: Well, because your guy won’t win, dummy, so your vote won’t matter.

John: It’s true, he probably won’t. But it’s not like my one vote will determine whether Incumbus gets re-elected either.

Every four years without fail (sometimes even in midterms), you will hear the phrase “most important election of our lifetimes.”

Much of this a cynical attempt by the big parties to lend a sense of urgency to voting for uninspiring options.

But not entirely. 🧵 That’s because as D’s and R’s have gotten more polarized and more ideological, it actually really can feel like the stakes have gotten higher with every successive election. That feeling accelerated for a lot of people during the Trump years, but the pattern was already there.

A 🧵on 🧳⛴️✈️immigration and birth rates 🤰👩‍🍼

In different ways you see arguments from both the left and the right that present immigration and Americans having more children as alternatives, as tradeoffs.

They're both wrong about this. The nationalist right has made immigration into a bugbear, of course; the (blisfully) former Rep. Steve King exemplified this when he said "we can't preserve our civilization with somebody else's babies."

Needless to say there are serious questions about who the "we" is here.

Since the overturn of Roe many GOP state legislatures having been trying to allocate modest public funds to support crisis pregnancy centers.

(1) This is good, & the ideological opposition to it is wrong.

(2) This is not nearly enough to support vulnerable women & children. CPCs do excellent and admirable work that deserves support, but they have always been working within the gaps of the system. They are not designed to be a replacement for more comprehensive set of public policies.

This is Graciela Olivarez.

She grew up poor in the Southwest. She never graduated high school. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of her.

She was a great American. 🧵 Despite a humble background, she made a successful career in Spanish-language broadcasting. Then, in 1970, when she was in her 30’s, she became the first woman to graduate from Notre Dame Law.

Starbucks recently said it will guarantee employee coverage for abortions but not if the shop is unionized. This sounds like a headline we would make up, but we didn’t. Corporate America never ceases to show you where its priorities are.

Good.

The real work is only getting started.

https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog/status/1540336880188801026

This decision, on its own terms, is just. But it does not establish justice in its fullness. We have much further to go until we have a society that values life the way it should, and that honors mothers, fathers, children with consistency and conviction.

The First Amendment means the power of the state cannot hold up one church or one faith as the exclusive standard.

It does not, and has never meant, that the state must treat religious institutions differently and worse than it would treat any other institution of civil society.

https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog/status/1539254884670877696

There’s a word for what happens when there is not only a separation of church of state, but a total privatization of religion & a strictly patrolled boundary between faith & public life.

That word is “laïcité.”

It is a French word.

We are not French. 🥐

As a follow up to yesterday’s #Juneteenth thread, here’s a 🧵about the time Abe Lincoln made a distributist 🐄 argument against slaveholders and secession. You may have seen these words before. Everybody from conventional progressives to socialists like this quote. We’ve posted it before ourselves.

But there’s more to the context than most people make out, and it still matters to us today.

Today is a holiday two-fer. It’s Father’s Day, and it’s also the traditional date of Juneteenth, marking the abolition of slavery (the latter will be officially observed tomorrow).

That coincidence reminds us how much the struggle against enslavement was a struggle for family. One of the worst cruelties of chattel slavery was the way it degraded and destroyed families for the sake of a master’s profit or caprice. It wrenched parents from children and husbands from wives.

The New York Times desperately wants you to know that this is not a heartbeat. “The sound is created by the machine itself.”

Next the Times will explain to its readers that when you play an MP3, Kanye West does not physically emerge from your stereo speakers.

We’re seeing a lot of discussion of Blue Laws, and we think people framing this as a religion vs. secularism issue are missing a large part of the point. So, with full awareness of the irony that we’re tweeting on Sunday, a few thoughts:

🧵 It’s a true that a lot of these laws have been motivated by respect for religion (which SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled constitutional, by the way). But they also guarantee workers a day off, something many of us increasingly lack with hectic or unpredictable schedules.