[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- A controversy looking for a target
- I’m a relatively recent transplant to New York City, as you probably know, but I have to say that this entire fuss over the Cordoba House has left me pretty annoyed. …I’m impressed with what a great example New York is of how to (mostly) live in a super-diverse community and get along just fine, thank you very much. I’m not a pollyanna—I’m aware that people can harbor all sorts of crazy racism about each other even if they do see members of the hated group go about their boring ass every day business just like everyone else—but that’s why it seems doubly important to me not to sow animosity where none existed before.
Which is all this ridiculousness about the “Ground Zero Mosque” is, right up to the misleading nickname that conjures up an image of a mosque being built right on the site, instead of a community center two blocks away…
Like I’ve said when people try to tar me with “bigot” when I criticize Catholic dogma, the vast majority of the victims of the Catholic rules against contraception and abortion are Catholics themselves. Muslim terrorists kill Muslims; in fact, in some places they mainly kill Muslims. The fight is against terrorists, not Muslims.
…What’s going on here would be like refusing to build churches near the OKC federal building site because McVeigh was a Christian.
- Same-sex marriage ban nullified
- [SCOTUSblog]
…The judge’s 138-page opinion is here.
The judge, in finding a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of legal equality, concluded that California could not justify treating committed couples differently solely because they were of the same sex. He applied the lowest constitutional test — “rational basis” – to this differing treatment. He also ruled that Proposition 8 violated rights that are protected by the Due Process Clause.
The evidence put forward in the challenge to the ban, the judge wrote, “shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples.”
Here are closing parts of the decision:…
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