#first amendment violation

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[azuremallone]

The Michigan state House of Representatives passed HB 4474, making it a felony to "intimidate" someone of a protected class with inclusions

So we're back to this, eh?

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Supreme Court rules school district cannot prohibit football coach's prayers on field

The court said high school football coach Joe Kennedy's prayers amounted to private speech protected by the First Amendment

The Supreme Court said Monday that a Washington state school district violated the First Amendment rights of a high school football coach when he lost his job after praying at the 50-yard line after games.

The opinion was 6-3 along conservative-liberal ideological lines.

"The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.

The Court said coach Joe Kennedy's prayers amounted to private speech, protected by the First Amendment, and could not be restricted by the school district.

The decision lowers the bar between church and state in an opinion that will allow more religious expression in public spaces. The court clarified that a government entity does not necessarily violate the Establishment Clause by permitting religious expression in public.

"We are aware of no historically sound understanding of the Establishment Clause that begins to '(make) it necessary for government to be hostile to religion' in this way," Gorsuch wrote.

The Establishment Clause of the Constitution says Congress can "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Kennedy praised the Court's ruling in a statement on Monday, saying, "All I've ever wanted was to be back on the field with my guys."

"I thank God for answering our prayers and sustaining my family through this long battle," he said.

The decision continues a trend of a right-leaning court that has sided repeatedly in recent years with religious conservatives. Last week, the Court said that Maine could not exclude religious schools from tuition assistance programs in a 6-3 decision divided along ideological lines.

"Today's ruling is the court's second major expansion of constitutional protections for religion in six days," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

"Last week, the court made it harder for states to decline to fund religious education. Today, the court is making it harder for secular schools to keep religion out of extracurricular activities, like high school football. In the name of defending religious exercise, the court's conservative majority has neutered the First Amendment's other reference to religion -- its prohibition of state sanctioning of it."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three liberal dissenters, said the court "weakens" the Establishment Clause's "backstop" protecting religious freedom.

"It elevates one individual's interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual's choosing, over society's interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all," Sotomayor wrote.

'AUDIBLE PRAYERS' ON THE FIELD

Kennedy began his prayer ritual soon after he was hired in 2008, but the school district grew concerned when Kennedy's short, quiet prayers grew in 2015 as players began joining him on the field all while the crowd was still in the stands.

The school district said it never restricted him from offering silent, private prayers, and offered him an alternate place to pray off the football field after games. Kennedy refused the accommodations and was ultimately placed on paid administrative leave and suspended from the program. After the season, he was given a poor performance evaluation.

He did not seek a new contract, but instead filed suit, arguing that the school district had violated his rights under the First Amendment. Kennedy lost his case at the district court level and before the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that his prayer amounted to governmental speech that is not protected by the First Amendment.

Before oral arguments in April, Kennedy told CNN in an interview that "every American should be able to have faith in public and not to be worried about being fired over it." Kennedy, who is Christian, said his prayers were meant to fulfill a covenant he had made to praise God after every game, "win or lose."

Lawyers for the school district had argued to the court that Kennedy's prayer practice was not private or personal prayer, but rather a ritual undertaken in full view of students that the school district was justified in restricting.

"No one doubts that public school employees can have quiet prayers by themselves at work even if students can see," Richard B. Katskee, a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told the Justices.

But, Katskee said, that is not what Kennedy had engaged in. Instead, Katskee argued, Kennedy "insisted on audible prayers at the 50-yard line with students ... (and) announced in the press that those prayers are how he helps these kids be better people."

Katskee argued that even if the Court viewed Kennedy's speech as private, the school district had adequate justification to restrict it because officials are permitted to "prevent disruption of and maintain control over school events." Katskee gave the example that a Satanist group had come forward to demand the same access to the football field.

Notre Dame Law School Professor Richard W. Garnett, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Kennedy, said on Monday that the high court's ruling will "provide much needed clarity and consistency" to an area of the law that has been "notoriously confused and inconsistent."

"The Establishment Clause is concerned with the entanglement of governmental and religious authority," he said, adding: "It does not require the censorship of private religious expression."

JUSTICES DIFFER ON WHETHER PLAYERS WERE COERCED

In his majority opinion, Gorsuch differentiated the case from past cases, pushing back on the notion that the opinion would lead to more school prayer.

He said the prayers at issue "were not publicly broadcast or recited to a captive audience. Students were not required or expected to participate."

Gorsuch added that students "were not required or expected to participate," rejecting concerns of some of the parents that students could feel "coerced."

And he limited the discussion to three prayers instead of a broader pattern of the coach's conduct.

"Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic -- whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head," Gorsuch wrote.

Sotomayor's dissent, which included photographs of the prayers in question, suggested that she thought the majority was not describing accurately the factual circumstances of the case.

"As the majority tells it, Kennedy, a coach for the District's football program, 'lost his job' for '(praying) quietly while his students were otherwise occupied,'" she wrote. "The record before us, however, tells a different story."

Her dissent also pointedly noted that the school district tried to accommodate the coach by offering him a place to pray, off the field. "Again, the District emphasized that it was happy to accommodate Kennedy's desire to pray on the job in a way that did not interfere with his duties or risk perceptions of endorsement," she said.

She said that it was "unprecedented" for the court to hold that Kennedy's conduct, "taken as a whole, did not raise cognizable" concerns of coercion.

Sotomayor stressed that students could have felt coerced to join in the prayer and pointed to the fact that the court in the past has "recognized that students face immense social pressure."

She said that they look up to their teachers and coaches as role models and "seek their approval" and that players might try to gain a coach's approval to secure a stronger letter of recommendation for college recruiting or more playing time on the field. "The record before the Court bears this out," she wrote.

Already, such concerns have been raised by the National Education Association, the nation's leading labor union for teachers, which said on Monday that the majority opinion would open the door to coercive prayer in schools.

"The Constitution should protect public school students from being coerced into religious activity," NEA president Becky Pringle said in a statement. "The court's decision here does the opposite: it ignores the real-life pressure and coercion that students will feel when school officials stage public religious observances in class or at school events."

[meret118]

Four cops 'drag' man from Kevin McCarthy press conference for asking question about Jan. 6 committee

Four law enforcement officers reportedly removed a man from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) press conference on Thursday when

[thelibertyloft]

Students Arrested for Writing 'Black Preborn Lives Matter' Near DC Planned Parenthood

Two students were arrested on Saturday for writing "Black Pre-Born Lives Matter" on the sidewalk with chalk in DC. Maybe they would have been ok if they had painted it in the streets permanently? #DC #PlannedParenthood #abortionismurder #alllivesmatter

Washington, DC — Two anti-abortion activists were arrested Saturday morning outside of a Planned Parenthood building. Erica Caporaletti, a 22-year-old student at Towson University, and Warner DePriest, a 29-year-old D.C. resident, were writing “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” with chalk on the sidewalk when police arrested them.

“This is government censorship,” Caporaletti said through a bullhorn,…

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[davidblaska]

The more they swarm, the more the school board kowtows to the mob

The more they swarm, the more the school board kowtows to the mob

Time to file a formal complaint

The Madison Board of Education is a public governmental body. As such, it is open to the public to attend. As a public meeting, it is the right of every citizen to record the proceedings as long as it causes no disruption. The news media did not attend Monday night’s meeting but if they had been…

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[minutemanmilitia-blog]

Ohio student suspended for staying in class during walkouts

HILLIARD, Ohio — An Ohio high school student says he tried to remain nonpolitical during school walkouts over gun violence and was suspended for a day because he stayed in a classroom instead of joining protests or the alternative, a study hall. Hilliard senior Jacob Shoemaker says school isn’t the place for politics, and he wasn’t taking sides Wednesday. The district says it’s responsible for…

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[meret118]

New Jersey public transit was forced to remove the bugs it had installed on its light rail system after a public outcry, but Baltimore's buses and subways remain resolutely under audio surveillance, while in Oakland, the cops hid mics around bus-shelters near the courthouses to capture audio of defendants and their lawyers discussing their cases.

The argument for these things goes, "No one is listening to them unless a crime is committed, and then they're of forensic value -- besides, you're in a public place, where you have no expectation of privacy."

We've seen that warehoused surveillance data is intrinsically leaky (anything you collect will probably leak, anything you retain will definitely leak); we've also seen that making the haystacks bigger doesn't make it easier to find the needles hidden in them.

Then there's the chilling effect of knowing that you're under surveillance: it's the cornerstone of the Chinese internet control model, which holds that the easiest way to manage dissent and prevent the transmission of politically unpopular views is to simply let everyone know that everything they say is on the record.

Finally, there's the race/class dimension of all this: public transit is overwhelmingly the province of poor Americans, who are also overwhelmingly racialized Americans. No one is proposing to fill the first class cabins of airlines with hidden mics (though the 9/11 terrorists flew in that cabin), nor are they proposing to bug timeshare jets, even though these would be much easier to hijack (and are subject to fewer searches) than a commercial airliner.

The belief that we should record all speech in "public" places on the off-chance that the recordings can be used later in a crime investigation terminates with mics in the salt-cellars of every diner table, mics on every urban short-hire bicycle, in every elevator, in every building lobby, in every bar. If you support mics on city buses but not on business jets, you're really supporting continuous surveillance of poor people and the freedom to speak freely for the elites.

Tien said transit officials may argue that posting notice that audio surveillance is in use means that anyone who rides those vehicles has consented. “But I don’t think that’s honestly consent,” he said.

There are also political and demographic issues at play. Privacy advocates say conversations involving nothing more threatening than strong opinions on politics, or politicians, could be monitored.

“It’s not just about privacy, it’s about freedom of speech,” Herold said, “Declaring open season on conversations just because they take place in public or communal space will have a chilling effect.”

And Tien noted that the surveillance could disproportionately affect low-income groups, “because of the demographics of public transit ridership, especially on city buses.”

Big Brother is listening as well as watching [Taylor Armerding/CSO Online]

(via /.)