It's Sunday

 

Christofascists in education

 The only thing that keeps me from despair is the knowledge that Europe recovered from the Blitz.

Go Hawaii!

 

Wookie Kim, legal director of the ACLU of Hawaii, which filed an amicus brief in the case, told Bolts that the court’s decision “ensures fundamental fairness and integrity in the criminal legal system, and more specifically it ensures that people aren’t wrongfully convicted because of inaccurate or misleading testimony by officers about what happened in an interrogation room or during an interrogation.”

  Bolts

Wookie Kim.

Across the country, 31 states already have some requirements that police record interrogations, according to a review conducted by Duke Law School, though many only require recordings for some types of cases, such as homicides. Hawaii is the ninth state to impose this requirement regardless of the crime someone is suspected of.

[...]

But the court didn’t rely on the U.S. Constitution in arriving at its decision—instead, it relied exclusively on the Hawaii Constitution, which contains similar language.

Justice Todd Eddins, who authored the majority opinion, took pains to spell out that this was intentional, writing, “No United States Supreme Court opinion has tackled the recording of custodial interrogations. If a case did though, we would still look to our state constitution first.”

[...]

The Hawaii Constitution’s due process clause “offers safety to Hawaii’s people that exceeds the federal constitution’s suddenly fluid protections,” Eddins writes.

He makes no mystery of the sort of cases he has in mind, describing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, as “erasing a generations-long constitutional right, stripping autonomy from half the population, and empowering states to force birth.”

[...]

“In this day and age where federal constitutional rights are being eviscerated or evaporated, it’s important that state supreme courts protect people’s rights, relying on the state constitution, and this is an example of that,” Kim said.

[...]

Earlier this month, when the Hawaii Supreme Court said the state couldn’t force a plot of land to be used for religious purposes because that violated the state constitution’s “Establishment Clause,” Eddins penned a concurrence to denounce “the Roberts Court” for eroding the separation between Church and State at the federal level.

[...]

“The Roberts Court casually dismisses the lessons of American and world history, the warnings of prominent early Americans, and the judiciary’s storied legal minds. Bad things happen unless government and religion are completely separated.”

[...]

Eddins drew national attention, and conservative criticism, last year with another decision he authored that upheld a ban on carrying a loaded pistol. In that case, his opinion directly rebuked the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to the Second Amendment. “The spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally-mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons during day-to-day activities,” Eddins wrote.

[...]

In last week’s decision on [a case involving] police interrogations, Eddins again made it clear that he was looking for alternatives to originalism.

“A constitution adapts,” he wrote. “Due process is agile… Due process matures with technological developments to protect constitutional rights.”

Two of Eddins’ colleagues on this five-member court, Sabrina McKenna and Vladimir Devens, joined his opinion. Devens is a former police officer who worked in the Honolulu Police Department.

[...]

Justice Lisa Ginoza dissented, arguing that recording interrogations “is not a matter of constitutional dimension.” She criticized the majority for requiring recordings “without actual information about the ability of law enforcement to meet the majority’s new mandates.”

She called for “input from key stakeholders—including law enforcement, the attorney general, prosecutors, the public defender, and others—because there is too much this court does not know about the on-the-ground ability and resources to effectuate this new rule.” (The court’s fifth member, Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald, split the difference, agreeing with the majority in part while also filing a partial dissent.)

Like every officer doesn't have a smart phone with a recording app.

Wookie Kim

Oh, yeah, his parents were original Star Wars fans.

It's Sunday

 

It's Sunday

  Remember this guy?

It's always the Bible pushers.

UPDATE 09/25/2025:

It's Sunday

 

Of course they were doing it anyway.

It's Sunday

 This was from last Sunday, but I missed it.

The antisemitism is coming from inside the house.

It's Sunday

“Pentecostalism represents a rare feat in American religion—a tradition that is growing,” said Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. And it plays well around the world. “The Pentecostal and charismatic movement is one of the biggest surges in the history of global and American Christianity,” said Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates. In the most expansive definition, Pentecostalism now claims as many as 600 million adherents worldwide, or more than a quarter of all Christians.

The fact that matters today—just days after what Minnesota lawmakers have called a tragic, targeted political assassination of lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the attempted assassination of lawmaker John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette—is that this style of religion, though diverse in its various expressions, is often intensely political. The best illustration of the point comes from the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Associated with C. Peter Wagner, the theologian and professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Missions, NAR is less a denomination than a secretive network. Its hierarchy of leadership includes apostles at the top, prophets next, and several other ranks below, and they often serve as front-line captains in America’s culture wars.

In his 2008 book “Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World,” Wagner explained that God has commanded true Christians to gain control of the “seven molders” or “mountains” of culture and influence, or seven areas of civilization: government, business, education, the media, the arts and entertainment, family, and religion. “Apostles,” he says, have a “responsibility for taking dominion” over “whatever molder of culture or subdivision God has placed them in,” which he casts as “taking dominion back from Satan.”

  Contrarian Substack

Continue reading.

Here comes another one SCOTUS' way

 

UPDATE 08/05/2025:

It's Sunday

 

It's Sunday

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05/27/2025:  And, as if that's not enough...

UPDATE 07/26/2025:

It's always the Bible pushers.

UPDATE 09/25/2025:

Testing the limits

On to the Supreme Court, no doubt.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Listen to his story.

It's Sunday

In an excerpt from his new book OPUS: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church, author Gareth Gore examines the ties binding Supreme Court kingmaker Leonard Leo and Opus Dei, a radical organization on the fringes of the Catholic Church that is accused of serious abuses and dedicated to the complete “re-Christianization” of the world.

[...]

Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit — a man from Georgia called Clarence Thomas, who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest. [...] Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee — although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court. Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin. It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.

  Rolling Stone

Putting aside teachings of their faith never seems to be a problem.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for John Roberts — a former member — to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court, the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate. A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court — Harriet Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society — and pressured him to nominate Samuel Alito, one of its members, in her place.

[...]

In 2011, Leo teamed up with Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni to co-found another nonprofit that successfully opposed an Islamic center being built near the site of the 9 ⁄11 attacks in New York, denigrated as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” A year later, he joined the board of the Catholic Association, another non-profit linked to the Corkerys, that funded campaigns to oppose same-sex marriage. For its part, the Catholic Information Center — despite in theory being apolitical — had also joined a suit against the Obama administration, challenging the requirement that employers provide and pay for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-causing drugs as part of employee health insurance plans.

[...]

The makeup of the [Catholic Information Center (CIC)] board was decidedly unpolitical — a mix of academics, lawyers, and volunteers who helped run the bookshop. Pat Cipollone, a lawyer who had been an assistant to Attorney General Bill Barr in the early nineties but who had since returned to the private sector, was the only board member who was remotely connected to the Washington political scene. But in 2014, all that changed. Alongside Leo, Bill Barr, the former attorney general, was also appointed.

Leo and his ilk would soon become a bridge connecting the prelature with important people on Capitol Hill — and the world of dark money populated by secretive billionaires with a deeply conservative agenda. Together, they would form a coalition — unified by their political connections, religious fervor, and money — that would reshape American society and destroy many hard-won civil rights.

[...]

The recruitment of Leonard Leo would cement ties between Opus Dei and the U.S. Supreme Court that had been developing for decades. [...] But with Leo and his network of dark money, Opus Dei’s penetration of Washington’s political and judicial worlds would now reach unprecedented levels.

[...]

As Leo’s access to the world of dark money grew, his Opus Dei friends the Corkerys became critical as a front for the tens of millions of dollars streaming through Leo’s hidden network of nonprofits. Neil and Ann had provided crucial cover for him during the campaign to secure the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, hiding the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to influence public opinion. As more dark money poured in starting in 2010, they began to do the same again through various nonprofits such as the Wellspring Committee and the Judicial Crisis Network. Their importance only grew following Scalia’s death, as Leo pumped his network for ever larger sums. In the weeks after Scalia’s death, the Corkerys began opening the purse strings in what would eventually become a $17 million campaign to stop Obama from replacing Scalia and instead ensure a reliable conservative filled the vacancy. It was just the start. Over the next five years, Leo and the Corkerys would oversee the transfer of almost $600 million of dark money to right-wing causes. Their hidden ecosystem would eventually enable a conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that would disassemble hard-won civil rights and turn back the clock on issues close to their hearts — on abortion, on affirmative action, and on vast swathes of what they saw as a progressive agenda.

They also used the network to line their own pockets.

Continue reading.

It's Sunday

Educators in Oklahoma are refusing a state order to incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans, setting up an inevitable showdown with the start of the school year just weeks away.

[...]

Walters’s guidance, which follows a June announcement of mandatory biblical curricula for grades five through 12, says that lessons on the Christian text should emphasize its historical context, literary significance and artistic and musical influence. The guidance also says a physical copy of the book should be in every classroom, along with copies of the Ten Commandments, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

[...]

Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of public instruction, last week released guidelines to schools for how they should be integrating the Bible into classrooms, saying educators who are against the initiative “will comply, and I will use every means to make sure of it.”

[...]

The Oklahoman reports that at least a dozen school districts in the state have stated publicly that they do not plan to comply.

[...]

“I suspect that the first thing that will happen is he will target a specific school district or multiple school districts who he believes are not complying with his directive, those school districts will then have to make a choice as to whether to bend [to] his whim or to sue,” said Rob Miller, superintendent of Bixby Public Schools.

“And I can tell you that if Bixby was one of those schools that he selected to come after, we would file a lawsuit,” Miller told The Hill.

[...]

“To date, schools have been advised by legal counsel (School Board Association and State Attorney General) to not follow the guidance because it goes against current Oklahoma State Law,” said Lee Northcutt, superintendent of Caddo Public Schools, in an email.

[...]

The day the guidance was released, a lawsuit was filed against Walters by Joseph Price, a resident of Mayes County. Price says in the suit he is “a concerned citizen and parent of children attending public schools in Oklahoma,” adding that the order violates the separation of church and state.

[...]

In a statement to The Hill, a spokesperson for Walters said, “Oklahoma school districts are required by state law to teach the historical significance of the Bible. Superintendent Walters will hold teachers and administrators accountable. Rogue, left-wing activists who refuse can leave Oklahoma and go to California.”

  The Hill

Jesus wept.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08/05/2024:  Crazier than you think.  Here's Louisiana's offering:

It's Sunday

Missouri has a job to do.

It's Sunday

One step to hold the line.

But how many other steps to crash through it?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

Support the ACLU.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 06:11 pm:

UPDATE 06/26/2024:

Which is why Louisiana enacted the law - to bring it back up to the current, corrupt Supreme Court to overturn that ruling, just as they did Roe v. Wade. 

It's Sunday

In his opinion [giving rights to incubated embryos], Parker wrote: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. [Alabama’s Sanctity of Life statute] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life—that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

  Elie Mystal @ The Nation

This is in the decision of a Alabama Supreme Court justice. Tom Parker

The word “God” appears 41 times in [Justice Tom] Parker’s opinion, which also liberally quotes from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis, and theologians like Thomas Aquinus and John Calvin. In an interview, Parker said he supports the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which is a code for imposing Christian rule based on biblical precepts on the rest of society.

[...]

The decision came out on Friday, and less than a week later two Alabama clinics, including the state’s largest hospital, have stopped offering IVF because they cannot assume the legal liability that could arise from discarding the unused, unwanted embryos IVF treatments produce.

[...]

Do the icicle babies get a Social Security number? Can their mothers count them as dependents on their taxes? Do their fathers have to pay child support? Are we all nine months older than we think and, if so, do 17-year-olds get to vote in the upcoming election?

[...]

This is clearly unconstitutional. The Alabama ruling, on its face, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court is privileging one religious sect—dominionist Christians—over all others, and it is doing this to extract legal payments from others, namely hospitals and clinics, that don’t share the justices’ religious viewpoint. Using the power of the state to force others to live in accordance with a particular religious belief is the very definition of state-sponsored religion.

[...]

What’s troubling to me is the extent to which the rest of the country has just accepted that we live under the rule of theocrats in robes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Establishment politicians, media figures, and even non-theocratic judges just kind of shrug and pretend that scripture is a reasonable basis for judicial pronouncements in a free society. If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds.

[...]

I don’t know how we combat the Christian takeover of the judicial branch—a takeover that has largely already happened—when most people in power won’t even acknowledge that a theocratic takeover of the judicial system is bad and out of step with the principles the country was literally founded on.

[...]

The priests and deacons and ministers of our time are using the bully pulpit of the judiciary to impose their version of God’s will on the rest of us, and their God is spiteful, bigoted, and misogynist.

We are entering a new Dark Age, one where, like the last one, science, education, and facts mean nothing, and Christian myths and legends are given the force of law. I don’t know how to stop them, but I think the first step is to recognize and name what they’re doing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03/07/2024:

It's Sunday

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.