by My governor, Tim Pawlenty, is at it again. Years ago, after September 11, he used immigration as a “wedge issue,” linking it to terrorism to scare and upset the voters of Minnesota. Now, he has not only waded into the question of revising the 14th amendment on birthright citizenship, saying, “ I think we’re the [...]
Read the full postMonthly Archive for August, 2010
by A project has sent me to reading all things Brandeis. I ran across an interesting statement by Brandeis that may capture an important aspect of the religious practice of fasting. This may seem strange to those who know much about Brandeis. Brandeis lived a very modest lifestyle, but I know of no instance of his [...]
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by Mayor Bloomberg’s speech tonight may go down in history as one of the great American speeches that people are reading a hundred years from now. Time’s Mark Halpern describes it as “best defense, speech of a lifetime.”
Read the full postIt has long been my sense that most men’s sexual orientation is attraction to numerous female partners. Most, at least after marriage, do a pretty good job of controlling that inclination. Even those who cannot control themselves generally profess to believe in the moral and social responsibility to remain monogamous. This may be changing. A [...]
Read the full postI want to follow up on Perry’s post and explain why the debate over the Islamic Center at Ground Zero has changed my view of the Convent at Auschwitz. I use prejudice rather than offense as the starting point. It would be bigoted to oppose a Convent because it’s Christian or a Mosque because it’s [...]
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by Perry has, in his usual measured and thoughtful way, discussed the analogy that some have proposed between the controversy over the convent at Auschwitz, on the one hand, and the Cordoba Project near Ground Zero, on the other. I think there’s a bit more to the analogy than he does, but I’d like to put that [...]
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by In 1657, Peter Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Netherland (now New York), who had no patience for religious diversity, got wind of the presence of Quakers in the settlement at Flushing. He ordered the town officials in Flushing to hand over the Quakers for arrest. The officials refused. They wrote Stuyvesant a letter, the Flushing [...]
Read the full postFurther thoughts on the alleged parallel between opposition to the planned Islamic center (Park51) near Ground Zero and opposition about ten years ago to the building of a convent and the erection of crosses next to the Auschwitz death camps: I wrote in my first post that the relevant question in neither case should be [...]
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by One of the many ways the Constitution’s framers showed their collective wisdom was by embedding the rule of law into the very framework of our system of government. Judicial review of popularly enacted laws keeps the majority accountable to underlying constitutional principles. Of course, one person’s core constitutional safeguard is another’s judicial activism run amok. And so, in a range of hot-button “culture war” cases, lower courts have tried to steer clear of the dreaded “judicial activist” label by shifting their analysis from the constitutional principles themselves to the facts through which the principles may be invoked. At times these days, the rule of law looks more like the rule of facts.
Read the full postWhen opposition began to get stirred up to the planned Islamic cultural center near (not at!) Ground Zero, I thought the objections were intolerant, and even silly. Then I was stopped short by the comparison, made by the ADL and others, between opposition to the center and Jewish opposition about ten years ago — opposition [...]
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