Religious institutions win equal treatment. | Rich and poor agree more than you might think. | Travel ban goes forward. | Nobody should own culture. | Media gets cake case wrong.

July 1, 2017
Religious institutions cannot be discriminated against merely because they are religious. The claim that rising inequality harms democracy ignores the fact that income doesn’t account for much of people’s differences in political views. The Supreme Court has mostly lifted the injunctions against the Trump administration’s travel ban; it turns out that the government does in fact generally have the power to exclude foreign nationals for national security purposes. Nobody owns culture, nor should they if we favor progress. The media just can’t help distorting the case of the wedding cake that didn’t get made.
Religious institutions cannot be discriminated against merely because they are religious. The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Missouri violated the U.S. Constitution when it barred a preschool and daycare center from a program that provided funding for the replacement of playground surfaces with material made from recycled tires. The state’s reason for denying the funding was that the center was affiliated with the Trinity Lutheran Church. According to the state, the Missouri Constitution prohibits the state from providing funds to religious schools. That determination, said the Supreme Court, violates the U.S. Constitution’s Free Exercise of Religion Clause. “There is no dispute,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts, “that Trinity Lutheran is put to the choice between being a church and receiving a government benefit.” The decision, as Neal McCluskey points out, is “a blow against patently unequal treatment of religious Americans under state laws,” but “it is not sufficient to throw open the doors to full freedom and equality in education.” “[A]s Justices Thomas and Gorsuch note in their concurring opinions, the Trinity decision keeps in place the ruling in Locke v. Davey (2004) that a state could deny a student a scholarship otherwise available to him because he planned to study to become a minister. Trinity supports the rationale of denying funding for someone to learn to propagate religion. But why should someone be barred from accessing otherwise generally available funding only because the profession he wished to follow was religious? From a school choice perspective, if a goal of sending your child to a religious school with a voucher is that he or she will learn to evangelize, precedent still stands in your way.” [Cato Institute]   In politics, the rich and the non-rich agree 90 percent of the time. They say rising income inequality threatens democracy, but the gaps between what the affluent want and what middle- and lower-income Americans want is overstated, writes John York: “Alexander Branham and Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas and Stuart Soroka of the University of Michigan demonstrate that the top 10 percent of earners and median earners actually favor the same policies 90 percent of the time. In fact, 80 percent of the time, all three classes favored the same outcome, albeit with different degrees of enthusiasm.” [The Heritage Foundation]   Yes, the government has the power to exclude foreign nationals from the country for national security reasons. The Supreme Court decided on Monday to hear the government’s appeal of the decisions against the Trump administration’s travel ban. In so doing it lifted the injunctions against the travel ban, except “with respect to respondents and those similarly situated,” i.e, “against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.” The Court’s per curium decision explained: “[T]he Government’s interest in enforcing [the ban], and the Executive’s authority to do so, are undoubtedly at their peak when there is no tie between the foreign national and the United States. Indeed, [the Executive Order] itself distinguishes between foreign nationals who have some connection to this country, and foreign nationals who do not, by establishing a case-by-case waiver system primarily for the benefit of individuals in the former category. To prevent the Government from pursuing that objective by enforcing [the ban] against foreign nationals unconnected to the United States would appreciably injure its interests, without alleviating obvious hardship to anyone else.” Much of the Court’s opinion clarifies what it means to have a “bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,” and includes the proviso that “a nonprofit group devoted to immigration issues may not contact foreign nationals from the designated countries, add them to client lists, and then secure their entry by claiming injury from their exclusion.” [Internal citations omitted.] [The Supreme Court of the United States]   Using modern medicine is cultural appropriation, too. The movement to ban “cultural appropriation” has reached the United Nations, and it’s nothing less than an attempt to claim intellectual property over a culture, writes Pierre Guy Veer: “It is rather ironic that those Natives would only want to ban ‘appropriation’ of ‘their’ culture. Why not push it to its logical conclusion and call for a ban on all cultural appropriation? This means that they would have to forgo every single technology that was imported from the rest of the world since 1492. In other words, they would have to abandon mathematics, writing, any form of metal casting, currency, all languages not originally from Pre-Columbus America, modern medicine, etc. […] “Besides, they have the concept of property wrong. Property implies a physical object like a house or clothes you bought or made yourself. It is as old as human civilization and is scarce. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is a monopoly granted by governments to keep someone from using something that is never scarce: ideas. This has given rise to questionable practices like patenting genes (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013) to keep anyone from researching it for a given period of time. Or the constant lobbying from the Disney Studios to keep Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain – he would have in 1984.” [Foundation for Economic Education]   Media lose track of which issue it is arguing about with conservatives. The media just can’t help distorting the case of the wedding cake that didn’t get made in Colorado (Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission), writes David Harsanyi: “[N]o matter how many times people repeat it, the case isn’t about discrimination or challenging gay marriage. But when the news first broke, USA Today, for example, tweeted, ‘The Supreme Court has agreed to reopen the national debate over same-sex marriage.’ The headline (and story) on the website was worse; it read, ‘Supreme Court will hear religious liberty challenge to gay weddings.’ Others similarly framed the case. (And, don’t worry, ‘religious liberty’ is almost always solidly ensconced inside quotation marks to indicate that social conservatives are just using it as a facade.) “There is an impulse to frame every issue as a clash between the tolerant and the closed-minded. But the Masterpiece case doesn’t challenge, undermine or relitigate the issue of same-sex marriage in America. Gay marriage wasn’t even legal in Colorado when this incident occurred. “So, the Associated Press’ headline, ‘Supreme Court to Decide If Baker Can Refuse Gay Couple Wedding Cake,’ and story are also wrong. As is The New York Times headline ‘Justices to Hear Case on Baker’s Refusal to Serve Gay Couple,’ which was later changed to the even worse headline ‘Justices to Hear Case on Religious Objections to Same-Sex Marriage.’ “A person with only passing interest in this case might be led to believe that Phillips is fighting to hang a ‘No Gays Allowed’ sign in his shop. In truth, he never refused to serve a gay couple. He didn’t even really refuse to sell David Mullins and Charlie Craig a wedding cake. They could have bought without incident. Everything in his shop was available to gays and straights and anyone else who walked in his door. What Phillips did was refuse to use his skills to design and bake a unique cake for a gay wedding. Phillips didn’t query about anyone’s sexual orientation. It was the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that took it upon itself to peer into Phillips’ soul, indict him and destroy his business over a thought crime.” [Reason]
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