Sunday, May 17, 2020


The Religious Freedom of a Nation May Depend on One Small Cake Shop

Masterpiece Cakeshop, a small family business that sits opposite a car wash in the Mission Trace Shopping Center, has survived a Supreme Court case and is struggling through the pandemic.

The challenges of running a small business during shutdowns, food supply disruptions, and economic turmoil aren’t unique to the Colorado cakeshop which specializes in custom designed cakes. But Jack Philips, the cakeshop’s masterpiece creator, has also spent 8 years battling for his religious freedom.

And the struggling cakeshop off South Wadsworth is dealing with its third lawsuit.

“Since its birth in the fires of the French Revolution, the political left has been at war with religion," David Horowitz wrote in Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.

Eight years is a short time to wait to destroy a cake shop in a struggle that has gone on for centuries.

Jack Philips is a devout Christian. Masterpiece Cakeshop is closed on Sundays. And while he loves detailing glazed flour petals for weddings, his art expresses his deepest moral convictions.

That’s why he won’t even bake cakes for Halloween.

Six years of religious persecution appeared to have ended when the Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had discriminated against Jack’s religious beliefs after the Commission had not only ordered him to make cakes celebrating gay weddings, but its members had compared his dissent to slavery, and rejected the idea that religious freedom deserves to be respected.

And yet the political mafia that had tormented him all these years made it clear that it wasn’t going to stop. DNC Chair Tom Perez vowed to continue the fight in a press release calling for "equality" in "bakeries". 211 Congressional Democrats, including Senator Michael Bennett, and future Governor Jared Polis, had filed a brief against the small cakeshop. After the ruling, Polis vowed to “stand strong.”

The Human Rights Campaign, a massive LGBT lobby with a $43 million budget, had submitted not one, but two amicus briefs against the cakeshop. One of those briefs featured a variety of celebrity chefs who make more in one day than Masterpiece Cakeshop and Jack Philips have in their entire existence.

The HRC claims to have raised $20 million for Obama.

The entire Left, from LGBT pressure groups like GLAAD, to the SEIU, the NAACP, the American Psychological Association, the American Bar Association, the cities of Los Angeles and New York, and even the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, poured down briefs.

They weren’t going to leave Jack alone.

And so, the Supreme Court ruling didn't provide much of a break for the small family business which had been forced to cut its staff and get out of the wedding cake business entirely to avoid more lawsuits.

The radicals seeking a confrontation began placing orders for cakes with Satan, upside down crosses or pentagrams on them. Philips believed that one of his tormentors was Autumn ‘Adam’ Charlie Scardina, a local lawyer, who at one point allegedly tried to order a red-and-black cake with an image of Satan on it.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission has yet to determine that there is a civil right that obligates a Christian baker to design and bake a cake with Satan on it, but after the Supreme Court took up the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, Scardina called to order a gender transition cake and was turned down.

Scardina then filed a complaint. That was in 2017.

The timing of the attempted order, “moments after news broke that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear Jack’s first case”, makes it obvious that this was not a legitimate attempt to obtain a cake, but a fallback legal strategy to continue the harassment in case the Supreme Court ruled for religious liberty.

The Commission found Jack liable for not making Scardina’s gender transition cake. But the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the small business, sued the state for discrimination. And the Colorado AG agreed to drop the case if the cakeshop would drop its suit.  Instead of appealing the dismissal, Scardina sued the cakeshop in the District Court for the City and County of Denver.

The lawyer is demanding over $100,000 and a jury trial to punish Jack for the cake that wasn’t.

Scardina had not been placing an order in good faith, but seeking to entrap the cakeshop by first placing an order for a birthday cake and then announcing that it was also a gender transition cake.

That’s not how you order a cake, but that’s how a radical familiar with the law entraps a good man. And Scardina's site is titled, "Attorney and Activist". While Scardina accuses Philips of deception, it’s the “attorney and activist” who was being deceptive by misleadingly structuring the cake request.

Scardina claimed to have heard ads for Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2017 and ordered the cake in a "hopeful" mood. In fact, Scardina had been harassing Philips since 2012, sending him taunting emails that mocked his religion. The Satan cakes alone suggest a calculated pattern of harassment.

Despite claiming that the cake was needed to celebrate Scardina’s gender transition, the name Autumn appears all the way back in 2013 paperwork for the Adams County Department of Human Services. It even appears in the records of the California Bar Association. Since Scardina moved to Colorado in 2008, that cake order would have been a very belated celebration of the alleged gender transition.

The lawyer harassing Masterpiece Cakeshop had been working for Adams County for seven years. Scardina is familiar with the system and is exploiting it to harass a religious man for his beliefs.

Jack Philips won two lawsuits, one initiated by Scardina’s complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, but no matter how many legal cases he wins, the harassment campaign continues.

After the Supreme Court cracked down on the Commission’s hostility to Jack’s religious beliefs, his tormentors decided to pursue a strategy of more directly harassing him through the courts.

Paula Greisen, the lawyer who is representing Scardina, also represented Craig and Mullins, the gay couple who had originally sued Masterpiece Cakeshop, making this the case that never ends.

The Left has the resources to continue harassing, threatening, and suing Philips indefinitely.

If Scardina loses, the next case has almost certainly already been prepped and waiting in the wings. The Left will not stop until it has smashed a small cakeshop tucked into the side of a shopping center.

Can one small business owner who is already on the brink stand up to 8 more years of this? The religious freedom of a nation may hinge on the determination of one cakemaker to resist a machine of hate.

As the Alliance Defending Freedom filing notes, "Phillips has suffered enough. The state’s past prosecutions generated death threats and vandalism and cost Phillips seven years of his life, 40% of his family income, and most of his employees — harms that endure even though he eventually won his legal fights. This crusade against Phillips and his faith should stop once and for all."

What’s at stake is not a cake, but a primordial struggle between religion and a radical cult as David Horowitz had described in his groundbreaking book, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.

"Radicals in America today don't have the political power to execute religious people and destroy their house of worship," David Horowitz wrote in Dark Agenda. "Yet they openly declare their desire to obliterate religion."

Destroying freedom of conscience is not a civil rights cause, but a crusade against religion.

The Supreme Court’s ruling penalized the egregious hostility by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission to the very idea of religious freedom, but didn’t settle the fundamental First Amendment question at stake.

And as long as that question remains unsettled, the harassment will continue.

In defending his right not to bake a cake that violates his beliefs, Jack Philips and his small cakeshop stood in front of a vast national bulldozer that seeks to destroy the very idea of religious freedom. The Supreme Court victory by the beleaguered small business didn’t save his business, it made him a target.

The Left understands that destroying Jack, even if he wins every court case, will make an example out of him. And until the Supreme Court upholds his inalienable freedom to be true to his faith, not only Jack, but every person of conscience will have his or her freedom held hostage in Lakewood, Colorado.

Until the freedom of that small cakeshop is settled, none of us are truly free.

SOURCE 





New York's Terrible Decisions on Wuhan Coronavirus Screwed the Rest of America

The curve of Wuhan coronavirus cases across the country has flattened and cities are slowly coming out of stay-at-home orders. Businesses are opening back up and people are doing what they can to return to normalcy.

But the bad decisions made by politicians in the hardest-hit areas, specifically New York, should not go unnoticed as we start to pull away from the pandemic.

On March 2, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was encouraging residents to continue their regular behavior. He even gave them ideas about what to do in crowded areas. The virus had been in the country since the end of January and rapidly spreading. Italy, a preview of what could come to the U.S. without proper preparation, was completely overrun, devastated and chaotic.

"Since I'm encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus, I thought I would offer some suggestions. Here's the first: thru Thurs 3/5 go see 'The Traitor' @FilmLinc. If 'The Wire' was a true story + set in Italy, it would be this film," he tweeted.

When things got serious just a week later, and New York City came under siege from the disease, de Blasio berated the federal government and President Trump for failing to send medical supplies or personal protective equipment. But it turned out, de Blasio didn't order them.

"It was not until March 6 and March 10 — over two months after the coronavirus outbreak first hit China — that they finally secured the first emergency procurements of masks and hand sanitizer, according to the city comptroller's office," The New York Post reported on March 20.

By this time, the federal government, led by President Trump, had been sounding the alarm about the disease for over a month. Those warnings went unheeded and crashed into disaster.

As the crisis got worse, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo followed President Trump's lead with daily press briefings. While Democrats and their allies in the media were hailing Cuomo's performance, they were rabidly opposing and criticizing President Donald Trump.

When cases in New York City and the surrounding areas got out of control, President Trump floated the idea of shutting down travel to and from the state. Cuomo was irate and said a quarantine of New York would be a "federal declaration of war."

According to a tracing study detailed by The New York Times, the disease spread around the country as New Yorkers traveled.

"New York City's coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country," the paper found and published on May 7. "The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast."

"The findings are drawn from geneticists' tracking signature mutations of the virus, travel histories of infected people and models of the outbreak by infectious disease experts," the reporting continues.

It turns out an early quarantine could have saved the rest of the country from economic havoc. But back to New York.

Since the beginning of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, one thing has been clear: the elderly are the most likely to die from the disease. Despite this fact, Governor Cuomo mandated that nursing homes accept virus patients. Workers from these homes pleaded patients be sent to hospitals or the USNS Mercy, but they were ignored. The results have been horrific and deadly.

"Another 1,700 coronavirus deaths have been reported in nursing homes and adult care facilities around the state," Spectrum News NY1 reports. "According to Gov.  Andrew Cuomo's office, 4,813 people have previously died from COVID-19 in the state's nursing homes since March 1."

Further, Cuomo's stay-at-home and shelter in place orders have been ineffective.

"This is a surprise…66 percent of the people were at home, which is shocking to us," Cuomo said during a May 7 press conference. "They're not working. They're not traveling…We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percent of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work — that these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That's not the case. They were predominantly at home."
Despite this statistic, Governor Cuomo extended the state's stay-at-home order until June 13 this week.

New York City politicians handled major steps of this process the completely wrong way and yet the rest of the country has been expected to follow their lead. When Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis chose a different, successful approach to handling the disease, he was roundly berated for not following the New York model. Thank goodness he didn't.

For the first half of the year, the rest of the country has been held hostage to New York, where decisions by leftist politicians led to the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus to the rest of the country. It's beyond the time that their advice be ignored so that competent people elsewhere can get back to their lives. Don't forget their actions when de Blasio and Cuomo demand a taxpayer-funded bailout.

SOURCE 






The pernicious Logan Act should have been scrapped long ago

by Jeff Jacoby

WHAT DOES Gen. Michael Flynn, the now-exonerated former White House national security adviser, have in common with Jimmy Carter, Jane Fonda, and Nancy Pelosi?

Answer: All of them were threatened with the so-called Logan Act, one of the oldest federal statutes, and arguably the most pernicious.

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to one count of lying to an FBI agent when he was asked about his communications with Russia's ambassador to the United States during the transition to Donald Trump's inauguration. But he later withdrew that guilty plea, and the Justice Department last week moved to dismiss the case. It did so, according to court filings, after evidence emerged that the bureau long ago knew there was no legitimate reason to believe that Flynn had engaged in any unlawful collusion with the Russian government. It pursued him anyway, arranging an interview in hopes of getting him to say something inculpatory.

Handwritten notes by the FBI's counterintelligence chief indicate that agents were angling "to get [Flynn] to lie, so we can prosecute him" or "get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act" in his conversation with the Russian envoy. Yet it was clear all along, as the Justice Department documents show, that a Logan Act prosecution had no chance of succeeding.

The Logan Act, embedded in the US Code at Title 18, Section 953, makes it a crime for any citizen to engage in unauthorized "correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government ... in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States." A crime, that is, for any American who doesn't represent the president or his administration to communicate with a foreign government about US policy. The statute's ostensible purpose is to prevent private interference in the conduct of foreign affairs. It certainly was never meant to prevent an incoming president's national security adviser from discussing US-Russian relations with the Russian ambassador.

There was never the slightest likelihood that Flynn would be charged with violating the Logan Act, let alone convicted of doing so. Nobody has ever been convicted of violating the Logan Act. In the 221 years since it was enacted, it has been used for one purpose only: as a cudgel to threaten political opponents.

The Logan Act is a relic of what Thomas Jefferson called "the reign of witches," when the Federalist majority in Congress approved, and President John Adams signed, laws making it a crime to oppose the president. Two of those laws were the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts; the Logan Act was another. It was named for George Logan, a Philadelphia Quaker who attempted to privately negotiate a détente with France at a time when the Adams administration was deeply hostile to the French government. Outraged by Logan's "temerity and impertinence," Adams asked Congress to make it illegal to communicate with foreign officials "without authority." Congress obliged. The law has been with us ever since.

The Logan Act is invariably brandished to criminalize political differences. When John Kerry was engaged two years ago in "shadow diplomacy" to preserve the Iran nuclear deal he had negotiated as secretary of state, Trump said he should be charged with a "total violation of the Logan Act." I wrote at the time that while Kerry might be wrong about Iran, the suggestion that he be prosecuted for meeting with foreign leaders was absurd. Equally absurd was Kerry's own suggestion three years earlier, when he was still secretary of state, that a group of Republicans led by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton had run afoul of the Logan Act (or even the Constitution) by writing to Iranian officials to derail the deal Kerry was negotiating.

The litany of Logan Act accusations is a long one. Among the many who have been accused are former president Jimmy Carter, for meeting with Hamas officials in 2008; Jesse Jackson, for his personal missions to Cuba and Nicaragua in 1984; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for sitting down with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2007; and Jane Fonda, for her infamous trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam War.

If the Logan Act were ever tested in court, it would almost certainly be struck down as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. Nevertheless, as long as it remains on the books, it will tempt malicious prosecutors and zealous political operatives. If that wasn't clear before the Flynn case, it is now. The Logan Act is dangerous and un-American, and ought to be expunged once and for all.

SOURCE 





The importance of challenging expertise

Even great minds can be swayed by the prejudices of the age.

As everyone now knows, science is contested. Of course, many aspects of science continue unchallenged – things like the electron mass or the structure of DNA. But other aspects, such as the speed of light, are open to constant refinement. Some aspects will soon cease to matter entirely to everyday science.

But the sort of science we are most familiar with right now, the science of exploring the unknown, is very different. It is an emergent process – a messy, gradual approximation towards truth, replete with uncertainty and ambiguity. It is advanced by human beings within social systems. And this appreciation of it as neither firm nor fixed, as not grounded in clear or inviolable evidence, is currently contributing to a cultural epiphany.

Almost every aspect of the coronavirus outbreak has been, and will continue to be, drawn into question by scientists and others for some time. That is how it should be. The origins, extent, actions, infectivity, durability and lethality of the virus are disputed, as are the best way to mitigate its spread and treat its associated diseases. Discussions of all these things draw on models, with built-in assumptions about all these aspects, as well as assumptions about how people behave.

The experts disagree on various issues here. This is because their interpretation of what currently passes for the available evidence – on everything from fatality rates to the benefits of wearing masks, from lockdowns to the reliability of tests – matters as much as the evidence itself. It is a competition for meaning within science.

That some scientists are venal, fallible and selfish may come to be as important as their virtue, diligence and humanism. The systems they work within matter, too. Mechanisms for the peer review of their work, the success, or not, of their funding applications, and the pursuit of promotions, are all open to gaming and interference. These are all framed by what some sociologists call ‘cultural scripts’.

After all, who decides what questions should be pursued in all this, what matters most and what ought to be prioritised. How any ensuing data (limited as it is in both scope and specificity) is to be interpreted is another key issue. Inevitably, decision-makers (and scientists) have other agendas, too – as we all do. Science, then, is not an exact science, but a deeply cultural activity.

A short contribution, titled ‘Misanthropy and Political Ideology’, to the American Sociological Review in 1956, illuminates some of the issues raised here. Its author, Morris Rosenberg, wanted to explore how individuals’ political ideologies are formed. He noted the research on factors such as personality characteristics, interpersonal relationships and group affiliations, among others. In his opinion, however, what had been overlooked was our fundamental attitudes about human nature or, as he highlighted in the title of his piece, misanthropy.

At its heart, democracy rests on having faith in the rationality of people. This affects how we interpret the actions of others, and it shapes what we each think is necessary for society to function. In other words, our most deeply held views of what human beings are like shape ‘the principles, practices and policies of a political system’, he argued. He sought to measure faith in people, correlating this against how we view our relationship to government, free speech and state control.

His conclusion was that, more than any other factors, these things determined individuals’ political outlooks. And what was true then about politics is also true today in relation to science and scientists, not least because science and scientists increasingly hold sway over much political decision-making. But what do we actually know about these people, about scientists? That the PM’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, attended a recent meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) pales into insignificance when we begin to ask what the actual scientists really think about us.

We know full well how recent events – from Brexit to Trump and beyond – have led elites to question the rationality of the people and, implicitly, democracy itself. How many of this expert group of scientists potentially share these prejudices? And how might that shape decision-making? As we know, the dominant impulse in public-health circles is a patrician one – one of the state telling the people what is for their own good.

We see scientific questions being contested now every day. Maybe the next time a politician or scientist talks with such certainty about ‘the science’ – in relation to climate change or our diets – we ought first to think about how they view other people, free speech, and whether they look to the state, rather than the people, to control things.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here
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