Wednesday, August 07, 2024
‘Patently Anti-Religious’: Tim Walz’s History of Restricting Faith-Based Institutions
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has faced multiple lawsuits accusing him of infringing on religious liberty during his six years as Minnesota governor.
Walz encountered legal challenges for COVID-19 lockdown policies that religious organizations argued were discriminatory, placing stricter requirements on churches than businesses. He also encountered pushback after signing a law that stripped faith-based schools of funding for a program that offers free college credits to high school students.
[Vice President Kamala Harris, now Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, tapped Walz on Tuesday to be her running mate.]
Walz determined in a May 13, 2020, executive order that retailers would be allowed to reopen at 50% capacity, but he left religious gatherings capped at 10 people. After Catholic and Lutheran churches in Minnesota announced plans to resume meeting in person regardless of the governor’s order, he negotiated to allow religious groups to operate at 25% capacity, according to the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune.
Two churches nevertheless moved forward with their lawsuit over discriminatory treatment. Walz settled in May 2021 after the state’s motion to dismiss was denied, agreeing to treat religious gatherings the same as “the least restricted secular business regulated by the order.”
Three churches backed by the Thomas More Society also filed a lawsuit in August 2020, arguing Walz violated their religious liberty by mandating masks, limiting capacity, and requiring social distancing.
“Governor Walz, a former teacher, gets an F in religious liberties,” Thomas More Society special counsel Erick Kaardal said in a press release at the time.
In May, the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld Walz’s declaration of a peacetime emergency in response to COVID-19, according to the Upper Midwest Law Center.
Walz also faced a lawsuit in May 2023 after he signed into law a bill barring schools that require students to affirm a statement of faith from receiving funding from Minnesota’s Post Secondary Enrollment Options program, which allows high school students to earn free college credits. Minnesota agreed not to enforce the law while the lawsuit is ongoing.
Becket senior counsel Diana Thomson called the state’s decision to exclude faith-based schools “patently anti-religious.”
Walz did sign legislation in May that clarified religious exemptions from the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on categories such as race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.
Republicans pushed for the bill after the state Legislature added “gender identity” as a protected class but didn’t add a religious exemption, according to the Minnesota Reformer.
In April 2023, Walz signed a bill into law that banned “conversion therapy,” defined as any practice that seeks to “change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” for clients under 18. At the same time, he signed a bill to make Minnesota a “trans refuge” state, which allows state courts to assume “temporary emergency jurisdiction” if a child has “been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care.”
The Harris campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Walz’s record on religious liberty.
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Arab Taxi driver rampages through Cologne, smashing into two groups of women before hero manages to apprehend him
A taxi driver went on a rampage through Cologne's old town, running over two groups of women before a hero managed to apprehend him.
The Jordanian, 44, from Velbert, reportedly raced his car down a street in North Rhine-Westphalia shortly after 10pm where he hit two women - aged 22 and 23 - head on.
He then sped on in his Volkswagen Passat towards the Rhine River where he hit two more women as a fifth woman managed to save herself by jumping to the side, BILD report.
German reports suggested the act was 'deliberate', and a 27-year-old woman has been left seriously injured.
A waiter, 34, from the brewery in front of where the crime took place - near to Alter Markt - was described as a 'hero' after he managed to detain the driver until the police arrived.
A police statement read that the man 'gave chase on foot', putting himself in grave danger, after the taxi came towards him without breaking.
The outside mirror was said to have touched his upper body after he jumped to the side.
After the Jordanian driver exited his vehicle at Alter Markt, the waiter held the driver until police arrived.
It is said that a similar incident occurred in Essen around an hour earlier, where a pedestrian suffered life-threatening injuries from a crash.
Cologne police are investigating whether it is the same driver as the one in Cologne.
Both cocaine and cannabis were found in the 44-year-old's car after he was detained, and a blood test was ordered
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Raising the Criminal Age Only Sweeps Youth Crime Under the Carpet
The Victorian state government has committed to raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 years old to 12, and to 14 years old by 2027 in an effort, it says, to avoid young people entering the criminal justice system early.
Yet, the recent case of a 14-year-old, who is on bail and had more than 380 charges, struck out because of his age.
He has been described by a magistrate as “causing terror” in the community, which sums up all that is wrong with plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility.
Not holding young offenders accountable for their actions will not halt the issue of youth crime.
If anything, it will likely reinforce the sense of impunity many young offenders already feel, and will do nothing to stem the number of home invasions, thefts, assaults, and robberies that have skyrocketed post-pandemic.
The Victorian Crime Statistics Agency reveals the number of alleged offences committed by young people aged 10 to 14 has increased 37 percent over the last five years. In 2024, there were over 6,800 alleged offences committed by this age group.
However, according to data released by the Productivity Commission, only 15 young people aged 10 to 13 were incarcerated over the 2022-23 financial year.
These figures show what happens when you do not punish or seek to rehabilitate young offenders. Little wonder many youths gleefully plaster their crimes across social media, underscoring their contempt for the law.
The government’s justification for raising the criminal age limit is that children belong in schools rather than the criminal justice system, this is unlikely to alter their mindset.
Not only would this teach young offenders that they can evade the consequences of their behaviour, but it also provides a dangerous opportunity for older offenders to recruit younger people to commit crimes on their behalf, safe in the knowledge that these children will not be prosecuted.
Lack of Options for Judges
Further, the debate around the age of criminal responsibility is driven by the assumption that entanglement with the criminal justice system inevitably means jail time for children.
This reveals a key problem with existing arrangements—namely the lack of deterrents available to judges when sentencing young people.
It is widely recognised that detention can be harmful for young offenders and should be avoided where possible.
Instead, many offenders, particularly non-violent offenders, are handed light non-custodial sentences that fail to address the factors behind their behaviour.
There must be punishments available to judges that are appropriate for those offenders not serious enough to be incarcerated, but whose conduct—and the decision-making behind it—requires intervention.
There’s a Model to Copy
Sentencing reform should begin with adopting practices successfully implemented in the United States. Rancho Cielo in California has established a successful program for non-violent offenders on probation and at-risk youth, with a focus on rehabilitation and providing skills for life.
Youth offenders are sent to the ranch as students, where they receive a high school education while also being enrolled in workshops that teach practical and employable skills.
The ranch operates at just a quarter of the cost of local prisons and has reduced youth reoffending rates from 40 percent to 15 percent over two decades.
Such programs not only take the offender away from social groups encouraging offending, but also stop youth offenders heading down the wrong path.
The most dangerous offender is one with nothing to lose. Giving young offenders hope and opportunity to build a career gives them something to lose.
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Australia: Sacking antisemitic employee will achieve nothing
Sacking the Officeworks employee at the centre of last week's brouhaha would turn her into a poster child for the anti-Semitic left, writes Janet Albrechtsen:
If Officeworks sacked the young woman at the centre of last week’s storm for refusing to serve a Jewish man, that might satisfy some people – particularly the noisy ones on social media.
A dismissal could demonstrate a serious consequence for an egregiously offensive action.
But it will, most definitely, also turn her into a martyr, a poster child for the anti-Semitic left. So, let’s pause and think.
If anyone thinks sacking this employee will settle this issue, they haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in schools and homes, universities and workplaces, and courtrooms too.
Caught on camera, the young woman’s language is a clue. The staff member, in her early 20s, can be heard telling the Jewish customer who wants to laminate a page of The Australian Jewish News featuring his trip to Israel, that she is pro-Palestinian and “I’m not comfortable doing that”. She says it’s company policy that she doesn’t have to do a job that makes her uncomfortable.
There is an opportunity here to consider something fundamental: how does a woman in her early 20s come to think that because she feels “uncomfortable” she has a right to refuse service to a Jew? Answering that question is much harder than issuing a dismissal notice.
Harder because blame extends well beyond this deluded young woman. It reaches into management ranks of Officeworks, into the boardroom of its owner, Wesfarmers – and into every company where workplace codes routinely use touchy-feely language that may lead an employee, especially a young one, to imagine that if something, or someone, makes them feel uncomfortable they can object.
Officeworks’ Print and Copy Terms and Conditions state that a customer must not provide material to an employee that “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, invasive of privacy, vulgar, obscene, profane or which may harass or cause distress or inconvenience to, or incite hatred of, any person”.
Officeworks employs thousands of young people. How do they determine what is “threatening, abusive, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane”?
Why was this young woman empowered to decide what material might “harass, cause distress or inconvenience to, or incite hatred” to “any person”?
This is not to defend this young woman – refusing to serve this Jewish customer was abhorrent. But let’s not forget that Officeworks has a policy that this woman believes empowers her to act in this abhorrent manner.
It’s a big enough ask expecting young employees to fairly determine what is incitement to violence when courts have offered no clue because prosecutors are loath to use the existing provisions that ban such actions.
At the other end of the spectrum, what are inexperienced employees to make of the legal free-for-all when it comes to subjective feelings such as “causing distress or inconvenience”?
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi is suing Pauline Hanson under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act claiming Hanson offended her. Faruqi has threatened action against this newspaper’s Johannes Leak, too, again claiming she was offended by a cartoon. Jewish groups are considering using 18C to prosecute words that they say offend and insult them.
Why are we outraged that a member of a generation raised in the shadow of the legal system that put a person’s feelings at the centre of laws to punish people for causing offence might think that their feelings trump all too?
We could have altered this offence trajectory. Instead, moves in 2017 to rein in the “offence and insult” part of section 18C went nowhere. Liberal MP Julian Leeser – who in recent days called for Officeworks’ chief executive to “hang his head in shame” – celebrated when feelings remained central to 18C. So did Jewish groups.
Politicians, poorly named human rights activists and Jewish groups still insist that we keep feelings at the centre of laws that can be used to punish people for causing offence. The young woman at the centre of the Officeworks brouhaha has simply moved the feelings bar a tad further down the line from actions that “offend” to those that make her “uncomfortable”. And why not, given that Officeworks policies do it too?
As a society, we can hardly pretend we didn’t see this coming. We have spent the past few decades turning a young generation into a fragile one. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff wrote about this 10 years ago. Their essay in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind, laid out what was happening on American campuses. It’s little different in Australia.
Haidt and Lukianoff wrote about the frailty of university students raised by over-protective parents, where the “flight to safety” happened at school too when playgrounds became risk-free. These “social-media natives” cocooned in silos might be different, the authors said, “in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts”. They need only look around to see a legal system where being offended provides an entry into a courtroom to make someone pay for hurting their feelings.
In September 2015, Haidt and Lukianoff warned that “attempts to shield students from words, ideas and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for students”. They warned that it would be bad for workplaces, too, when students stepped into the real world, inevitably confronting what they were shielded from on campus.
It would be bad for democracy, too, the authors predicted with laser-sharp accuracy. “When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as wilfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.”
Ten years on, we can remove “campus”, “college” and “university”, and “students” from The Coddling of the American Mind thesis and insert “workplace” and “employees”. We have reaped as we have sown.
To turn this around, Haidt and Lukianoff said it was critical to “minimise distorted thinking” so that those who felt discomfort “see the world more accurately”.
Maybe, then, sacking this Officeworks staffer is too easy – and also misguided. Maybe visiting the Melbourne Holocaust Museum is a better way to challenge this young woman’s distorted thinking. Her scheduled visit there (agreed after an earlier complaint) took place after the one caught on camera. If learning some history, gaining an insight into a deeply complex problem made her feel uncomfortable, all the better.
It’s certainly preferable to turning her into an unemployed martyr for the left.
This doesn’t get Officeworks or Wesfarmers off the hook. They need a new set of terms and conditions to make clear that just because something might cause distress – or discomfort, as this woman called it – that is no reason to refuse service.
Parents, politicians and universities have some important work to do, too. Complicit in raising a coddled generation, a good place to start is reminding kids, students, and adults that, as Haidt and Lukianoff wrote, “subjective feelings are not always a trustworthy guide; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong”.
Oh, and we should repeal section 18C.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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