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Unreasonable Doubt: Vincent Bugliosi Defends Agnosticism

By Eric Reitan

…rtainty, we think it is better to err on the side of letting the guilty go free than on the side of shattering the lives of the innocent. And so, even if we’re pretty confident of a person’s guilt, reasonable doubt is enough to set them free. Or at least that’s how things work in the context of the criminal justice system. On a more personal level, the presumption may well go the other way. Suppose the accused is your Uncle Jack. And suppose the c…

As Court Prepares to Rule on Sacred Apache Site, Religious Freedom Faces an American Right Prized Above All Others

By Dana Lloyd

…he First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993). This case has precedent working against them, however. In Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, the U.S. Supreme Court declared constitutional a plan to build a road and log trees in the High Country in Northern California, an area sacred to the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa peoples. Forty…

Vaccine Mandates are Constitutional; Religious Exemptions are Unnecessary and Harmful

By Andrew L. Seidel

…emptions are not constitutionally required. People are fond of saying that freedom isn’t free, but nor is it absolute. And thinking in constitutional absolutes is killing Americans. Literally. The claim that the Second Amendment protects a sacred and unlimited right is a legal narrative recently invented, deliberately advanced, and grossly manipulated by the NRA—and it’s killing Americans. The Supreme Court’s political manipulation of the constitu…

I Am Better than Him

By Amina Wadud

…this religion; I am in this social economic class; I am any category of a number of things: including food consumption. Because I am this or that, then I am better than you. Sure oppression, or zulm, as it’s referred to in the Qur’an, also requires power: the power to exploit the differences as such, but even that is interesting in the way it is discussed in the Qur’an. For one thing, in the Qur’anic stories of Satan (or shaytan as the Arabic pro…

State-Licensed Ministers Can’t “Pray Away the Gay,” SCOTUS Affirms

By Sunnivie Brydum

…in all 50 states. In fact, even the California minister who filed suit is free to practice the debunked “therapy”—he just can’t engage minors in the practice, and can’t represent himself as a state-licensed therapist offering that treatment. In his ministerial duties he is free to preach about the power of prayer (or, in some cases, more nefarious tactics) to “rescue” people from the bonds of queerness. But what he can’t do, according to the newl…

Global LGBT Recap: Francis’s First Year; Homophobia and Development; African Activists Push Back

By Peter Montgomery

…ampion open government and civil society and fight corruption. We bolster freedom of assembly and a free press…. At times, we are compelled to make tough choices when the immediate need to defend our national security requires us to work with governments that do not share our fundamental commitment to human rights. No one knows that better than all of you. We look to you to strike the extremely difficult balance that both preserves critical bil…

Circuit Court Rejects Priests for Life Contraception Challenge

By Patricia Miller

…The court concluded that PFL’s rights are not violated under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and it is still free to hate on birth control: All Plaintiffs must do to opt out is express what they believe and seek what they want via a letter or two-page form. That bit of paperwork is more straightforward and minimal than many that are staples of nonprofit organizations’ compliance with law in the modern administrative state. Religious nonprofi…

Protests Force Torch Detour in San Francisco

By Lygia Navarro

…ng Olympic pop promos and protesters waved signs reading “Free Tibet” and “Free Speech Now.” One man shouted, “Protect the First Amendment! This isn’t Communist China!” Police and park rangers tried convincing the protesters to leave the plaza and join the pro-Tibet contingent out in the street, but the protesters would not budge. Along the waterfront, the local chapter of Students for a Free Tibet drew huge crowds with their Chinese tank fashione…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…heir own Globe and Mail essay, however, the land that settlers imagined as free wilderness was neither free nor empty. And, they write, the deadly effects of the myths of settler masculinity persist today, as the trial of Colten Boushie’s killer showed. Even if Mennonites thought they had found a pacifist’s paradise in the prairies, their deeds to the land came at the price of violence to Indigenous peoples who still understood the land as their o…

Is Refusal to Write Anti-Gay Cake Message a Violation of Religious Freedom?

By Kara Loewentheil

…s on the cake makes it more complicated, because it implicates the baker’s free speech rights. It’s one thing to request that a baker furnish a cake that might be used to celebrate something to which the baker objects—that’s a kind of second-degree complicity argument. But requiring a baker to actually perform a speech act—writing on the cake and selling it—might be more problematic from a free speech point of view. But what if there was no speech…