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Booing Gay Soldiers and Expressing Faith in the Public Square

By Sarah Posner

…s make against LGBT equality is that civil rights for LGBT people infringe on the religious freedom of Christians who believe homosexuality is sin. Therefore they insist the government shouldn’t give them, in Santorum’s words, “special privileges.” Conservatives frame this as a free exercise, or religious freedom issue, and, like Bachmann, skirt the church-state separation issue. Because these conservatives believe that the government should endor…

Google-Phonics, Or, ‘What Is the Sound of a Thousand Tech Workers Meditating?’

By Kevin Healey

…this also fails to please. “So finally I got the googlephonic—the highest number of speakers before infinity.” He pauses dramatically before adding finally, “Sounds like shit.” In classic Martin style, he waits for the laughter to die down before adding the final punchline: “So I said, ‘Hey, maybe it’s the needle!’” The metaphor is apt. The gurus of Silicon Valley tout the benefits of exponential increases in the processing power of hand-held dev…

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…

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…

I Believe You’re Wrong: The Trouble with Tolerance

By Charles Randall Paul and John W. Morehead

…ponents to heartily resist or embrace our influence and vice-versa. We are free to the extent that we live in a trustworthy world. The new birth of freedom will grow as we can come see most of our opponents as men and women who, like us, dare to die for the future benefit of all—and who, like us, will rely on patient persuasion, not disdainful coercion to accomplish the good they desire. We cannot say with any degree of confidence what motivates t…

The Kids Are All Wrong: Texas Tosses The Enlightenment

By Burke Gerstenschlager

…r culture’s own post-Enlightenment understanding of self-determination and free will. Texas does not go back two hundred years to the Framers of the Constitution. It goes back 400 years to the Reformation itself, before democracy was even a modern concept. For a full decade, Texas students will not learn the distinct intellectual role the Enlightenment played in contrast to the Reformation. So much for the concepts of free will and self determinat…

It’s Only a Game: How Not to Think about Video Game Violence

By Joanna Brooks

…ntonin Scalia presented the 7-2 ruling as a defense of free speech and the free circulation of ideas. That’s been a consistent theme for the Roberts court, which in recent years has in the name of freedom of speech legalized the sale of animal torture videos and struck down limits on corporate political spending on the grounds that corporations have free speech rights too. But in his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer asked, “What sense do…

On the “Shunning” of Marriage Equality Opponent Ryan T. Anderson: A Reply to Damon Linker

By Eric C. Miller

…political effects. Linker is correct that a liberal society ought to be a free and open space where ideas may be exchanged and contested in free and open fashion. He may also be correct that proponents of same-sex marriage should meditate on their individual and collective responses to those opposed. But he is wrong to suggest that Ryan T. Anderson has been “shunned.” Anderson has been able to study at some of the nation’s top universities. He ho…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…of anti-Black violence from Irish workers who saw both enslaved people and free people of color as their economic competitors). But the nexus is always there. Not for nothing was the Trump campaign slogan easily construed to mean “Make America White Again.” As Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman remark in their introduction to Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, the coerced labor provided by enslaved people was not some…

“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…