Strossen: We have a policy of opposing vouchers that goes back many, many years. The old policy deals with the issue of whether vouchers can be used to finance parochial schools. Vouchers were initially opposed because it was our perception that they were proposed as a ruse to get around Supreme Court decisions prohibiting direct governmental funding of parochial schools. The [voucher plan voted down in California last year], for instance, was structured in such a way that religious schools were clearly exclusive beneficiaries in the sense that the amount of money was set at such a level that the only tuition that it could possibly pay for was parochial school. That violates fundamental First Amendment principles.
Reason: What is the distinction between taking a Pell grant and going to a Catholic university and taking a voucher and going to a parochial school?
Strossen:The Pell grant is clearly constitutional because it's the government giving money directly to individuals in a nondiscriminatory way in terms of how they are going to use it and the ideology or belief that they reflect in their individual choices. I think the Supreme Court would look at the mechanics of who gets the money and, in a lot of voucher programs, the money goes directly to the schools, not to the parents. Some of them present a problem even at the superficial level.
You have to ask, just as you always do in separation-of-church-and-state cases, what is the purpose of the program, and what is the effect of the program? If you can show that the purpose is not to neutrally help all individuals pursue education and you can predict that it will have the effect of singling out parochial schools and helping them, that's very different from the intent and the fact of helping individuals. These are not bright-line distinctions. You have to evaluate all the facts and circumstances whenever you get into separation of church and state.
The California plan also had some other problems, as I recall. The vouchers could be used for schools that were engaging in racial and gender discrimination [actually, the California initiative explicitly excluded schools practicing racial discrimination], and the ACLU also has a problem with that. I wrote the brief for our Bob Jones University case, in which we argued that the government could not subsidize racially discriminatory schools, even indirectly through the tax system. The way the California program was set up, it could do that, for gender discriminatory ones,too. But you can say, well, to some extent, there are always some government subsidies, right? They all get fire protection.
Reason: Don't people use federal money to go to all-female colleges?
Strossen: Exactly. Again, one has to look at the degree of involvement, the degree of subsidization.
Reason: If someone devised a school-voucher plan that was reasonably neutral, in which the money went to individuals and there was no overwhelming bias to parochial schools, do you think the ACLU would support such a plan?
Strossen: I can't imagine an affirmative civil liberties basis for supporting it. The question would be, Are there continuing civil-liberty objections to it? If we got to a situation that was not as egregious as what we saw in California recently, we would have to take a hard look at it. But my own view is that we would not per se exclude programs that included paro- chial schools any more than we per se oppose Pell grants.
Reason: You mentioned earlier the idea of an employer banning his employees from smoking. Are you concerned by the movement toward a prohibition on smoking?
Strossen: Absolutely. The form that those regulations often take is employers prohibiting their employees from smoking not only in the workplace but even at home. Our view is that what you do in your own time and in your own space, if it' s not directly undermining your efficiency as a worker, it's your business, not your employer's.
We certainly wouldn't object to passing on in a fair way extra costs that are incurred as a result of personal choices, but that's a very different thing from absolutely prohibiting it and denying a person that choice. We have been lobbying for laws and we've been successful. More than half the states now have laws that prohibit employers from regulating what employees do in their own time. Some of the laws are targeted specifically at smoking. Others are written more broadly and basically say, as long as it's their own place and their own time, they can do what they want.
Reason: Do you think regulations of smoking in public are similarly troubling?
Strossen: If you gave me a specific example, I could answer that. Our policy on regulation of smoking calls for a fact-specific analysis that reasonable regulations are designed to protect somebody from second-hand smoke. I think [an outright ban] could conceivably raise a civil-liberties problem. It's a bit of a stretch. You would have to say, well, a restaurant is a public accommodation, which means that they have to be open to all comers, which they still are. They are just saying that, while you're there, you can't engage in this particular behavior which does have demonstrably adverse consequences. It seems to me that if you're going to make the argument that it was violating some fundamental right of the smoker, you have to in some way play up the fact that smoking is an addiction, that you're discriminating against this disabled person.
I do see [smoking prohibition] as kind of hysterical and a misguided response from a public-health point of view. I think it is a policy that would increase smoking, particularly among the young where we want their education to discourage them from undertaking health risks. It's ironic, because smoking is such a great example of where consumption has gone down dramatically through education because of the absence of prohibition.
Reason: How does the ACLU pick specific cases in which to become involved?
Strossen: I think one of the criteria for our work is that by definition it has to be reactive. The government is doing something; we're reacting against it. We also have to have the tools to do something constructive. If something is clearly a loser, then we're not going to take the case. We're not going to waste the resources. The irony is that most of our cases are completely uncontroversial within the ranks of civil libertarians. They're attempts to enforce rights that even the Supreme Court would say are clear rights. But it's one thing for the Supreme Court to say it, and it's another thing for the local police chief to recognize it, the local school board to know about it, the local town council to honor it.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
canada goose jackets|5.9.10 @ 11:57PM|#
The strongest attack on this assumption comes from an unlikely source: Warren Farrell, formerly an activist in the women's movement and the only man elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women. Farrell is the author of The Myth of Male Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993), which Barbara Dority, co-chair of the Northwest Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, says has the "potential for being The Feminine Mystique of the men's movement." Farrell writes: "Feminism justified female 'victim power' by convincing the world that we lived in a sexist, male-dominated, and patriarchal world. The Myth of Male Power explains why the world was bi-sexist, both male and female-dominated, both patriarchal and matriarchal--each in different ways."
ugg discount outlets|8.25.10 @ 1:24PM|#
Ugg boots (sometimes called uggs or ug boots) have been considered a fashion trend since the early 2000s.The combination of its soft shank and sheepskin interior means that ugg boots are designed for casual, short-term use, and not for situations which require sturdy, protective footwear, as the design emphasis is on style and comfort rather than protecting the feet. While in the boot, the sockless foot is in full contact with the sheepskin lining, thereby maximizing the insulative properties of the boot.
|9.28.10 @ 2:24AM|#
The ACLU is as crooked an organization as any I'm aware of.
nfl jerseys|11.17.10 @ 3:13AM|#
mxyhfg
منتدى العرب|3.9.11 @ 8:58PM|#
Thank you