Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free, where this week's stories include:
But first, it's another case of zoning against the Good Samaritan.
A church in the border town of San Luis, Arizona, is suing the city government after its pastor was fined for distributing food on church property. The Gethsemani Baptist Church argues in a new federal lawsuit that those fines are part of a campaign of "harassment and intimidation" officials are waging against the church's legal, longstanding food ministry.
"This has been a vital ministry helping people, ranging from people crossing the border to people as far as away as Tucson and food pantries around the area that rely on this church to feed people," says Jeremy Dys, an attorney with the First Liberty Institute, which is representing Gethsemani Baptist Church.
Gethsemani Baptist Church, and its pastor Jose Manuel Castro, have been distributing food, clothing, and other essential items to the poor, for over two decades from its property a few blocks from the U.S.-Mexico border.
For almost all that time, the city government was actively supportive of the church's ministry, according to its lawsuit. The city allowed the church to store food in a city-owned warehouse, and local elected officials participated in its food drives.
Since a 2012 zoning code update, the church's operation of a food ministry—which included receiving, storing, and distributing food and hot meals—in a residential area was considered a "legal non-conforming use" by the city.
Dys says the city's amicable relationship with the church ended with the election of San Luis Mayor Nieves Riedel, a named co-defendant in the lawsuit, in late 2022.
Riedel did not respond to Reason's emailed request for comment.
Following her election, the mayor told the church they could no longer store food at a city-owned warehouse nor use the public park across the street from the church to distribute food, per the lawsuit.
Throughout 2023, the church also received letters from the city saying that it couldn't accept semi-truck deliveries on its property and that its storage and distribution of food on-site changed the character of its food ministry from a legal, non-conforming use into an illegal zoning violation.
To appease the city, the church's pastor agreed to minimize the storage of food at the church and to have semi-truck food deliveries brought to a separate property, where they'd then be transferred to a smaller trailer and brought to the church.
Nevertheless, the city continued to assert that the church's food ministry was a zoning code violation. In February, Castro was twice cited by city officials. In the first incident, he received a ticket for handing out food to a crowd of ten people on the church property.
In the second incident, he was ticketed when a semi-truck driver mistakenly arrived at the church with a food delivery. The church's lawsuit claims that the driver was only there for a few minutes before Castro directed him to take the delivery to the off-site location. The next day, a city code enforcer came to the church and ticketed Castro for the incident.
After the second violation, the church stopped its food ministry completely. Its lawsuit notes that a third zoning violation would technically be a misdemeanor that would expose Castro to potential jail time. Already, the first two violations have netted the church $4,000 in fines.
The church's lawsuit accuses the city of San Luis, Riedel, and several other individual city officials, of violating the Church's First Amendment right to free exercise and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA)—which limits the kinds of zoning laws that localities can enforce against religious organizations.
Reason has covered a number of cases where churches' charitable missions have been hamstrung by local zoning regulations and burdensome approval processes.
"The city has a specific target on the back of pastor Castro, trying to intimidate him into submission for engaging in otherwise protected activity. That's the kind of behavior the First Amendment and federal law stand against," says Dys.
Speaking of trying old ideas again, progressive lawmakers, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), have reintroduced their Green New Deal for Public Housing Act.
According to a press release, the bill would spend between $162 to $234 billion on public housing initiatives. That would include converting existing, aging public housing stock into all-electric, "climate resilient," renewable energy-generating complexes. All this work would be done with unionized labor (naturally).
The bill would also repeal a longstanding policy that prevents the federal government from building more public housing.
"We have seen our counterparts, everywhere from Vienna to Singapore, engage in truly revolutionary public and social housing policies," Ocasio-Cortez told Politico. "And the stigma around public housing has prevented everyday Americans from understanding that we can actually really have incredible housing in the United States under a public model."
Vienna's extensive stock of publicly owned, mixed-income housing developments is a lodestar for left-wing housing activists and policymakers. Even there, public housing units are suffering from deteriorating quality, long waitlists, and funding shortfalls.
In Ocasio-Cortez's own backyard, the U.S. Department of Justice just indicted dozens of public housing employees for allegedly accepting bribes and extorting contractors for smaller repair jobs. This endemic corruption might be adding to the public housing stigma the congresswoman complains about. Certainly, it would be an issue to address before funneling billions of more dollars to the same public housing agencies for green energy upgrades.
California's "builder's remedy"—a weapon of last resort to get housing built in anti-development jurisdictions—just won a major legal victory.
The builder's remedy is a longstanding provision of state law that allows developers to build residential projects of theoretically unlimited density in communities that don't have a state-approved housing plan.
Provided a proposed "builder's remedy" project contains a set number of below-market-rate units, cities can't deny them permits, even if the project doesn't comply with local zoning standards.
Until recently, no one had gotten a builder's remedy project approved. Indeed, prior to a few years ago, few had ever been proposed. One reason for that was that cities can deploy all sorts of procedural tricks to stop builder's remedy projects.
Witness the small Los Angeles community of La Cañada Flintridge, which was refusing to process a developer's builder's remedy project—an 80-unit apartment development on the site of a former church—because it didn't comply with the city's zoning code.
As mentioned, the builder's remedy allows developers to ignore local zoning codes. La Cañada Flintridge tried to argue that they weren't denying the developer's application for violating the zoning code, they were merely refusing to process the application as incomplete because it didn't comply with the local zoning code.
A Los Angeles Superior Court rejected that argument last week, ruling that the city had unlawfully disapproved the builder's remedy project.
"By holding that Builder's Remedy projects cannot simply be defeated by procedural loophole, the court's ruling ensures that Builder's Remedy remains a meaningful and impactful consequence," reads a write-up of the decision by attorneys with the firm Holland & Knight (which litigated the case).
The post Zoning Versus the Good Samaritan. Again. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Florida legislators are considering several bills that would target undocumented immigrants and the Floridians who interact with them. One of the more controversial measures, which is wrapped into Senate Bill 1718, would make it a third-degree felony for Floridians to conceal, harbor, or shield—or transport "into or within" the state—a person who they know "or reasonably should know" is in the United States unlawfully.
"With this legislation, Florida is continuing to crack down on the smuggling of illegal aliens," said Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. State Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R–Spring Hill), who introduced S.B. 1718, said the bill "should be the model for all 50 states going forward."
S.B. 1718's supporters have painted the bill as a way to protect Floridians and their rights. But some religious officials in Florida are worried that if S.B. 1718 passes, their work with undocumented immigrants could be criminalized—something they say would represent a violation of their religious liberties.
Joel Tooley takes issue with the bill being framed as an anti-trafficking effort. Tooley is a pastor at Melbourne First Church of the Nazarene and a consultant with the Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of evangelical churches and organizations that advocates for immigration reform. S.B. 1718 "is actually a bill that criminalizes normal activities that are irrevocably natural expressions of the work people do as a response to their spiritual calling to show compassion for those in need," he tells Reason.
"As a pastor in Brevard County…I oppose S.B. 1718 because of the threat it is to religious freedom, as well as because of the economic devastation it will bring upon Florida," says Tooley, noting that "faith leaders will most certainly defy" the legislation "if enacted."
"Our concerns are really pastoral. For us, this is not a partisan issue," said Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and an Assemblies of God pastor based in Orlando, in a press conference last week hosted by the Evangelical Immigration Table and World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization. "In this legislation, some people may have missed that there's religious liberty concerns," Salguero explained. "It can criminalize a pastor transporting one of his parishioners, or one of her parishioners, to church, to Sunday school, to midweek worship."
Federal law already prohibits people from transporting undocumented immigrants "in furtherance of such violation of [immigration] law," but S.B. 1718 has a lower threshold, applying to more routine activities. The bill would make it a third-degree felony for someone to transport or harbor an undocumented immigrant that they know or suspect is undocumented. Under Florida law, that would be punishable by up to five years in prison (and up to 15 years if the transported migrant is a minor). The bill wouldn't apply to migrants who overstayed their visas.
As written, S.B. 1718 doesn't outline exceptions for the activities of churches, which often provide transportation services to parishioners. The language around "harboring" could also prove sticky. Some churches help arrange temporary housing or engage in home-based worship, both of which could be interpreted to fall under S.B. 1718's prohibited activities. Without clarity, Floridians will likely become more hesitant to interact with people who are (or who they suspect to be) undocumented, chilling community ties.
Dale Schaeffer, district superintendent for the Florida District Church of the Nazarene, expressed his concern in last week's press conference that S.B. 1718 could represent a government threat to religious expression. "Our Constitution has strong assurances that government will not restrict the free exercise of religion," said Schaeffer. "The ability to express our religious freedoms, that all people are valuable in God's sight, is essential to the faith of the Church of the Nazarene and any evangelical Christian here in the state of Florida."
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 772,000 undocumented people live in Florida, making up 4 percent of the state's population. Of the state's undocumented residents, 65 percent have lived in the U.S. for five years or more.
Ingoglia told a Senate panel in March that he wasn't "demonizing immigrants" but rather "demonizing illegal immigrants." Salguero noted in last week's press conference that "several delegations" have gone to Tallahassee to speak with state officials and told Christianity Today that although he has contacted DeSantis' office, he hasn't received a response.
Like many other bills that target undocumented immigrants, S.B. 1718 would negatively impact native-born Americans and criminalize once-mundane interactions. Punishing undocumented immigrants—who are overwhelmingly peaceful residents of Florida, contributing to local communities and economies—shouldn't be done at the expense of religious and civil liberties.
The post Florida Pastors Are Worried This Immigration Bill Could Infringe on Religious Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Montreal's historic preservation laws may force one of its historic churches to close its doors.
Since 1878, St. John the Evangelist parish has operated out of its existing church building in Montreal's downtown, where it's earned the status of the mother church of Anglo-Catholicism in Canada. A few decades ago, needed repairs gave it the characteristic metal red roof it's known for today.
"It's a slum gothic style, it's a very beautiful space inside," says St. John's pastor, Father Keith Schmidt.
The same can't be said for the adjacent parish hall, which has seen better days. Once a school, the building is little-used now and in need of some desperate repairs.
The St. John's congregation has also seen better days. Schmidt says that the parish hasn't been immune to the general decline in church attendance in Quebec. With fewer active parishioners, the church has struggled financially.
That's in contrast to the surrounding neighborhood, which has seen a boom of new development in recent years.
For that reason, St John's has been toying with the idea of redeveloping its hall into a new building that could then be rented out on a long-term basis and the revenue used to support the church's continued operations.
"It's more staircase than anything else," says Schmidt of the parish hall. "Everyone agrees that it doesn't make any sense anymore, but trying to change it isn't easy."
Standing in the way of this plan is the Montreal city government.
The city's zoning code requires that church-zoned properties be used for church-like activities. That would require St. John to get a variance in order to redevelop its hall.
Schmidt says that obtaining a variance is a minor issue, all things considered. The real trouble is the city's historic preservation laws, which place extreme restrictions on how much of the parish hall can be demolished.
A few years ago, the church hired a real estate firm to prepare drawings and plans for a potential redevelopment of the site. They then approached the city to see what could be done. He says that the city required them to produce a heritage report on their building but generally seemed receptive to the idea of redeveloping the hall.
That changed late last year when Schmidt claims the city said any construction on the hall would have to preserve the building's rear and side walls.
"That would add greatly to the costs of construction, [having to] take these walls down and rebuild them," he says. If the city had told the church about this condition from the beginning, Schmidt says that they likely would have just dropped their development plans altogether.
The Montreal city government did not respond to Reason's request for comment in English. It did tell the Canadian news channel CTV (which first reported on the story) that St. John's proposal "is being analyzed, each request is studied according to the regulations in place and integration into its environment. The city is aware of the financial burden involved in the maintenance of churches, which is why our teams assist and support owners for this type of request."
Schmidt tells Reason that his church has done what it can with its existing buildings to support its operations, including renting out its hall to musical performers and the church itself to movie film crews. But neither has done anything to change the long-term structural financial challenges it faces. The money it spent on studying redevelopment of its parish hall has only added to that strain.
"That's left us in an extreme bind; our resources are dwindling by the month. It's not clear how we're going to get out of this," he says.
The post Historic Preservation Laws Are Stopping This Historic Church From Preserving Itself appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal judge yesterday issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against enforcement of New York's ban on firearms in "any place of worship or religious observation." U.S. District Judge John Sinatra Jr. concluded that the rule, part of a law that New York legislators passed after the Supreme Court overturned the state's "proper cause" requirement for concealed-carry permits, "impermissibly infring[es] on the right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense."
Sinatra's decision in Hardaway v. Nigrelli comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Glenn T. Suddaby issued a broader TRO against New York's law in Antonyuk v. Hochul. The two rulings do not bode well for politicians who try to defy the Supreme Court's June 23 ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen by imposing new restrictions on the right to bear arms.
The lead plaintiffs in Hardaway are the Rev. Jimmie Hardaway Jr., pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Niagara Falls, and Bishop Larry Boyd, pastor of Open Praise Full Gospel Baptist Church in Buffalo. They "wish to exercise their fundamental, individual right to bear arms in public for self-defense by carrying concealed firearms on church property in case of confrontation to both themselves and their congregants."
Hardaway and Boyd, whose lawsuit was joined by the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, are licensed to carry concealed handguns and had consistently done so on church grounds as a safeguard against violent intruders. But New York's law—which prohibits guns in myriad "sensitive locations," including churches—made that precaution a Class E felony, punishable by up to four years in prison.
Under Bruen, the state has the burden of showing that such location-specific gun bans are "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation," which requires identifying analogous restrictions that have long been recognized as constitutional. "New York fails that test," Sinatra writes. "The State's exclusion is, instead, inconsistent with the Nation's historical traditions, impermissibly infringing on the right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense."
In the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court described "laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings" as "longstanding prohibitions." But in Bruen, the justices noted that "the historical record yields relatively few 18th- and 19th-century 'sensitive places' where weapons were altogether prohibited." They included "legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses."
New York argued that laws enacted by four states (Georgia, Texas, Virginia, and Missouri) and two territories (Arizona and Oklahoma) between 1870 and 1890 showed that its ban was consistent with the historical understanding of the right to bear arms:
• An 1870 Georgia law prohibited the carrying of pistols or revolvers in "any place of public worship."
• An 1870 Texas law made it a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine, to bring firearms into "any church or religious assembly." That law did not apply to "any person or persons whose duty it is to bear arms on such occasions in discharge of duties imposed by law."
• An 1877 Virginia law prescribed a fine for bringing a "dangerous weapon" to "any place of worship" during services. It made an exception for anyone who "had good reason" to carry a weapon "in the necessary defense of his home, person or property." The same law made it illegal for someone to carry a weapon on Sunday "at any place other than his own premises" unless he had "good and sufficient cause therefor."
• An 1883 Missouri law said anyone convicted of carrying a firearm into "any church or place where people have assembled for religious worship" could be punished by a fine of $25 to $200 and/or five days to six months in jail.
• Under an 1889 Arizona law, someone who carried a firearm into "any church or religious assembly" would face a fine of $50 to $500, plus confiscation of the weapon.
• An 1890 Oklahoma law made it illegal to carry a weapon into "any church or religious assembly." It included an exception for anyone "whose duty it is" to "suppress breaches of the peace."
As Sinatra sees it, those examples do not meet the test established by Bruen. "Where a governmental practice has been open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic," the Supreme Court said in that case, "the practice should guide our interpretation of an ambiguous constitutional provision." But it added that "to the extent later history contradicts what the text says, the text controls," because "post-ratification adoption or acceptance of laws that are inconsistent with the original meaning of the constitutional text obviously cannot overcome or alter that text."
The Court cautioned against giving evidence from the late 19th century too much weight: Since "post-Civil War discussions of the right to keep and bear arms 'took place 75 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, they do not provide as much insight into its original meaning as earlier sources.'" The justices also said territorial laws carry "little weight," because they "appear more as passing regulatory efforts by not-yet-mature jurisdictions on the way to statehood, rather than part of an enduring American tradition of state regulation."
Sinatra does not think the analogs cited by New York establish such a tradition. The state cites "a handful of enactments in an attempt to meet its 'burden' to demonstrate a tradition of accepted prohibitions of firearms in places of worship or religious observation," he writes. "The notion of a 'tradition' is the opposite of one-offs, outliers, or novel enactments. Rather, 'tradition' requires 'continuity.'"
The six laws "are of unknown duration," Sinatra writes, "and the State has not met [its] burden to show endurance over time." Hence "the Court is left with a handful of seemingly spasmodic enactments involving a small minority of jurisdictions governing a small minority of population" that "were passed nearly a century after the Second Amendment's ratification in 1791." Those "outlier enactments," Sinatra adds, "contrast with colonial-era enactments that, in fact, mandated such carry at places of worship." He concludes that the laws "are far too remote, far too anachronistic, and very much outliers," making them "insufficient" to establish "an American tradition."
Suddaby, who concluded that New York had failed to justify many of its location-specific gun bans, was more impressed than Sinatra by the historical evidence regarding firearms in church. "Based on the historical analogues," he wrote, "it is permissible for New York State to generally restrict concealed carry in 'any place of worship or religious observation.'" But he noted that three of the six laws cited by New York included "one or more of the following four exceptions: (1) for those bound by 'duty' to bear arms at the place of worship; (2) for those possessing 'good and sufficient cause' to carry a gun at the place of worship; (3) for those serving as 'peace officers' at the place of worship; and (4) for those for whom the place of worship is 'his own premises.'"
Taken together, Suddaby said, those provisions "suggest that there also exists a tradition of permitting an exception to this prohibition for those persons who have been tasked with the duty to keep the peace at the place of worship." He also noted that "the vast majority of the states in 1868 [when the 14th Amendment, which made the Second Amendment applicable to the states, was ratified] did not have this restriction at all." Suddaby concluded that "the Constitution demands that this provision contain an exception for those persons who have been tasked with the duty to keep the peace at the place of worship or religious observation."
That category presumably would include pastors such as Hardaway and Boyd as well as designated congregants. Their concerns cannot be lightly dismissed given horrifying crimes such as the massacres at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
The plaintiffs' motion for a TRO and a preliminary injunction notes that "the recent history of violence in churches, particularly the murder of nine parishioners in Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, has reaffirmed Reverend Hardaway's conviction to carry for self-defense and to keep the peace at his church." Since the Charleston shooting, it says, Hardaway "has almost always carried a firearm for self-defense on Sundays and at services until the effective date of the Place of Worship Ban."
New York says that is now a felony. "The Nation's history does not countenance such an incursion into the right to keep and bear arms across all places of worship across the state," Sinatra writes. "The Constitution requires that individuals be permitted to use handguns for the core lawful purpose of self-defense. And it protects that right outside the home and in public. Nothing in the Nation's history or traditions presumptively closes the door on that right across every place of worship or religious observation."
Although Sinatra's ruling is limited to this one provision of New York's law, he notes the perversity of the state's response to Bruen. "Eight days after the Supreme Court struck down New York's unconstitutional 'proper cause' requirement for conceal[ed]-carry licenses," he writes, "the State responded with even more restrictive legislation, barring all conceal[ed]-carry license holders from vast swaths of the State."
That regulatory strategy has not fared well in the courts so far, which has not stopped other states from copying it. New Jersey and California are both considering bills that would ban firearms from a long list of "sensitive" places, making it legally perilous even for someone with a carry permit to leave home with a gun.
The post A Federal Judge Says New York's Ban on Guns in Church Is Unconstitutional appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Even though Warren Jeffs resigned as president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), his followers continue to worship him as their prophet. Jeffs is currently serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting minors—at the time of his arrest in 2006, he had more than 70 wives and nearly a third of them were under the age of 17. A handful of Jeffs' followers were also charged with sexual assault.
This religious community—the subject of Netflix's latest true-crime docu-thriller, Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey—wasn't finished with conflict after Jeffs and others were removed from the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas. Child Protective Services (CPS) returned to rip more than 450 children from their mothers on the compound. CPS claimed that because their religion represented a "pervasive belief system," it was too dangerous to leave any children in the community. In horrifying raw footage from the raid, the children (including newborns) are seen crowding on buses and screaming for their parents. The Texas Supreme Court later found that the raid was not justified because CPS failed to prove the children were in immediate danger.
When faced with a choice between family and church, many FLDS members continue to choose the latter. This devotion has led to many broken families where the husband is exiled while his wife and children—who think obedience is their only choice—stay behind, or in the worst-case scenario, are reassigned to new husbands.
The post Review: After Cult Leader Was Convicted, His Compound Was Raided by Child Protective Services appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The United Methodists are the second-largest Protestant Christian denomination in the United States, and they're headed for a split.
That might seem like an internecine affair, something of interest mainly to Methodists or, at most, other churches hoping to poach some congregants amid the chaos. But big church splits as politically tinged as this one can be a revealing microcosm of our politics as a whole. And Methodism—which has long held something of a median position in American Protestantism, given Methodists' historical location between Episcopalians (stereotypically elite, urban, center-left) and Pentecostals (stereotypically poor, rural, populist)—might be uniquely well-suited to provide a religious microcosm of our national polarization and its rising risks.
The precipitating issues for this looming Methodist crackup, as in so many other churches over the past two decades, are gay marriage and ordination. A large (and overwhelmingly traditional) African contingent in the denomination plus the interruptions of COVID have made for a long and complicated separation process. United Methodists tentatively agreed on a protocol for breaking up the denomination in early 2020, but this summer, a group of conservative churches preemptively launched their own new denomination, after which more progressive groups rejected the 2020 plan. The issue may now remain in limbo until the denomination's next General Conference, which, due to COVID, was bumped all the way to 2024.
For now, it's too soon to say exactly who will get what—the name, the buildings, the seminaries, the bureaucracy, the debts—or even what will remain to divide, as conservative journalist (and Methodist) W. James Antle III writes, given the denomination's recent history of "squabbling" and "increasingly empty pews." Yet however this denominational divorce plays out, theology around same-sex relationships isn't the only thing driving Methodists apart. "There are parts of the church in which traditional trinitarian thinking is beginning to morph into Unitarian thought," Bishop Gary Mueller told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "However, there are also parts of the church where I am concerned that traditional Christian orthodox thought is beginning to resemble white Christian nationalism."
That's a brief but very suggestive sketch. It envisions the leftward edge drifting into secularism with limited use for God, while the rightward edge moves into a nationalist syncretism that makes God the servant of the state. Even if these two factions could figure out a way to live with one another where gay marriage and ordination are concerned, there's no basis there for staying united—not with the other extreme, but also not with the Methodists stuck in the middle.
If you're not a Methodist, though, why should you care? For starters, non-Methodists should care about rising secularity and its potential implications for religious liberty. As religiosity declines—and especially religiosity which entails beliefs and practices that put adherents significantly at odds with the American mainstream—religious liberty will most likely be of personal interest to an ever-smaller portion of Americans.
A Methodist who is functionally a Unitarian and wholly supportive of gay marriage has much less need of religious liberty protections in the America of 2022 than a Methodist who is opposed to gay marriage and believes that requires her to, say, refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. There are plenty of people who will defend religious liberty to the hilt even if they are not themselves religious, but that kind of principled, consistent civil libertarianism is rarer than we might wish. Many people in practice will only defend the rights they themselves exercise. That means waning religiosity comes with the risk of waning religious liberty.
Next is the Christian nationalism, which is lately much in the headlines thanks to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R–Ga.) decision to embrace the label and, at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, to falsely claim it applies to most other Americans, too. Christian nationalism, as Georgetown University scholar Paul D. Miller argues in The Religion of American Greatness, is not "a lovable excess in patriotism and piety" but an "incoherent," "illiberal," and—for Christians—"often idolatrous" fusion of faith and state. Miller says it isn't "a catch-all term for any kind of Christian political advocacy," as Greene has tried to assert. Rather, the "unique feature of Christian nationalism is that it defines America as a Christian nation," he writes, "and it wants the government to promote a specific Anglo-Protestant cultural template as the official culture of the country."
It's easy to imagine, particularly in a country as religiously and culturally diverse as ours, the dangerous places to which Christian nationalism could lead. And it's bad enough as an inchoate folk impulse which mixes some disorganized attempts to claim special political privileges for Christians with mostly normal right-wing politics. But insofar as Christian nationalism becomes a defined political agenda which adherents are willing to claim by name—and that's quite a new phenomenon—those attempts are likely to become a more serious threat to liberty, not least because of nationalism's tendency to resort to force to achieve its ends.
Last is the worrisome prospect that history could rhyme. After all, this wouldn't be the first time the Methodist communion in America has split: The denomination's current nominal unity is actually a reunity. Methodists' best-known previous division came in the run-up to the Civil War, when the Methodist Episcopal Church, then America's largest Protestant denomination, schismed over slavery. The Baptists' Triennial Convention split the same year and for the same reason, which is how we got the Southern Baptists.
Historians and contemporaries alike agree those church splits prefigured and advanced the national division and war that came a decade and half later. And now, as then, formal church separations can make it easier to view the other side as an enemy, perhaps to be confronted with violence, so that what was intended to be a de-escalation measure becomes escalatory instead.
Maybe now, as then, churches are the canary in the coal mine, warning us of catastrophe we could still avert.
The post What the Methodist Split Tells Us About American Political Polarization appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two Philadelphia-area churches have come under fire from local zoning officials, who say their free meal services, mental health counseling, and monthly pantries aren't allowed on their properties and will have to stop or else they risk fines.
In early June, Pottstown staff sent letters to Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First, saying that this charitable work went beyond the allowable activities for churches in the borough's Downtown zoning district.
"I am writing this letter with compassion for those affected by the COVID pandemic and with gratitude to residents who've provided aid to those in need throughout that period," wrote Pottstown Zoning Officer Winter Stokes in a letter to one of the churches obtained by WHYY, which first reported the story. "However, as the Zoning Officer, I must enforce the zoning code."
Stokes' letters specifically lists regular provision of mental health counseling to families, weekly buffet meals, and the distribution of soap, razors, toothbrushes, and other essential items as disallowed uses.
The two churches can either apply for a zoning variance—which requires going before the borough's Zoning Hearing Board—or stop the disallowed charitable work. Failure to do either of those things could result in the churches being hit with $500 fines for every day they're out of compliance.
"It was an absolute surprise when we got this letter," says Dennis Coleman, the deacon of Christ Episcopal Church. He says that his church has been providing meals and an "essentials" pantry for years without incident.
"We've been doing the one meal a week for as long as anyone can remember," which typically feeds about 60 people, Coleman says. The church also runs a "Last Week of the Month" program that provides people with food, essential items, or even assistance in paying gas and electric bills.
Christ Episcopal Church in Pottstown and the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania both hired attorneys after receiving the letter from the borough and are trying to negotiate a solution that will let the church continue its longstanding charitable work.
The borough gave Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First until this coming Sunday to cease their activities or apply for a variance.
Coleman tells Reason that his church has no intention of stopping its activities or applying for a variance.
"We would need a variance to ask permission to do what Jesus calls us to do. And we're not in the mood to ask permission to do what we've always done or what we're commanded to do," he says.
Pottstown borough staff did not respond to emails requesting comment.
Churches' charitable activities often don't fit neatly into commercial or residential categories defined by municipal zoning codes. That makes them occasional targets of code enforcement.
Reason has covered cases of an Oregon church's soup kitchen being prohibited by its residential zoning and a New York church's cold weather shelter being prohibited by its commercial zoning.
Even when charitable activities are allowed by the zoning code, the process for getting them approved is long and discretionary. Frequently, it will involve public hearings where opponents have the opportunity to urge zoning officials to deny permits for a new soup kitchen or shelter.
Those critical voices can often crowd out the beneficiaries of these privately provided services, as well as the people who are happy to support them.
"People come in for a meal, or come into the pantry, it's an opportunity to get to know folks and journey along with them," says Coleman. "Everything in our pantry, and our meals, good folks donate to that. People want to support this."
The post Pennsylvania Town Threatens Churches With $500 Fines for Providing Free Meals, Counseling Services appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Interfaith Sanctuary purchased an old Salvation Army building on State Street near downtown Boise, Idaho, in early 2021, it seemed like a dream come true. Everything about the property made it a perfect fit for the nonprofit's new emergency homeless shelter.
The only thing the organization needed to turn that dream into a reality was a conditional use permit from the city. That required talking to the neighbors. And that proved to be a problem.
The visceral opposition of nearby residents to Interfaith Sanctuary's shelter plans turned what should have been a permitting process of a few months into a bitter conflict that stretched out for over a year and put the entire project in jeopardy.
"We are stuck," Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the executive director of Interfaith Sanctuary, told Reason in February. "All of these hopes and dreams are written. The architects have designed the whole thing. We have a contractor. We have complete estimates. We have a security team. We have everything we need to move forward except for the conditional use permit."
The loss of the new shelter building would be a real blow to Interfaith Sanctuary and the people it serves.
Even before COVID-19, the organization had been bumping up against the limits of what it could do with its existing cramped emergency shelter. The sudden appearance of a deadly infectious respiratory virus didn't help the situation.
"We use every nook and cranny and this pandemic has made it very difficult," says Peterson-Stigers. The shelter had to slash its capacity from 164 people to 140 just to allow some modicum of social distancing.
A temporary influx of federal homeless funding, however, allowed the heretofore privately funded Interfaith Sanctuary to house those displaced from the shelter at a rented out Red Lion hotel. Soon enough, it had placed over 100 people there.
Being able to give people their own rooms where they could stay 24/7 was a huge blessing, says Peterson-Stigers. The range of health care Interfaith Sanctuary could provide to ailing, elderly clients expanded dramatically. Guests weren't having to roam the streets all day. Parents didn't have to raise their kids in a crowded, dormlike setting.
The improvements she saw in people's health and well-being sent Peterson-Stigers looking for a new, larger shelter location that could support the same number of people and level of care after the outfit's temporary federal funding dried up. In early 2021, Interfaith Sanctuary purchased the Salvation Army building and surrounding two-acre lot for $2.4 million. It was a bargain then. The city's white-hot real estate market makes it a practical steal now.
The building itself was three times as large as its current shelter, meaning the organization would be able to give families and hospice patients their own rooms. It was close to downtown, which meant it was close to the people it serves and the services they need.
Most importantly, it was one of the few available properties in the city whose zoning allowed for an emergency shelter. All the nonprofit needed was that conditional use permit, and then Interfaith Sanctuary could get to work on the remodeling.
In Boise, and most of the rest of the country, obtaining a conditional use permit requires applicants to notify nearby property owners of their plans, go through a public hearing, and secure the approval of the local zoning board. The process gives the neighbors a lot of opportunities to complain, which they did in Interfaith Sanctuary's case.
Peterson-Stigers says the initial neighborhood meeting on the permit application was a disaster. People said that the shelter would bring drug users and criminals to the area. Parks would become overrun. Kids wouldn't be able to play outside.
Interfaith Sanctuary agreed to more rounds of public engagement. These eventually morphed into a city-sponsored task force intended to study the appropriateness of the organization's planned shelter site.
In January 2022, neighborhood opponents managed to derail the project entirely by convincing Boise's Planning and Zoning Commission to deny Interfaith Sanctuary's permit application. The organization was forced to appeal to the city council. After a marathon set of hearings over multiple days in late April, the council voted 4–2 to approve the shelter. That was a victory for Interfaith Sanctuary. But it doesn't give the organization back the time it spent waiting for permission to perform its charitable work.
The pandemic has posed a special challenge for homeless shelters, the people who run them, and the people who stay there. Crowded indoor shelters seemed almost designed to increase COVID-19 transmission. Many shelter residents chose to live on the streets instead.
In response, many of America's churches and charitable organizations looked for safer ways to provide housing. Some of these efforts were aided by emergency pandemic funding from the federal and state governments. Yet even when one arm of the state was lending a helping hand, the other was bringing down the hammer on private parties trying to help the most vulnerable.
No comprehensive counts exist of how many homeless people died during the pandemic or how many died of COVID-19. Cities that do track these figures saw homeless deaths increase anywhere from 50 percent to 300 percent.
As the pandemic swept across the country, churches and other social organizations wanted to move quickly to help people find shelter. But labyrinthine rules around land use and building permits made doing so incredibly difficult, and in some cases effectively impossible. Zoning fights and permitting delays are often downplayed as unimportant burdens on well-heeled developers. But this was something else entirely: a direct threat to the poor and vulnerable.
In early April 2020, one of San Francisco's first serious COVID-19 outbreaks swept through the city's largest homeless shelter, Multi-Service Center South. Of the 150 people staying or working at the shelter at the time, 70 tested positive for the virus.
"Unfortunately, we have a situation that we knew could potentially happen in one of our congregate living settings," said Democratic Mayor London Breed at an April 10 press conference. But, she argued, "we know it could have been worse."
Multi-Service Center South had a maximum pre-pandemic capacity of 340 people. In the weeks prior, the city had already been in the process of moving residents out of the shelter and into private hotel rooms where the virus would have less of a chance of spreading. Other residents, per the San Francisco Chronicle's reporting, took matters into their own hands and moved out onto the streets.
Activists criticized Breed for moving too slowly to get people out of the city's shelters. Yet San Francisco's experience was fairly typical.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, there were few tools available for preventing the transmission of COVID-19. Federal ineptitude meant masks and tests were in short supply. Vaccines were still on the drawing board.
That meant the country relied on social distancing to stop the spread—a challenge anywhere, but especially in homeless shelters that typically packed many people into congregate, dormlike facilities.
Public health regulations gave shelters little choice. Complying with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's social distancing guidance meant some shelters had to reduce their capacity by as much as 50 percent. Others closed completely. The result was a sudden "decompression" of the existing, pre-pandemic shelter system.
In January 2020, 82.6 percent of traditional facility-based shelter beds nationwide were occupied. By January 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the occupancy rate had dropped to 71.4 percent. Where did all those people go?
One answer is that they simply moved out onto the street. "Clients regularly reported that they preferred to remain unsheltered rather than congregating indoors due to a fear of contracting the virus," says the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in its 2021 Annual Homeless Assessment Report.
We'll never know how many people lost shelter altogether. HUD, citing health concerns, waived the requirement that recipients of federal homelessness funding perform "Point in Time" counts of the number of unsheltered people in their jurisdiction.
Another answer is that they moved into hotels and motels, often funded through government aid. The March 2020 $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act included a massive $5 billion bump to federal homelessness spending. The bulk of that, $4 billion, was poured into HUD's preexisting emergency solutions grants program.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency also issued guidance allowing its "public assistance" grants to be spent on providing "non-congregate shelter."
Some of the state and local organizations that received these funds devoted a good chunk of them to renting out and staffing up motel and hotel rooms. The near-total collapse in business and tourist travel had left the hotels largely vacant, and individual rooms allowed people to isolate.
By late June 2020, California's Project Roomkey—the first large-scale effort to turn hotels into housing for the homeless—had placed over 10,000 people in hotel rooms.
Using individual rooms also relieved some regulatory red tape. Peterson-Stigers said that the private settings allowed Interfaith Sanctuary to provide its clients at the Red Lion hotel with hospice care—something the group couldn't do in its congregate shelter because of federal medical privacy regulations.
Other guests benefited from not being outside and exposed to the elements all day. Instead, they had a safe and secure place to store their things, and a fixed address to travel to and from appointments. Parents had a much easier time enforcing rules or putting the baby down for a nap.
Once again, data on how many hotel rooms were used as homeless shelter space are spotty. HUD reports 33,259 of these voucher beds were in existence in January 2021, more than double the number that existed in 2020. But not every jurisdiction included its hotel beds in the count of available shelter beds it reported to HUD.
These voucher beds ended up housing 11.3 percent of sheltered homeless people in 2021. But they didn't absorb everybody coming out of a decompressing shelter system. Another 6.5 percent were housed in "other beds" located in churches and other facilities not traditionally used as shelters—a 15 percent increase from 2020, according to HUD.
It's likely a lot more people would have been sheltered in these nontraditional arrangements had it not been for the obscene amounts of red tape placed on churches and charitable organizations trying to give someone a warm bed for the night.
The primary reason Boise's Interfaith Sanctuary purchased its State Street property was the potential it offered the organization to scale up its charitable work. The larger building and surrounding lot would allow it to provide more services to more people.
But that scale would become a focal point of neighborhood opposition. As the approval process dragged on, opponents of Interfaith Sanctuary's new location suggested an alternative. Instead of one big shelter, why not scatter several smaller ones around the city? That way, Interfaith Sanctuary could provide more focused care to shelter residents while reducing the impacts on the neighborhoods the shelters were in.
This alternative plan turned out to be impossible to implement. In response to the controversy its shelter plans had kicked off, Interfaith Sanctuary had agreed to a request from Boise Mayor Lauren McLean to delay its permit application so that a "Better Shelter" task force—made up of city staff, neighborhood representatives, and homeless advocates—could be assembled to vet alternatives.
At one meeting, task force facilitator Jen Schneider, a Boise State University professor of public policy, presented a spreadsheet of 56 possible alternative shelter sites identified by a city-commissioned real estate survey.
Schneider noted that only four of Boise's 24 zoning categories, covering about 7 percent of the city's zoned land, allowed for shelters. That meant only 17 of the 56 potential shelter sites the city's survey had turned up were viable.
Only five of those 17 properties were the right size to host a shelter, and three of those were already in the process of being bought by other parties. That left two properties available: a vacant lot behind a Walmart and another empty parcel owned by the county highway agency that wasn't for sale.
Both were inferior to the property that Interfaith Sanctuary already owned. To acquire them, the organization would also have had to buy at the top of Boise's booming post-pandemic real estate market. That's a tall order for a privately funded nonprofit.
Boise's city limits encompass 85 square miles. That there were only three feasible properties that could play host to a homeless shelter underscores just how difficult it is for churches and nonprofit providers even to find land where their charitable work is allowed.
A sudden, massive influx of federal funding and the near-overnight collapse of business and tourism travel made the housing of homeless people in hotels during the pandemic possible. This still wouldn't have been practical without equally rapid zoning reforms.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness praises states such as California and Oregon for running model hotel-to-shelter conversion programs. The success of both programs, the organization notes, required legislation exempting these conversions from normal zoning regulations. Private parties trying to serve the homeless outside of state and federally funded or administered programs often had to contend with the full realm of land use regulations.
Making matters worse is the fact that homeless services often don't fit neatly into the uses permitted by a city's zoning codes. They aren't quite commercial activities. They're not residential either. Churches and charitable nonprofits were often blindsided by zoning officials' determination that their shelter or soup kitchen wasn't allowed to operate on their property.
Take the case of Free Methodist Church in Gloversville, New York. In the months before the pandemic, the church had worked to convert a former YMCA building it owned in the city's downtown into a cold weather shelter.
In February 2020, however, a city official informed Free Methodist Pastor Rich Wilkinson that the YMCA building's commercial zoning prevented it from being used as a shelter.
The trouble was that Gloversville's code was silent on whether cold weather shelters were allowed in commercial zones. This kicked off a two-year back-and-forth between Wilkinson and the city.
Wilkinson argued that a shelter was similar enough to commercial zone-compliant rooming houses and hotels that it should be allowed. This argument failed to move officials who voted against issuing his church a permit. They also denied his church's application for a zoning variance.
These delays didn't make Gloversville's weather any warmer. Anyone looking to escape the sub-zero temperatures of an upstate New York winter was forced to migrate to surrounding counties where shelter was available.
"All it is, is a line in the city code that is keeping people from sleeping in the warmth," Wilkinson says. "It's ridiculous to me that anybody would allow people to sleep in the cold when there's a place where they could come inside and get warm."
St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Brookings, Oregon, faced similar pandemic care hurdles. For decades, the church had provided free meals two days a week alongside other religious congregations in town. When the pandemic hit, those other churches shut down their soup kitchens. Not St. Timothy's. The church's pastor, Bernie Lindley, decided to expand the church's meal service to six days a week to pick up the slack.
The expanded number of days that the church was serving meals and the fact that it was the only soup kitchen left in town soon turned it into something of a gathering place for the area's homeless and indigent. At the city's urging, the church also agreed to host a "safe parking" site where people with nowhere to sleep except their vehicle could legally park overnight. That brought even more people around.
This all boiled over into a conflict with St. Timothy's neighbors. In April 2021, 30 Brookings residents sent a letter asking the city to "reconsider allowing vagrants to continue to live and congregate at St. Timothy's Church."
In response to that petition, city staff did some research. They discovered that soup kitchens—by virtue of being regulated by state health authorities, like commercial restaurants—had actually been prohibited in the city's residential zones all along. And all churches in Brookings, including St. Timothy's, were in residential zones.
In October 2021, the Brookings City Council passed a new ordinance allowing organizations to provide "benevolent meal service" two times a week in residential areas, provided they get a conditional use permit.
On paper, this ordinance legalized soup kitchens that were otherwise prohibited by the city's zoning code. In practice, it meant that the Brookings City Council was imposing new requirements on the church's heretofore unregulated meal services.
"What we're doing is what churches do. Churches feed people," Wilkinson told Reason in November 2021. "To tell a church that they have to be limited in how they live into the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a violation of our First Amendment right to freely practice our religion."
In January 2022, the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon—with the help of the Oregon Justice Resource Center and the law firm Stoel Rives—sued the city of Brookings. The pending lawsuit argues that the city's ordinance violates the religious liberty protections of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Wilkinson's Free Methodist Church also has an active lawsuit against Gloversville.
Both are examples of churches whose charitable activities were made illegal on technical grounds. Following the letter of the law didn't stop other shelter operators from being dragged through hell.
Long before the pandemic-caused exodus from the shelter system, the Silicon Valley community of Palo Alto, California, had a large, obvious unsheltered homeless population.
"In a place like Palo Alto, where condos start at $1.5 million, there's literally someone who's living out of their car or on the street on every single block, in every single neighborhood," says Chris Kan, a genetics researcher and Palo Alto resident. "It's a problem everyone in the area knows and everybody wants to do something about."
For that reason, Kan's Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA) and other religious organizations lobbied the city to pass a "safe parking" ordinance that would permit willing churches to devote their parking spaces to overnight stays by vehicles and their owners.
In January 2020, the city council unanimously approved an 18-month pilot program letting churches set aside up to four safe parking spaces. The idea was to start off slow. If things worked out well, the city could consider allowing nonreligious institutions to host safe parking sites, and potentially permit more than four cars as well.
The program passed just in time for the pandemic. But just because these safe parking sites were legal didn't make them easy to set up.
Unlike neighboring cities with safe parking programs, Palo Alto's ordinance required churches to get a special permit to open one. City officials had the power to reject a permit application if they thought a parking site would adversely affect surrounding residents' health, safety, and welfare. An approved application could also be appealed to the city council, which is exactly what happened to Kan's application.
He says his church was ready to file an application at the beginning of 2020. The pandemic disrupted those plans. City offices, like most workplaces, were closed down or went remote. City staff suddenly had responsibility for administering a lot of new emergency programs.
This delayed things for months. Eventually in February 2021, the UUCPA had its application accepted. In May, it received provisional approval from Palo Alto's planning director.
Instead of starting the operation, however, that approval just led to more delays. In June, the low-income senior living facility next door—ironically built on land donated by the UUCPA in the 1960s—appealed the permit.
That kicked off more rounds of public engagement, which got heated quickly. Kan says some of the opposition they faced was from people with a misunderstanding of how the site would be managed and who would be allowed to stay there. Those folks, he says, proved reachable. Others were flatly opposed.
"Palo Alto, on a 'not in my backyard' scale, is probably a nine out of 10," he says. "There was honestly just a group that, come hell or high water, weren't going to agree to it no matter what we did. That was just a political reality."
With the help of groups like the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, the UUCPA was able to rally support and get its application approved by the city council in October 2021. Its safe parking site is operational today. Kan says it's mostly been at capacity since it started.
That was a happy ending for the UUCPA and the people the group is now serving. But it came almost two years after the safe parking program was first approved.
"This is literally four passenger cars," says an exasperated Kan. "It's four people in four cars that's in the back of a parking lot that's being professionally monitored by social workers and police."
The sheer amount of process that cities layer onto the provision of homeless services is certainly burdensome. It's often unreasonable. It can even be unconstitutional, says Diana Simpson, an attorney with the Institute for Justice.
She references the U.S. Supreme Court's 1985 decision in City of Cleburne, Texas v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., which struck down a local requirement that hospitals serving the "feeble-minded" obtain a special permit.
Regulations have to be a rational means of pursuing a legitimate governmental interest. And in Cleburne, the Supreme Court decided that requiring special permits for a hospital just because it was serving the mentally ill wasn't rational. Rather, the Court determined that the permit requirement at issue was motivated by prejudice against the disabled, and, therefore, was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
"Land use decisions have to be about the use, not the people," explains Simpson.
Theoretically, the Cleburne decision should provide significant protections to people trying to set up facilities servicing the homeless. But time and again, the discretionary processes of governments heavily geared toward public input often mean that those homeless shelters receive more de facto scrutiny than would a similar use, such as a hotel.
"The problem with this conditional use requirement, and this repeats all over the place, is neighbors don't want it. The town gets shy and says you can go somewhere else, but there's nowhere else to go," says Simpson.
The Institute for Justice has sued on behalf of several homeless shelters that have been denied conditional use permits—recently winning one case in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
Despite Supreme Court precedent, these lawsuits are typically an uphill battle. Lower courts give extreme deference to a government's rationale for its regulations. Simpson says that the courts have also generally treated Cleburne as a unique one-off decision that's not neatly applicable to similar cases.
Shelter providers themselves are sometimes loath to sue—either for lack of resources or a fear of souring their relationship with a local government they have to interact with on a daily basis. The result is that the rights of homeless service providers, and the people they serve, are often ignored.
On the most immediate level, the months or years churches spend getting permits or securing a scrap of land where their charitable work is legal is time they're not spending on their missions.
The people they would have fed or sheltered during that time have to look for help elsewhere or go without it. The time and resources they do sink into getting permission comes at the expense of productive work they could be doing.
The opportunity costs of that lost time were particularly acute during the pandemic when so many people were in need.
"We could have helped elderly folks who were isolated because of the pandemic," says Kan. He estimates the UUCPA spent a thousand volunteer hours just getting its safe parking permit. "We could have worked with kids who didn't have the best internet. There were a lot of programs we could have put that energy into."
Excessive regulation also suppresses organizations' willingness to provide shelter and other services to the homeless in the first place. Palo Alto's safe parking ordinance was backed by a number of city churches interested in participating in such a program. Most looked at what the UUCPA went through and said "heck no."
The chilling effects of discretionary, public input–heavy approval processes also come with a personal cost. People just trying to do good have to face a lot of vitriol and opposition from their community.
"There's no escaping this conversation in this town," says Interfaith Sanctuary's Peterson-Stigers. The zoning fight didn't stop the nonprofit's day-to-day work. But it did take an emotional toll, transforming efforts to help the needy and the vulnerable into a bureaucratic slog that put the organization at odds with the government and much of the community. "I hate the work that I'm being asked to do right now that feels very political."
The post Labyrinthine Zoning Rules Restricted Homeless Shelters During the Pandemic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For a few hours every Sunday morning, New York City's Jerry Orbach Theater transforms into a church. When it does, the 199-seat off-Broadway theater can be filled to 50 percent capacity under the state's current COVID-19 rules.
A few hours later, when the Jerry Orbach welcomes guests to yet another performance of Perfect Crime, the long-running murder mystery show, the 199-seat theater's capacity must be capped at just 33 percent.
Yes, under New York's pandemic rules, the exact same physical space that can't host more than 66 people for a performance is somehow considered safe when up to 99 people gather there to pray and sing together. That's despite the fact that, based on what we know about how the COVID-19 spreads, church services seem to be, if anything, more dangerous for unvaccinated attendees.
The theater, which is owned by longtime Perfect Crime star Catherine Russell, has been operating at a loss due to the capacity restrictions, according to an amended complaint filed this week in a lawsuit challenging New York's COVID-19 rules for theaters.
"For small venue theaters and comedy clubs…that differential treatment can mean the difference between breaking even and performing at a loss," lawyers from the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law firm, wrote in court filings on behalf of Russell's theater and several others in New York. The amended complaint argues that New York's disparate treatment of theaters and comedy clubs relative to similar venues like churches violated both the First and 14th Amendments.
The lawsuit points out that it isn't only houses of worship that have been singled out for better treatment. Wedding venues, conference centers, and other large indoor event spaces are allowed to operate at 50 percent of capacity.
Even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced plans to lift all COVID-19 capacity restrictions on May 19, the situation at the Jerry Orbach Theater is, for now, a lingering reminder of the arbitrary and often nonsensical rules that have governed Americans' lives and livelihoods for the past year.
People seem to take COVID-related restrictions less seriously when they are engaged in virtuous activities, polls show, but that's no reason for such distinctions to make their way into official government policies.
Unfortunately, New York has been a national leader when it comes to nonsensical COVID rules—rules with predictable results. Earlier in the pandemic, Cuomo mandated that bars must serve food in order to serve alcoholic drinks, and then tried to regulate exactly what kind of food must be served when bars mocked Cuomo by offering the bare minimum.
If Cuomo goes ahead with plans to lift all restrictions in New York later this month, Russell and her fellow theater owners likely won't get their day in court. Still, the nonsensical rules in place for the past month are yet another reminder that arbitrary restrictions on economic behavior are a poor way to fight this, or any, public health scourge.
The post New York's Nonsensical COVID Rules Force Theaters To Operate at 33 Percent. Unless They Host Church Services. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Religion, we've been warned, divides us and leads to conflict. It stands to reason, then, that as the country becomes less religious, conflict should fade away. Instead, it's clear people are eager to fight one another at all costs, and they'll find new reasons to do so if the old ones become irrelevant. Forget religious wars; Americans now wage their fanatical crusades over politics.
As in the past, to avoid endless strife we're going to have to learn to peacefully coexist.
"Religion poisons everything," warned the late Christopher Hitchens. He was perfectly willing to respect the right of the faithful to celebrate their traditions, he said, but he argued that believers were incapable of "the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone."
So, life should be growing more peaceful as the years pass, right? After all, "Gallup finds the percentage of Americans who report belonging to a church, synagogue or mosque at an all-time low" and "as older, more religiously observant generations die out, they are being replaced by far less religious young adults," Pew Research tells us.
But anybody who has even accidentally glanced at recent headlines knows that life is not growing more peaceful. Americans are as divided as ever and engaged in increasingly violent conflict not just to win, but to destroy perceived enemies. Religion may be going away, but new causes have arisen to excite the passions of true believers.
"American faith, it turns out, is as fervent as ever; it's just that what was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief," Shadi Hamid argues in The Atlantic. "Political debates over what America is supposed to mean have taken on the character of theological disputations. This is what religion without religion looks like."
Worse, of course, is that political true believers are, if anything, even less inclined than the theologically motivated to "leave me alone" as Hitchens justifiably wanted. Religious fanatics all too often harness state power to force their visions on the unwilling, but political fanatics don't know any other way to express their beliefs. And they are fanatics.
"On the left, the 'woke' take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends," adds Hamid. "On the right, adherents of a Trump-centric ethno-nationalism still drape themselves in some of the trappings of organized religion, but the result is a movement that often looks like a tent revival stripped of Christian witness."
Hamid isn't the first observer to conclude that America's deepening political divisions look just like religious zealotry.
"In the early days of Christianity, believers would rather be thrown to Roman lions than reject their Savior," Jon Gabriel wrote in the Arizona Republic in December. "Now, we're supposed to hold that same devotion so some flawed politician can have four more years in Washington, D.C."
"[T]he American left has lost its mind," Matt Taibbi complained last summer. "Each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics."
"The need for meaning hasn't gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction," Andrew Sullivan observed in 2018. "We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical."
America's bitter polarization makes much more sense when you see political fervor as a substitute for religious fanaticism. Pollsters' findings that "55% of Republicans say Democrats are 'more immoral' when compared with other Americans; 47% of Democrats say the same about Republicans" seem bizarre in the context of policy debates. So do warnings from scholars that an election "could generate violence and bloodshed." But they take on a new light when you realize that adherents of the major political factions see their clashes as contests between good and evil. Apocalyptic language, purges of opponents, and street violence aren't about advancing ideological agendas; they're exercises in punishing heretics and sinners.
If the woke and the Trumpist alike are devotees of modern cults, can they learn to share the same country in peace? Hamid isn't optimistic.
"Can religiosity be effectively channeled into political belief without the structures of actual religion to temper and postpone judgment?" he asks. "There is little sign, so far, that it can."
But, if there is hope, it's in the tool that theologically divided Americans adopted in the past so that diverse religious sects could coexist without eternal strife: tolerance.
Earlier this month, in Scientific American, three scholars rejected President Joe Biden's call for "unity" because it's "often understood to be an argument for uniformity or assimilation to specific values and beliefs—which is not particularly realistic." Instead, they argue, "a more practical solution to the current partisan divide is though tolerance of our differences."
"Tolerance does not imply compromising our values, beliefs or way of life, but rather allowing others to live life as they wish because our reasons to endure these differences (such as a respect for others' freedom of expression) outweigh our reasons for objection," add authors Kumar Yogeeswaran of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Levi Adelman of the European Research Center on Migration and Ethnic Relation, and Maykel Verkuyten of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
The authors acknowledge that tolerance is challenging because it requires admitting that those horrible other people have an equal right to abide by their beliefs. But "[i]n a nation divided between two almost equally powerful political factions, tolerance is a necessity for avoiding future conflict."
We've done it before, after all. Americans learned through hard experience that it was better to tolerate religious dissenters and their differing ways of life, however imperfectly, than to engage in endless conflict and risk our own destruction. With ideological crusades replacing theological battles, we will again have to learn to live and let live.
The post Only Tolerance Can Save Us From Political Fanatics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"You need to stay home," said the voiceover in an April public health ad in New York state. "It's all they're asking us to do. It's not that hard."
It's not that hard. This (or some variant) has been a frequent refrain from officials, public health experts, and others throughout the coronavirus pandemic. The tone is a mash of encouragement and paternalism intended to convey that many of us can avoid contributing to the disease's spread with relatively easy precautions.
It's not that hard is true of hand washing. It's almost always true of wearing a mask. But it is not true of lockdowns. It is not true of social distancing. It is not true of skipping Christmas or Thanksgiving or your mom's birthday or your brother's wedding. It's not true of missing church and New Year's Eve parties and eating in restaurants. It's not true of going without regular, in-person contact with friends and loved ones.
This actually is that hard. It sucks, and we should say so.
That is not to say it's not worth it. My household has been pretty conservative—as in careful, not Republican—about pandemic mitigation measures, conservative enough to get criticized for it both by family members and by strangers on the internet. We took advantage of the summer months to go to outdoor, masked church services, and we've had a limited number of friends over for bonfires in our backyard every week. I tried to stretch that stuff as long as possible into the fall, but I live in Minnesota and now it's just too cold, especially with our kids involved. Both church and socializing have moved back online. Most weeks we encounter only ourselves, our nanny, and sometimes staff at stores.
But like many things, this does not become easy just because we judge it worthwhile. Doing Easter service online was the right call, but it wasn't not that hard. Staying in our house all the time with two teething, bored toddlers isn't not that hard. Being unable to take them for a leisurely, purposeless, and, crucially, heated stroll through the mall isn't not that hard. Our twins having literally no other playmates their own age isn't not that hard. Wholly inadequate Zoom time with our friends isn't not that hard. None of this is not that hard.
And we're comparatively lucky! We have reliable, fast internet access and friends with the same. We can stay connected in a better-than-nothing facsimile of our ordinary relationship. We can at least see each other's faces. Many other Americans with limited tech skills or internet service cannot do likewise.
Our jobs are white-collar and allow us to work from home full-time. That's only true of about two in 10 people in this country.
Our income is high enough that we are the recipients of deliveries, not the deliverers. "You need to stay home" is not an order with which the truckers and postal workers and so many other people who keep us fed and clothed can comply.
Our kids are young enough that we're not dealing with the fiasco of online school. Friends with older kids are agonizing, switching schools, trying desperately to make an unworkable situation work.
Our child care wasn't disrupted, as so many people's was, because the incredibly high cost of day care for twin infants had already pushed us to the nanny option. But plenty of parents, especially mothers, have had their careers interrupted or put entirely on hold because there is no one to watch their children.
And their children, by the way, do not have an adult's understanding of the timeline of this crisis and can't entirely comprehend why everything is strange and scary right now. That isn't not that hard, and I don't think it's coincidental that I most often seem to see It's not that hard issuing from the lips of childless, white-collar, middle-class (or richer) people who do not have a chronic illness or disability. Maybe, for those few, it's truly not that hard. It is that hard for the rest of us.
It's hard because people need people. We are made to be in relationships with each other. Our brains, hearts, souls, spirits—whatever you want to call that core of our being—that thing need parties. It needs human contact. It needs community. It needs beers on the couch. It needs board games late into the night. It needs play dates. It needs not to die alone. It needs not to give birth alone. It needs love. And the internet, blessed and cursed as it is, can transmit love only so well.
The end of the COVID-19 pandemic is finally in sight. By summer, they tell us, anyone who wants a vaccine can have it. Life will drift back to normal. We'll have parties again. So it's maybe six months to go. That's not very long, in the grand scheme of things. The bulk of this is already behind us. Pandemics past have been longer and deadlier.
But right now, and for months to come, this is still happening. It is still lonely. It is still difficult. And I still don't want to hear from anyone's mouth—least of all public health officials—the pernicious, dismissive, inhuman claim that it's not that hard.
The post Stop Saying Lockdown Is 'Not That Hard' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Churches Were Eager to Reopen," says the headline over a story in today's New York Times. "Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases."
The not-so-subtle subtext: Reopening churches was reckless, because they are more likely than other venues to be the sites of superspreading events, regardless of the precautions they take. But the evidence presented by the Times does not support that thesis.
"More than 650 coronavirus cases have been linked to nearly 40 churches and religious events across the United States since the beginning of the pandemic," the Times says, "with many of them erupting over the last month as Americans resumed their pre-pandemic activities."
The number of confirmed COVID-19 infections in the United States is now 3.1 million, meaning the church-related cases identified by the Times account for 0.02 percent of the total. On the face of it, that does not seem like "a major source of coronavirus cases." And there are something like 385,000 churches in the U.S., so the ones tied to COVID-19 infections represent around 0.01 percent of Christian congregations.
Also note that the Times is talking about church-related infections "since the beginning of the pandemic," so its tally of 650 does not even tell us what has happened since services resumed after lockdowns were lifted, which is ostensibly the story's focus. The article says "many" of those infections happened during the last month, but it never says how many.
More to the point, the Times never says how churches compare to other settings—such as bars, restaurants, offices, factories, house parties, and Memorial Day or Independence Day gatherings—as a source of virus transmission. Even if half of the infections tallied by the Times happened recently, that would still mean other sources account for around 99.8 percent of newly confirmed cases since mid-May, when testing should have begun detecting post-lockdown infections.
ProPublica reports that "more than 24,000 coronavirus cases have been tied to meatpacking plants." As of June 30, the Marshall Project says, "at least 52,649 people in prison had tested positive" for COVID-19. Yet the Times thinks 650 cases make "churches and religious events" a "major source" of infection.
Some church services have become superspreading events, and it is not hard to see why that could happen. "It's an ideal setting for transmission," Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University, tells the Times. "You have a lot of people in a closed space. And they're speaking loudly, they're singing. All those things are exactly what you don't want."
But churches, like other venues, can take precautions that reduce the risk of virus transmission. Outdoor services are less risky than indoor services. Well-ventilated spaces are less risky than poorly ventilated spaces. Services where congregants wear masks and keep a distance from each other are less risky than services where people crowd together without masks. Services where people eschew singing, or keep the volume low, are less risky than services that don't.
Astonishingly, the Times dismisses the value of such precautions, saying the virus "has struck churches that reopened cautiously with face masks and social distancing in the pews, as well as some that defied lockdowns and refused to heed new limits on numbers of worshipers." But in each of the examples it describes in detail, precautions fell notably short.
One outbreak happened at a Texas church where the pastor said it was OK for congregants to hug each other. Another happened at a West Virginia church service where masks were "optional." A third happened at a Christian youth party in Ft. Myers, Florida, that was attended by 100 teenagers who "did not stay at a distance." A fourth happened at a Christian youth camp in Missouri where "camp leaders had asked campers to quarantine themselves for two weeks before arriving and to monitor their temperatures" and "campers were given masks to wear in group settings, although they were not required to wear them when they were in smaller groups of campers they were rooming with."
Physical distancing and mask wearing do not eliminate the risk of virus transmission. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether churches can reopen with an acceptable level of risk by following the same guidelines that apply to other settings where people gather for extended periods of time. By implying that precautions don't really matter, the Times is sending a dangerous message to Americans, many of whom are already weary of social distancing rules and disinclined to wear masks.
Whether you think resuming religious services is worth the risk obviously depends on the value you attach to them. "I am trying to do the right thing," Dan Satterwhite, a pastor at a church in Pendleton, Oregon, tells the Times. "I know a lot of people don't feel this way, but those that do, feel that church is essential. There's more to be considered there than just the physical health; there's also the spiritual health."
I have not been to synagogue in months, but I was not very keen on going even before the pandemic. By contrast, my wife, a rabbi who faces a relatively high risk of dying from COVID-19 because she takes an immunosuppressive medication, has started attending services again. Everyone wears a mask, avoids touching anyone else, maintains a distance of at least six feet, and sings only at the volume of ordinary conversation. The prayer leader faces away from the congregation, and there is no reading from the Torah, since that would entail close proximity. When there is a sermon, the speaker stands at least eight feet from the congregation and avoids speaking loudly.
These precautions are not foolproof, but they are surely better than pre-pandemic practices, and my wife has decided that the benefits she gets from attending services outweigh the risks. That's the sort of decision all of us have to make these days, and there is no rational reason to view religious activities differently in that respect or to treat them as so dangerous that they cannot be tolerated at a time when people are resuming secular activities that pose similar risks of virus transmission. That arbitrary distinction, the one the Times seems to be urging, is at the heart of the frequently successful First Amendment cases challenging pandemic-inspired legal restrictions on religious gatherings.
According to the Times, Satterwhite "said that scrutiny had fallen unfairly on churches, while businesses with outbreaks did not face the same backlash." He adds, "I think that there is an effort on the part of some to use things like this to try to shut churches down." Given reporting like this, that seems like a fair inference.
Update: The Times changed the original headline over the story two days after it appeared. The headline now reads: "Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are Confronting Coronavirus Cases." The current version of the story does not note, let alone explain, the revision.
The post Churches, Which Account for 0.02% of COVID-19 Cases, Are a 'Major Source' of Infection, <em>The New York Times</em> Says appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Massachusetts pastor, Kristopher Casey, will be punished with a $300 civil fine for convening more than 10 people at his Sunday church service. If he does it again, the fine will increase to $500, and he could face criminal charges, Masslive.com reports.
And where has the press been in the face of what seems, on its face, to be an egregious violation of the First Amendment's protections of peaceable assembly and the free exercise of religion? The newspapers have been basically cheering it on.
"The constitutional guarantee of civil liberties is not absolute, and its abridgment is not necessarily an act of tyranny," a Washington Post editorial advised. "In this pandemic, the reach of an individual's freedom to be foolish ends an inch away, where the next individual is entitled to protection against the peril posed by the fool's heedlessness." The Post insists that "the same rationale" that closed "concert halls, sports arenas, restaurants, and gyms," also "justifies and requires closing the doors to churches, synagogues, mosques, and other traditional venues of worship."
A New York Times editorial took a similar position: "Bans like these are legal, as long as they are neutral and applicable to everyone…. Under Supreme Court precedent, any infringement on speech or religion must be incidental to the central goal of the restriction, which in this case is clear: stopping the spread of the coronavirus."
If state, local, or federal authorities were shutting down newspaper printing plants, restricting reporters from newsgathering, or preventing the physical distribution of newspapers on pandemic-related public health grounds, the Times and the Post would almost certainly take a different, and less casual, view of the matter. They'd be in court complaining about First Amendment violations faster than you can say Floyd Abrams.
Back in September, the Times' publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, had a long article asserting that "a tour of our nation's history reminds that the role of the free press has been one of the few areas of enduring consensus," that "the First Amendment has served as the world's gold standard for free speech and the free press for two centuries. It has been one of the keys to an unprecedented flourishing of freedom and prosperity in this country and, through its example, around the world." Sulzberger insisted that "in the United States, the Constitution, the rule of law and a still-robust news media act as a constraint."
The same First Amendment and rule of law that protects the free press is the one that protects the freedom of assembly and the free exercise of religion. For that self-interested reason alone, you'd think that maybe the newspapers would be less eager about cheering on the abridgment of civil liberties.
A few brave journalists have taken a different view of it. Veteran economic columnist David Warsh is critical of what he describes as "news media that pass along orders without questions." An editorial in the New Boston Post observes disapprovingly that "all this is happening in the state where people prized their liberty enough to start the American War for Independence."
Pastor Casey of the Adams Square Baptist Church in Worcester, in his April 22 letter to Governor Baker of Massachusetts and to the mayor and police chief of Worcester, quoted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which is older even than the federal First Amendment: "It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship."
The federal Constitution does expressly provide that some rights are limited in extraordinary circumstances. The suspension clause in Article I, for example, provides that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." But there's no such language about suspending the First Amendment. And even the habeas corpus language applies only specifically to cases of "rebellion or invasion," not as a blanket "public safety" concern. Whether the novel coronavirus qualifies as an "invasion" may yet be a matter for litigation.
In the meantime, leaving aside the legal questions, as a practical and political matter it seems highly unlikely that Americans will stand idly by indefinitely while the government forbids them from gathering in their places of worship. The newspaper editorial writers may roll over for it, but Pastor Casey and his congregants, and many others like them, will not.
The post Prohibiting Religious Services Makes the First Amendment a Coronavirus Victim appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the leaders of a Dutch church found out that a family of Armenian refugees was facing deportation, they realized this was a chance to act on their convictions, even if it meant a bit of civil disobedience. As a result, the church has spent more than a month taking advantage of a legal loophole to ensure that the family stays.
For almost nine years, the Tamrazyan family has living as refugees in the Netherlands. And for good reason—according to their asylum request, the father has received death threats due to his political activism in Armenia. While a judge granted them asylum, the government fought back, and the initial ruling was eventually overturned.
Facing a deportation order, the family of five, who had previously been living in an asylum center, sought aid. "This week I can be expelled from the Netherlands after 9 years," 21-year-old Hayarpi Tamrazyan said in a video posted to Twitter in September, according to Euronews."On behalf of my brother and sister, I ask you for help."
Hayarpi and her siblings—Warduhi and Seyran—as well as her father Sasun and mother Anousche, moved out of the asylum center and took refuge at the church where they were members: Gereformeerde Kerk vrijgemaakt (GKv) Katwijk. But as Quartz reported, the church was too small to house them over a long period of time.
That's when Bethel Church in The Hague stepped in to help. In addition to taking the family in, the church made certain authorities couldn't arrest them. How? According to Dutch law, police are not allowed to force their way into houses of worship while religious services are taking place. So ever since October 26, Bethel has been holding a round-the-clock church service.
"We do all this by continuously [sic] praying, singing, listening to sermons and worshipping," Axel Wicke, a minister at Bethel, tweeted Sunday. "The Tamrazyan familiy is literally living in a protective house built by prayers and worship."
Bethel has received the support of the Protestant community in the Netherlands. Its efforts have attracted pastors from around the country, who lead the service in shifts, no matter how many people are in the congregation. The church is trying to "create time and space for dialogue with the government about a dilemma that…should not be faced by a church: choosing between respect for the government and protecting the rights of a child," Theo Hettema, chairman of the General Council of Protestant Ministers, told Eternity News.
Where do "the rights of a child" come into play? The Tamrazyan family previously tried to obtain a "children's pardon," which allows families seeking asylum to stay if they have a child who's been in the country for more than five years. Having lived in the Netherlands for nearly nine years, the Tamrazyans should have been eligible, but their application was still rejected. In fact, from 2013—when the policy was implemented—to April 2016, less than 10 percent of children's pardon requests were granted, according to the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service website.
Wicke told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that Bethel has been aware of this issue "for a while"—long before the Tamrazyans sought aid. He also explained why Bethel feels it's so important that the family not be sent back to Armenia. "We know from the family that [Sasun] also got abducted several times—he was politically active and people in the country were wanting him dead," Wicke said.
Bethel is not the only church to take drastic measures in order to try and stop deportations. On Monday, Reason's Zuri Davis wrote about CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina. For 11 months, CityWell sheltered Samuel Oliver-Bruno, an undocumented immigrant whose wife and son are both American citizens. On Friday, Oliver-Bruno showed up for an appointment at the local U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office, only to be arrested by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Dozens of his supporters who had accompanied him to the appointment surrounded the van where he was taken by immigration agents. They prayed, chanted, and sang. Police ended up arresting 27 of them.
Reason's Shikha Dalmia reported in February that there many churches across the United States providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants. Authorities usually don't force their way into sensitive locations like churches and hospitals, though in some cases agents will simply wait until immigrants leave to arrest them.
As for the Tamrazyans, Hettema told Quartz he hopes Dutch Minister of Migration Mark Harbers will grant them legal residency, which Harbers has the power to do. But Hettema understands that a never-ending church service isn't the final solution.
"We do not have any illusions. It may end with vans of the Repatriation and Departures Service out front, or may end because we can no longer continue the service," he told Eternity News. "But that was not reason not to do it," he added, indicating that when a family asks for help, it's up to the church to step up.
The post Dutch Church's Month-Long, 24/7 Service Is Saving a Family of Refugees From Deportation appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Members of a North Carolina church were the latest to clash with the federal government over immigration policies. During the holiday weekend, an immigration appointment ended with the arrest of an undocumented immigrant in the church's care as well as the arrest of several members.
CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham sheltered undocumented immigrant Samuel Oliver-Bruno in a former Sunday school classroom for 11 months. The 47-year-old is married to an American citizen and has a 19-year-old son, who is also a citizen. On Friday, Oliver-Bruno had an appointment at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office in Morrisville. Oliver-Bruno was expected to give his fingerprints and discuss a petition to legally delay his upcoming deportation via a deferred action status. Members accompanied Oliver-Bruno to his appointment, fearing entrapment.
Their fears proved correct. After walking in with his son, his attorney, and the church's pastor, plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents predictably swooped in to arrest Oliver-Bruno.
The church members moved to surround a van where officials had taken Oliver-Bruno. They chanted, "Let him stay," sang "Amazing Grace," and prayed. The Morrisville Police Department released a statement saying that it arrested 27 people for obstruction after they did not follow "two orders to disperse." (The members were aware that their actions could lead to arrest.) Included among those arrested was Oliver-Bruno's son.
CityWell Pastor Cleve May argued that ICE "exploited" Oliver-Bruno's due process by arresting him while he complied with the legal guidelines to delay his deportation. May also believed that the USCIS meeting, which was legally required for Oliver-Bruno's petition, was a trap.
"It was presented as a legitimate appointment but ICE utilized due process as bait," he told CNN.
North Carolina Congressmen David Price and G.K. Butterfield, both Democrats, released a statement that also said Oliver-Bruno was "entrapped." They have since requested deferred action from deportation on his behalf and are seeking prosecutorial discretion in his case.
CityWell is one of many houses of worship that have stepped up to combat harsh immigration policies. As Reason's Shikha Dalmia reported in February, sanctuary churches have enjoyed a special privilege from ICE when it comes to shielding immigrants. An internal administrative bars government agents from entering "sensitive locations," like places of worship and hospitals, to arrest immigrants. In fact, the deep cultural respect for these places have made them more reliable for immigrants than sanctuary cities. Additionally, ICE agents have even used some of these locations to house asylum seekers when they do not have room.
Despite this decades-long understanding, however, the Trump administration has quietly begun pushing back on sensitive locations. Dalmia's report listed several instances of agents stalking immigrants in order to arrest them once they left their sanctuaries. In one case, ICE agents shadowed parents at a hospital who were seeking care of their 2-month-old infant, who was born in America. Agents even watched the mother as she breastfed. Deportation proceedings soon followed.
The actions taken against Oliver-Bruno can only deter immigrants from complying in good faith with government requirements.
The post A Church's Dramatic Attempt to Stop a Deportation Reflects the Crackdown on Sanctuaries appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After a report found that 301 Catholic priests, clergy, and lay teachers in Pennsylvania sexually abused over 1,000 children, several in the state government hope to both lift and expand the statute of limitations for child sex crimes.
The disturbing report, which is 884 pages long, found that systemic sexual abuse occurred over in six Pennsylvania dioceses over the span of at least 70 years. The report also established a pattern that revealed Bishops and others in church leadership were aware of the sexual abuse and chose to act in a way that often protected the predators from repercussions. In several instances, Bishops dissuaded victims from reporting abuse and actively worked to prevent meaningful investigation into the allegations.
Among its many revelations, the report exposed the way some used Pennsylvania's statute of limitations on reporting child sex abuse to their advantage. Many of the victims are now too old to see their abusers prosecuted. The current statute of limitations lets victims of child sexual abuse sue their abusers, and those complicit, in civil court until the age of 30. PennLive reports that a bill sponsored by Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R) would raise the age to 50. Additionally, the bill, Senate Bill 261, would completely eliminate the statute of limitations for any future criminal prosecutions for child sex abuse.
As reported, Scarnati's bill was unanimously approved in the Senate, but has been stalled in the House since February 2017.
Supporters of the expanded window hope to see Scarnati's bill joined with a "real deal" amendment proposed by Rep. Mark Rozzi (D), who himself is a victim of clergy abuse. PennLive also reports that Rozzi's amendment would give victims an additional two years to pursue civil action. Rozzi has since argued that it can take victims a long time to come to terms with the abuse they suffered, often times after the window is closed.
Scarnati's bill is expected to come up for a vote in the fall. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who presented the report to the public, urged state lawmakers to pass the bill.
Victims in other states are looking for similar actions. WVUE reports that an older Louisiana man brought allegations against a former deacon in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Louisiana faces similar issues with its statute of limitations on child sex abuse.
The post Pennsylvania Lawmakers Want to Lift the Statute of Limitations Amid the Catholic Priest Sex Abuse Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his five years as head of the global Catholic Church, Pope Francis has made a number of statements that go well beyond the magisterial purview to teach on faith and morals. Frequently, he steps into the realm of "prudential judgments" on difficult political questions—judgments that involve choosing the best means to a shared end, and judgments about which good and faithful Catholics need not always agree with the pope.
It seems one of his underlings has decided he can do one better, decreeing not just his own policy prescriptions but also his own facts. According to the Catholic Herald, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, has told Vatican Insider that China is the nation currently "best implementing the social doctrine of the Church."
Taken a face value, the statement is astounding in its obliviousness. We are speaking of a country where forced abortion and even infanticide are the norm—a country that executes more humans a year than any other on Earth; that harasses, detains, tortures, and disappears its critics on a regular basis; that just last year passed a law to "strangle online freedom and anonymity, and further clamped down on media outlets for reporting that departs from the party line," according to Human Rights Watch; that believes religious activities should be controlled by the state; that broke off relations with the Vatican half a century ago to that end; and that has been appointing its own Catholic bishops without consulting the pope ever since. This is the country Sorondo, recently returned from a visit, calls "extraordinary"?
"What people don't realise is that the central value in China is work, work, work," he said. On climate change, he added, the Communist government is "assuming a moral leadership" in the world. Personally, I'd have preferred that the Vatican assume a bit more "moral leadership" in Communist China.
That the statement comes at a delicate moment makes it all the more frustrating. The Church and the Chinese government have been exploring a possibility of rapprochement, with a Vatican spokesman saying that a new agreement could be inked any day. The move would be a controversial one, which many conservative Catholics around the world strongly oppose.
Catholics in China have for the last five decades been split, with some attending unauthorized "underground" churches, led by priests loyal to the pope, and others attending state-sanctioned churches where the clergy is selected (or at least approved) by the government. In an effort to bridge the gap with Beijing, the Vatican is apparently replacing some of its own bishops with men chosen by the Chinese. At The Washington Post, one writer called the pending deal—which presumably would involve more such replacements and arguably would legitimize the Communist regime—"a capitulation of spiritual authority [that] would damage the Catholic Church in China for years to come."
But there are arguments on both sides. The Church has long wished to mend ties with China, and doing so has been a special goal of Pope Francis over the last few years. As Crux's John L. Allen wrote, the world's largest country offers an opportunity to win souls on an incomparable scale, while better relations could improve the situations of the roughly 10 million Catholics already there. And there are many reasons to support greater openness between countries in general, including that human rights abuses are easier to carry out in places that are closed off from the view of the world. During the Cold War, Pope John Paul II famously charted a middle way between isolation of and capitulation to the USSR. He is remembered for helping to bring down Communism through his dogged support of Poland's Solidarity trade union. Trade with China has already nudged the country into economic liberalization of various sorts over the last couple of decades.
Whether the case for dealmaking is strong enough to overcome genuine fears about the Church sacrificing its autonomy is a question that is open to debate. But Bishop Sorondo's laughable suggestion that China is a model of Catholic social teachings takes a complex, controversial political question and answers it in the stupidest possible way. An authoritarian regime guilty of "widespread human rights violations" (to quote Amnesty International) is not a model of Catholic governance. For a senior Vatican official to suggest otherwise hurts the Church's credibility and will rightly mobilize even greater resistance to both this deal in particular and the Francis papacy as a whole.
The post Vatican Official Says China, Which Persecutes Christians and Murders Dissidents, Is the Country 'Best Implementing the Social Doctrine of the Church' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We recently got married. Well, technically, we got married twice.
One fine day this spring, we put on nice clothes and publicly performed the rites and rituals recognized by our families and community as a wedding ceremony. As part of the day's events, we signed a Ketubah, the traditional Jewish wedding contract. Historically, the Ketubah included the groom's promise to provide "food, clothing, the necessities of life, and conjugal needs" for the bride, along with a statement of the dowry the bride brought to the marriage. Modern versions are often more egalitarian. Ours included a mutual promise to "work for one another," "live with one another," and "build together a household of integrity." Ketubot are typically beautifully calligraphed works of art, and we spent a lot of time choosing the right text and design for ours. It was witnessed by our rabbi and by two beloved friends. It hangs in our bedroom as a reminder of the commitment we have made to each other.
We also got married in the eyes of the law. Our state marriage license was printed at the city-county building on cheap paper after the clerk checked our IDs, filled our names into the anonymous blanks in the same text every other couple has to use, and gave us a pamphlet about syphilis. We had no say in the wording or the witnesses. We keep that license in the safe deposit box at the bank with our mortgage and the titles to our cars.
The contrast in the thinking behind our two marriage documents, and in how we have treated them now that we have them, captures the difference between thinking of marriage as a mutual contract and thinking of it as a license from the state. It's the difference between a relationship that requires consent and one that requires permission.
If you hang around with libertarians long enough, you'll almost certainly hear someone ask, "Why can't we just get the state out of the marriage business entirely?" Until two years ago, when Obergefell v. Hodges settled the question, you'd occasionally hear a certain stripe of libertarianish conservative call for privatizing marriage too, sometimes on principle and sometimes as a dodge around the question of whether the federal government should recognize gay unions. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), for instance, has long said, "I don't want my guns or my marriage registered in Washington." The Alabama state legislature has considered proposals that would more or less end the licensing of marriages in the state, presumably not because of a deep commitment to limited government.
As libertarians, we would prefer to deal with the government as little as we can, yet we still chose to involve the state in our marriage. The reasons we did so can shed light on the challenges involved in extracting the state from this institution, and also on why such a change might be worthwhile.
Cupid by Contract What does it mean in practice to say we want to get the state out of marriage?
One problem is that state marital provisions are one-size-fits-all, as with our fill-in-the-names-and-sign-here marriage license. Actual 21st century marriages are much more idiosyncratic—the wide range of pre-nuptial agreements demonstrates this, as does our personalized Ketubah. Many people might want the flexibility in marital arrangements that privatization allows. Writing in Slate in 1997, the Cato Institute's David Boaz imagined a kind of standard contract, much like a standardized will, that would work for many as-is but would also allow for more detailed arrangements. One can even imagine marriage contracts that are renewable at 5- or 10-year intervals, allowing couples to part ways amicably without many of the financial and emotional costs of divorce.
Economic arrangements could be varied along a number of dimensions, including considerations for children, agreements about how money will be spent, and worst-case-scenario planning for illness, death, or divorce. People could choose to have a religious wedding, with a contract designed by the institution in question, along with specifications for divorce and the rest. All of these kinds of contracts would be enforced through common-law mechanisms, with judges interpreting the texts and building up a body of legal precedent about how to resolve disputes. We could also imagine marriage certification services (Marital Underwriters Lab? BridalZoom.com?) who check over simple contracts for those who don't want to use a lawyer or a church.
Full privatization also implies that marital status must be irrelevant to the provision of government benefits. Otherwise, the state would still have an interest in how marriage is defined. Truly private marriage would allow for whatever variety of arrangements people desire.
Privatization of this sort might be especially attractive to those whose relationships currently do not have legal status. Plural marriages are the obvious example. Religious institutions might also support privatization, as it would enable them to have their own set of marital rules without fear that the state's requirements would force them to act against their beliefs. Tailored contracts, especially if such contracts became relatively standardized for particular kinds of partnerships, might be appealing to the very wealthy or to those with child custody complications. If such contracts included provisions for private arbitration (or even marital counseling), this might reduce some of the costs of divorce, making them attractive to all kinds of married people.
Marriage Without the State Historically, human beings have found a variety of ways to define and regularize marriage that don't require a license from the state. Such systems had the usual advantages of stateless orders: They offered more variety, they were more flexible, and they were more responsive to local needs. The problem was that these forms of marriage worked at a time when others in the community played a much larger role in determining not just what counted as a marriage but who could get married. Could the regularity and social enforcement required for functioning informal institutions exist in a 21st century context, when marriage is considered a much more private institution? It's an open question.
For most of human history, for most people, marriage was a way to ensure that they and the communities they inhabited were able to survive economically. When most humans lived at the margins, ensuring that there was sufficient labor to work the fields or run the family business was essential. Marriage provided an economic partnership for organizing production, and the ability to raise children together meant that those children could contribute to that production process.
Because of the community's interest in ensuring good marital matches, what counted as being married was decided in decentralized ways by particular communities, especially among the poor. Marriage was much more a matter of custom than of formal rules. Permissions came not from a magistrate, but from neighbors and kin. Arranged marriages can be seen as an extremely strong form of permission, where parents or others possess an exclusive right to contract a marriage for their heirs, even when it overrides the desires of young people. More commonly, that right to grant permission was used to veto a marriage rather than to force one.
But in the West at least, marriage has been a matter of consent between partners for a very long time. As far back as the Magna Carta we find specific language protecting widows—a particularly vulnerable category—from forced marriages. But consensual marriage still required permission from parents, relatives, and community. What's more, consent is not the same thing as love. Consensual marriages based on economic and political concerns were the standard up until the last 200 years or so.
Until then, customary practices predominated, especially in remote areas where the reach of the state was limited. The practice of "jumping the broomstick" as a public indication of intent to marry was common among slaves in the American south, but also had a long history in other communities as well. Some communities recognized jumping backward over a broomstick as an intent to divorce. Medieval Ireland's rules for marriage were part of a legal system that operated outside of a formal state. There were 10 different forms of Irish marriage, most of which depended on what each partner brought to the union in terms of property. Property mattered, as it did elsewhere, because it defined the rights the person had with respect to divorce as well as the rules governing inheritance. There were also a series of fines for a variety of classes of illegal marriages, including marriage by stealth, abduction, or rape. Scotland's famously relaxed marriage laws allowed for a much lower age of consent than in England, and permitted nearly any adult to perform a marriage between two consenting individuals. Dramatic scenes of elopements to Gretna Green thus became a feature of the English novel and of English life.
There is no specific moment when marriage became defined by the state rather than private institutions. In part, this is because church and state were so intertwined for so long.
Going to the Chapel Today we think of churches as being part of civil society, and those who propose the privatization of marriage are generally insistent that houses of worship should be able to determine their own rules for the marriages they will chose to sanctify. If houses of worship do not wish to marry same-sex or interfaith couples, that's up to them.
But through much of history, the line between church and state that allows for such nuance was nearly nonexistent—in part because the church frequently acted like a state. The church's rules covering marriage enjoyed the force of law, so much of what the church did was equivalent to state involvement. And the church's numerous rules about who could marry, divorce, remarry, and adopt often were designed to work to the church's material benefit.
For example, for a long time one could not marry a relative closer than a seventh cousin. There is no biological justification for such a rule, and you can imagine how difficult it was to provide proof that a couple wasn't breaking it. So the church sold indulgences to waive the rule, which was a convenient source of revenue. Similarly, the church's centurieslong prohibition on adoption was a way to ensure that childless couples did not have heirs and would be more likely to will their property to the church. Rules against remarriage for widows also made it more likely that property would go to the church while creating a class of women who could become nuns. This is likewise why the church prohibited the Jewish practice of levirate marriage, where a widow would be expected to marry her dead husband's brother to keep her property in his family.
It's tempting to simply propose that governments accept as valid any marriages performed by other private institutions, but this only shifts the battle one level higher. Which institutions would count? Are evangelicals going to stand for plural marriages in the Church of Satan? Will progressives accept arranged marriages between much older men and very young girls?
In the 12th century, the Catholic Church attempted to require that marriages be solemnized in a church, but that was unenforceable in a world where tradition saw, in the words of historian Stephanie Coontz, "mutual intent or the blessing of a parent sufficient" for that purpose. What constituted mutual intent varied across time and communities, early on requiring mutual promises followed by sexual intercourse, but later requiring only the exchange of vows. By 1215, the Church required three things for a marriage to be valid: (1) a bride with a dowry; (2) announcements beforehand of the intent to marry; and (3) marriage in a church. Even here, however, the state played no official role, and other religious groups had their own traditions for what constituted a valid marriage.
The Protestant Reformation meant that states were increasingly closely identified with the particular sacramental practices that were legal within their borders, so the distance between church and state narrowed. No longer competing institutions, the church and state were often nearly synonymous. Enlightenment thinkers' insistence on creating separation between church and state pulled the two apart again, but the more secular world of the Enlightenment meant that the balance of power had shifted. Modernity meant that, in the West, the state took primacy over the church in many matters that had previously been primarily theological—including marriage.
Marriage, American-Style In the United States, family law, including marriage law, has long been the purview of individual states. But in 18th and early 19th century America, those laws were difficult to enforce in the face of communities where established customs defined marital status and where clergy were often rare visitors.
Historian Nancy Cott reports that despite marriage laws, "informal marriage was common and validated among white settlers from the colonial period on." Couples who met community standards more or less married themselves, demonstrating the continued importance of consent rather than the law. Cott adds that "cohabitation and reciprocal economic contributions" also mattered for indicating that a couple was married, but that "consent was the first essential." Before the state's reach became sufficiently great, communities were much more concerned about whether pairs were functioning as married couples were expected to function than whether they had followed the formal rules of the state or even the church.
Even in these situations where the state was mostly absent, marriage was not a matter of "anything goes." The standards for determining a valid marriage were self-policed by the communities in question. Where law and customary practice conflicted, even to questions of tolerating divorce or sex outside of marriage, customary practice that permitted such things under the right conditions often won the day. Some of the communal norms about defining marital status were strong enough that they became codified by judges in case law. "Informal marriage was valid unless it was specifically prohibited," writes Cott. In cases where judicial intervention was needed to determine if a couple was married, judges generally deferred to community norms about what counted as married, operating on the assumption that couples who were cohabitating and otherwise acting like a married couple were properly considered one, absent clear evidence to the contrary.
It's tempting to think that a 21st century version of privatized marriage could simply recreate this world. However, the increased heterogeneity of human beings and their romantic relationships has made a single, common norm of marriage unsustainable, requiring that society move from informal, communal norms to some more explicit and formalized contractual relationship.
To this day, states and comparable jurisdictions have wide latitude in defining the rules for marriage and divorce. Until 2008, for example, the District of Columbia required a blood test for syphilis in order to get a marriage license, while neighboring Virginia and Maryland did not. Alimony and child support rules differ widely from state to state as well. In a fashion not unlike those Gretna Green elopements, it was common for couples to cross state lines to marry or divorce in states whose laws were more amenable to their individual circumstances. Several dozen movies between 1910 and 1947 focused on the infamous ease and convenience of the divorce laws in Reno, Nevada. And one of the reasons the economist F.A. Hayek took a job in Arkansas when he first moved to the U.S. in the 1950s was to take advantage of the state's liberal divorce rules.
Marrying Like a State We got married for a complex but fairly ordinary list of reasons.
We wanted to spend more time enjoying life with the person we loved best. Steve wanted someone to edit his prose. Sarah wanted someone to organize her chaos. We wanted to raise our two sets of kids together, to work together, to be there for the other in case of emergencies, and to ensure that we had a legally acknowledged relationship for financial and medical reasons. We also wanted to model a committed and loving relationship for our children by formalizing our promises to one another. We wanted to combine our households and our lives for fun, for pleasure, for efficiency, and for the sake of our budgets.
Given all these self-interested reasons that we, and other people, get married, why should the state determine who counts as wed? Even if we agree that marriage is good for the people getting married and that maintaining the institution is good for society because it contributes significantly to better child raising, why is it licensed and controlled by external authorities?
For an answer, look to the self-interest of state actors. The power to define the terms of marriage is the power to raise revenue, incentivize behavior that benefits the organization, and determine who is eligible to receive the benefits the organization provides. In Seeing Like a State, his study of the state's power to organize and manipulate its citizens, James Scott argues that governments and similar institutions need to impose categories and rigid, artificial organizational schemes on people in order to accomplish the institutions' various goals. Once the state imposes those categories, they become part of how we think about what those categories are organizing.
The state's increased role in defining what counts as marriage, even as the state has reduced restrictions on who one can marry, has happened in parallel with the growth of state involvement in many other aspects of people's lives. The state's interest in defining and approving of marriages is entangled with the role marital status plays in a host of government programs. When privatizers call to remove the state from marriage, it sounds as if there's only one plug to be pulled; in fact, there are thousands. As long as those programs exist, and as long as they depend to some degree on a clear definition of marital status, the state is unlikely to get out of the business of defining marriage.
This becomes the dilemma. The battles over marriage, including future debates over plural marriage, can indeed be defused if they are de-politicized. But as long as marriage matters for so much else, it cannot be de-politicized.
It's tempting to simply propose that governments accept as valid any marriages performed by other private institutions, but this only shifts the battle one level higher. Which institutions would count? Are evangelicals going to stand for plural marriages or weddings in the Church of Satan? Will progressives accept arranged marriages between much older men and very young girls? When governments need to know marital status, marriage cannot be de-politicized.
The American government's burgeoning role in marriage has always been driven by a succession of social issues where control over defining marriage was a trump card. In the 19th century, the most obvious examples were slavery and race. Roughly half of the original 13 colonies prohibited interracial marriage. By the end of the Civil War, the vast majority of states did so. Far more states criminalized interracial marriage than interracial sex, and interracial marriages were one clear exception to the law's deference to community-based informal norms. Even if interracial couples met all of the local expectations, they did not get the exemption from the law that white couples usually did. Maintaining this racial inequality even as social norms worked to change it required the full force of the law. Over the course of the 20th century, some states rescinded their laws and many others enforced them only selectively until the Loving v. Virginia decision overturned them all in 1967.
In the 20th century, as always, the definition of marriage was closely tied to economics, but with the new twist that the state was providing many more incomes. "Marriage bar" policies of both governments and private employers early in the century prohibited hiring married women, making marital status a way to control women's behavior and enforce a particular vision of married life. A number of New Deal programs (including Social Security) used marital status as a way of determining benefits, so individual states had to clarify their marriage procedures and ensure that they were followed. A federal policy during the Depression that no family could hold more than one government job made marital status more of a concern to Washington.
The history of the U.S. tax code has been deeply entangled with marital status. In his history of the tax code's effects on women, Taxing Women, tax law scholar Edward McCaffery explains how various changes in rates and filing status have reflected the attempts by politicians and others to privilege the "traditional" male-headed single-earner household. Joint filing under the current tax code creates a "secondary earner bias" that causes the spouse whose labor force participation is more marginal to have his or her first dollar taxed at the same rate as the last dollar earned by the primary earner.
As women are far more likely to be the secondary earner, this feature continues to discourage married women from working even as it encourages marriage among people with higher earning capacity. For high-earning couples with relatively equal incomes, getting married means a higher tax bill than staying single, while high-earning couples with disparate incomes see lower taxes if they marry. These features create incentives, at least on the margin, for a particular type of marriage.
On the spending side, marriage matters for eligibility and benefit levels for a large number of government programs. In the mid-1990s, the General Accounting Office reported 1,049 federal government laws that recognize marital status. To the extent that marriage reduces benefit levels and increases the tax burden for poorer couples, the combination of the two discourages marriage among the poor.
The structure of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) means that for many poor couples, marriage means a reduction in benefits. Unmarried parents can both take advantage of the family EITC, and the one without the resident child can also get the childless worker EITC. Married parents, meanwhile, are not eligible for all three credits. The power of the state to define who is and is not married has implications not just for the financial situation of potential partners, but for the viability of the institution of marriage and the corresponding social benefits it brings.
The fight over same-sex marriage illustrates many of the same themes as the shift of heterosexual marriage. The broader cultural move of marriage from permission to consent, and from economic to companionate unions, gave same sex-couples even more grounds to wonder why their partnerships remained unsanctioned. But the consent of marital partners still required exogenous permission from the state, so the same-sex marriage question was inevitably a political question.
As the political battle grew, libertarians were quick to suggest that such battles were unavoidable as a result of the state's role in defining marriage. A number of libertarians argued for eliminating the state's role in marriage entirely as a way to cut the Gordian knot.
Recognizing that such a radical solution was a non-starter politically, other libertarians—including Reason and the Libertarian Party—backed state-sanctioned same-sex marriage as a second-best option as early as the 1970s. Given the long-standing classical liberal commitment to equality before the law, this position was a legitimate one. The state's involvement in marriage was hardly likely to disappear in the near future. We should expect the debate over plural marriage to raise all of these issues again.
Getting the State Out of Everything If the problem with getting the state out of marriage is that marriage matters for so many other things that the state does, why not focus on the state doing fewer of those things? Reducing the state's role in other areas is already a good idea, but all of those policies can also be seen as intermediary steps, part of eliminating the state's role in marriage.
For example, an anti-poverty agenda that includes things like ending occupational licensure, reducing or eliminating the minimum wage, removing restrictive zoning laws that raise housing prices and discourage people from starting small businesses, and introducing meaningful competition into K–12 education could reduce the need for government welfare programs. Such programs rely on marital status to categorize benefit recipients even as program incentives often work to undermine marriage and its social benefits. Transforming anti-poverty policies reduces the political importance of marital status at the same time it strengthens marriage as a social institution.
One could make a similar argument about policies from taxation to health care. Reducing and flattening tax rates are already part of most libertarian thinking about taxes, but they've rarely been seen as a tactic to reduce the state's role in marriage by reducing the scope of government policies that rely on marital status. Similarly, freeing up health care markets from government regulation and ending the tax-favored treatment of employer-provided health insurance are good ideas in themselves, and such changes will also have the side benefit of reducing the importance of marital status for public policy.
Getting the state out of marriage requires that we get the state out of a whole number of other things first. Then the only marriage contract we'll need will be the one we made between ourselves, and not the one between ourselves and the state.
The post Getting the State Out of Marriage appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Religious types have long worried a ruling in favor of nationwide same-sex marriage could lead to the revocation of rights and privileges for religious organizations. During the arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges—the case in which the Supreme Court today ruled that gay couples "may exercise the fundamental right to marry" in any state—there was an exchange that lent some credence to those fears.
Justice Samuel Alito cited Bob Jones University vs. the United States, a 1983 decision allowing the federal government to strip a Christian university of its tax-exempt status for discriminating against interracial couples.
"In the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to taxexempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?" he asked.
Responded the solicitor general: "You know, I don't think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it's certainly going to be an issue. I don't deny that. I don't deny that, Justice Alito. It is going to be an issue."
Today, some wonder whether the Court just opened the door for the government to withhold tax or other benefits from private, faith-affiliated organizations that refuse to perform gay weddings, offer housing to gay couples, etc. From a recent article in The New York Times:
Conservative religious schools all over the country forbid same-sex relationships, from dating to couples' living in married-student housing, and they fear they will soon be forced to make a wrenching choice. If the Supreme Court this month finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, the schools say they will have to abandon their policies that prohibit gay relationships or eventually risk losing their tax-exempt status…as a violation of a "fundamental national public policy"…
In a recent letter to congressional leaders, officials from more than 70 schools, including Catholic high schools and evangelical colleges, said that a Supreme Court ruling approving same-sex marriage would put at risk all schools "adhering to traditional religious and moral values."
Critics allege this is merely panic-mongering on the part of gay marriage opponents, noting that "there are religious denominations that ban women's ordination, and still have tax-exempt status."
But it's not clear that precedent is precisely relevant. By elevating marriage to a "fundamental right" in its ruling, the Court today gave it a special status that may not apply to, say, the right to be ordained a Roman Catholic priest.
The Supreme Court justices themselves disagree about what this decision means for religiously affiliated organizations. Writing for the majority, Anthony Kennedy offered assurances that people of faith would still be allowed "to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned." But John Roberts, the chief justice, warned in his dissent that protecting a right to "advocate" is not necessarily the same as guaranteeing one's freedom to "exercise" religion without reprisal.
Relevant sections from three of the opinions are below the fold.
From the Opinion of the Court:
Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here. But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.
…
Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine pre- cepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who believe allowing same- sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and search- ing debate. The Constitution, however, does not permit the State to bar same-sex couples from marriage on the same terms as accorded to couples of the opposite sex.
From Roberts' dissenting opinion:
Federal courts are blunt instruments when it comes to creating rights. They have constitutional power only to resolve concrete cases or controversies; they do not have the flexibility of legislatures to address concerns of parties not before the court or to anticipate problems that may arise from the exercise of a new right. Today's decision, for example, creates serious questions about religious liberty. Many good and decent people oppose same-sex marriage as a tenet of faith, and their freedom to exercise religion is—unlike the right imagined by the majority— actually spelled out in the Constitution. Amdt. 1.
Respect for sincere religious conviction has led voters and legislators in every State that has adopted same-sex marriage democratically to include accommodations for religious practice. The majority's decision imposing same-sex marriage cannot, of course, create any such accommodations. The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to "advocate" and "teach" their views of marriage. Ante, at 27. The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to "exercise" religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses.
Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage—when, for example, a religious college provides married student housing only to opposite-sex married couples, or a religious adoption agency declines to place children with same-sex married couples. Indeed, the Solicitor General candidly acknowledged that the tax exemptions of some religious institutions would be in question if they opposed same-sex marriage. See Tr. of Oral Arg. on Question 1, at 36–38. There is little doubt that these and similar questions will soon be before this Court. Unfortunately, people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.
And from Clarence Thomas' dissenting opinion:
Numerous amici—even some not supporting the States—have cautioned the Court that its decision here will "have unavoidable and wide-ranging implications for religious liberty." Brief for General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists et al. as Amici Curiae 5. In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well. Id., at 7. Today's decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.
The majority appears unmoved by that inevitability. It makes only a weak gesture toward religious liberty in a single paragraph, ante, at 27. And even that gesture indicates a misunderstanding of religious liberty in our Nation's tradition. Religious liberty is about more than just the protection for "religious organizations and persons . . . as they seek to teach the principles that are so ful- filling and so central to their lives and faiths." Ibid. Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.7
Although our Constitution provides some protection against such governmental restrictions on religious practices, the People have long elected to afford broader protections than this Court's constitutional precedents mandate. Had the majority allowed the definition of marriage to be left to the political process—as the Constitution requires—the People could have considered the religious liberty implications of deviating from the traditional definition as part of their deliberative process. Instead, the majority's decision short-circuits that process, with potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.
The post What Does Today's Gay Marriage Ruling Mean for Religious Organizations? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How do you protect a swingers club from a bullying neighbor and a hostile zoning board? Turn it into a church.
That was the innovative legal tactic devised by Nashville Attorney Larry Roberts, whose client purchased a property for $750,000 last November with the intention of making it home to the Social Club, an "equal opportunity lifestyle organization" that aims to help its members find other that share the "same interest and desires."
Enter the Goodpasture Christian School, which his located nearby. Principal Ricky Perry complained that the organization would "pollute" the minds of his children with "ungodly activity." The local zoning board agreed, passing an emergency zoning resolution in March that blocked Robert's client from building on the site.
So the swingers club found religion. When asked if rebranding the club as a church was intended to skirt the zoning resolution, Roberts smiled. "Let's just say it's opening up to give people guidance."
No sexual activity will be allowed on the premise, but there will be socializing and dancing. "It will have the same rules that many churches observe," says Roberts, "such as do not steal, do not lie, do not cheat, do not harm others, and do not kill." There is one difference: Adultery is OK, as long as your spouse knows all about it.
The post A Swingers Club Is Rebranded a Church To Evade Local Busybodies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>How do you protect a swingers club from a bullying neighbor and a hostile zoning board? Turn it into a church.
That was the innovative legal tactic devised by Nashville Attorney Larry Roberts, whose client purchased a property for $750,000 last November with the intention of making it home to the Social Club, an "equal opportunity lifestyle organization" that aims to help its members find other that share the "same interest and desires."
Enter the Goodpasture Christian School, which his located nearby. Principal Ricky Perry complained that the organization would "pollute" the minds of his children with "ungodly activity." The local zoning board agreed, passing an emergency zoning resolution in March that blocked Robert's client from building on the site.
So the swingers club found religion. When asked if rebranding the club as a church was intended to skirt the zoning resolution, Roberts smiled. "Let's just say it's opening up to give people guidance."
No sexual activity will be allowed on the premise, but there will be socializing and dancing. "It will have the same rules that many churches observe," says Roberts, "such as do not steal, do not lie, do not cheat, do not harm others, and do not kill." There is one difference: Adultery is OK, as long as your spouse knows all about it.
About 5 minutes.
Produced by Amanda Winkler. Narration by Todd Krainin.
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The post A Swingers Club Is Rebranded a Church To Evade Local Busybodies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a speech this week he went on yet another anti-capitalistic rant, claiming that the
"opinion" that "economic growth, encouraged by the free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness" has "never been confirmed by the facts."
This shows, notes Dalmia, that the Pope pays no attention to Bono, which is a sign of good taste.
His judgement, however, is another matter. It seems the Pope hasn't put down his copy of Das Capital to actually look at the world around him in quite a while. If he had, he'd not only notice how it has raised living standards in countries where it has (sort of) been tried (and these don't include his native Argentina and his new home, Italy). He'd also notice how these (semi) capitalistic countries keep the Catholic Church and its charitable mission going. She writes:
Capitalism puts more discretionary income in the pockets of people to devote to charitable pursuits. It is hardly a coincidence that America donates over $300 billion annually toward charitable causes at home and abroad, the highest of any country on a per capita basis.
The church itself is a big beneficiary of this capitalist largesse, with its U.S. wing alone contributing 60 percent to its overall global wealth. Some of this money comes from donations, but a big chunk comes, actually, from directly partaking in capitalism: The church is reportedly the largest landowner in Manhattan, the financial center of the global capitalism system, whose income puts undisclosed sums into its coffers.
So the new pope needs to be careful not to bite the hand that feeds his institution and its work. Otherwise, neither he nor the poor in whose name he is speaking will have much to be thankful for.
Go here for the whole thing.
Happy Thanksgiving.
The post The Pope Can Make All of Us More Thankful Today, Says Shikha Dalmia… appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When newcomers arrive in Williston, North Dakota they often can't find housing immediately; demand far outstrips supply in the bustling oil town. So for over two years the Concordia Lutheran Church has offered job seekers a place to crash.
From the Oil Patch Dispatch:
When they arrive, [Rev. Jay] Reinke gives them the same message:
"I'll say, 'I need to tell you that you are a gift. You're a gift to us. You're a gift to Williston. Welcome,' " Reinke said. "Sometimes men have just started to cry. They have been so alone, they've just really suffered. And they haven't felt welcomed."
So naturally code enforcement had to go and shut the place down.
From the church's Facebook page (via Mollie Hemingway of Ricochet):
Very sad tonight. …Our Overnighters will spend their last night in the church on Thursday night. The [Planning & Zoning Department] has determined the health and safety of the men in our church is better served by allowing them to sleep outside instead of in a building without a fire sprinkler system.
… FYI—a year ago, the fire chief said our building was safe for our purposes without a sprinkler system. Two weeks ago, he said it isn't. What a difference a year makes.
From The Dickinson Press:
Bret Schoening, 28, arrived in Williston on the train from Ohio a week ago….
"We just want to come here and make a better life for ourselves and our children," said Schoening, who spent hundreds of dollars on hotels before going to Concordia this week. "We just want to be honest and work hard and pursue the American dream."
…An inspection by city planning, building and fire officials determined that allowing people to sleep in the church overnight is not permitted under zoning ordinances.
And the city will not grant a variance without modifications to the facility that the church cannot afford.
A letter from a staff planner outlined the upgrades needed, including being handicap accessible, have a designated sleeping room and showers and bathroom facilities to accommodate the number of people staying there.
In addition, the letter states that the church would need to provide overnight supervision and adequate resources for job searching and counseling.
"You're raising the bar so high that no churches can help," Reinke said.
…The men staying at the church this week said they're unsure what they'll do…. Some said they'll sleep in their vehicles, another said he'll "squat" somewhere until he can return home to get his vehicle.
Read more about the good work the church had been doing here and here.
The post Better They Sleep Outside: Zoning Commission Shuts Down Housing Shelter For No Good Reason appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rev. Hoyt is leading his church, the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, and 19 other organizations to sue the NSA for first, fourth, and fifth amendment violations resulting from electronic surveillance. Rev. Hoyt sat down with ReasonTV's Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss the lawsuit and why his church has a history of getting involved in political matters of this nature.
"In the 1950s, of course we all remember it was the McCarthy era, there was a lot of anti-communist hysteria going on, and here in Hollywood, actors and writers were being blacklisted for presumed communist affiliation," Rev. Hoyt says, "and my church took a very public and courageous stand on supporting people who were being harassed by the government because of their political beliefs."
About 4:30 minutes.
Produced by Tracy Oppenheimer. Camera by Alex Manning and Patrick Bowers.
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The post Unitarian Church Leads NSA Lawsuit: Q&A with Rev. Rick Hoyt appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sweeney (D-Gloucester) is at least the fourth New Jersey politician to wade into the controversy over the Rev. Michael Fugee, the subject of a criminal investigation by the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.
The post Jersey Senate President Calls on Newark Archbishop To Resign Over Priest Who Violated Ban on Ministering to Children appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Back in February, Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch decried passage of legislation in the House of Representatives allocating federal funds to fix up houses of worship damaged by superstorm Sandy. Today, a terrific New York Times editorial, "A First Amendment Storm," chimes in:
In the bipartisan lunge to give in to political pressure from some religious groups after Hurricane Sandy, the House dispensed with holding even a single hearing before passing the bill, which abandons decades of Supreme Court precedent and longstanding administrative rules barring direct taxpayer financing of religious activities.
Complaints that current rules unfairly discriminate against houses of worship are simply wrong. Churches, like most nonprofit organizations and businesses, are eligible for government loans to make storm-related repairs. They are also eligible for disaster assistance grants, just as secular nonprofit organizations are, if they dedicate at least 50 percent of their facilities to providing "essential services of a governmental nature" — like a community homeless shelter or soup kitchen open to the general public on a nondiscriminatory basis. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, one of only six Republicans to vote against the bill, rightly argued that it unfairly exempts churches from the neutral requirement that beneficiaries of federal aid have to provide key secular services….
The First Amendment does not allow a Hurricane Sandy exception to pay for the rebuilding of damaged houses of worship. The Senate should let the bill die.
Absolutely correct. By the way, were the damaged houses of worship relying on prayer for protection instead of subsidized flood insurance?
For background, see my column, "Separating Church and State Money."
The post <em>New York Times</em> Correctly Denounces Post-Sandy Fed Bailout of Churches, Synagogues, and Mosques appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The bill passed in the House Monday by a 85-8 vote.
The measure leaves it up to individual places of worship to decide whether to allow concealed handguns and who could carry them.
The post Arkansas House Approves Bill to Allow Guns in Churches appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The case, among scores rejected in one-line orders, was brought by GeorgiaCarry.org.
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]]>Whatever can the former Pennsylvania senator be talking about? How much more in the public square can one get than a closely watched campaign for the nomination as the presidential candidate of one of our two biggest political parties? Not to mention the irony that Santorum made his claim that believers like him are somehow being excluded from the public square on the national ABC News program This Week.
Santorum's observations were provoked by the latest brouhaha over the role of religion in politics that erupted over the Obama administration's initial insistence that its new mandatory health care regulations require companies run by the Roman Catholic Church to offer health insurance that covers women's reproductive services including contraception. The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops denounced this ruling as a violation of their religious beliefs and an infringement of the First Amendment's prohibition against laws that interfere with the free exercise of religion.
The Obama administration quickly tried to control the political damage caused by this controversy by artfully claiming that so much money would be saved as a result of women using the services that health insurance companies would cover them at no additional cost. Consequently, the administration argued that the Catholic Church would not be actually paying for health insurance coverage of these reproductive services. Never mind that money saved but not rebated as a lower fee is not really distinguishable from paying for the covered service.
History shows that in the United States conflicts between church and state typically arise over how benefits supplied or mandated by government are distributed. Legal scholar Douglas Laycock has spent a career looking at the interaction between government and religion in the United States. He notes in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black articulated the two chief principles that underlay the tension that state-supplied public welfare benefits produces when they intersect with religious belief.
For the 5-to-4 majority in Everson, Black declared, "No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion." So far, so good. But Black also argued that government "cannot hamper its citizens in the free exercise of their own religion. Consequently, it cannot exclude individual Catholics, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Baptists, Jews, Methodists, Nonbelievers, Presbyterians, or the members of any other faith, because of their faith, or lack of it, from receiving the benefits of public welfare legislation."
In Everson, the Court ruled that reimbursing parents for transportation to and from parochial schools was not a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because New Jersey "does no more than provide a general program to help parents get their children, regardless of their religion, safely and expeditiously to and from accredited schools." One critical element noted by Black is that state compulsory education laws required that children attend school. Since parents are required by law to send their children to some kind of schools, then it would be wrong to discriminate against religious parents when it comes to putting them on buses to get there. Looking over the history of First Amendment constitutional conflicts, it is clear that most early court cases arose in the context of state-mandated education.
In the 18th century when the Constitution was adopted, Justice Black's two principles'"(1) citizens cannot be taxed to support religious activities, and (2) the state may not deny tax-financed public welfare benefits to any citizen based on their religious beliefs'"rarely conflicted. "In an era with few public welfare benefits," explained Laycock in his 2006 essay, "Church and State in the United States: Competing Conceptions and Historic Changes," "No-aid [to religious activities] protected citizens from being forced to contribute to churches involuntarily: it protected the churches from financial dependence on government, and thus from government control."
But with the relentless expansion of the welfare state the days when churches were protected from financial dependence on government are long gone. In their book, The Challenge of Pluralism, political scientists Stephen Monsma from Calvin College and J. Christopher Soper from Pepperdine University argue, "If government'"seeking to strictly follow the no-aid-to-religion doctrine'"would run public service programs in a secular manner or if it would fund public service programs of secular nonprofit organizations, but would not fund public service programs of the same or parallel nature of religious organizations, religion would be put at a government-created disadvantage."
Is it really the case that government and religious programs that seek to feed, clothe, shelter the poor, educate the ignorant, and take care of the sick are in some kind of competition? Only if one assumes that government agencies are engaged in teaching religious or non-religious beliefs as they dispense food stamps, rent vouchers, and vaccines. On the other hand, a cynical public choice analysis might suggest that both churches and government welfare agencies may see themselves in competition when it comes to increasing the number of people who are dependent upon them.
In order to address concerns that religious organizations are "disadvantaged" by competition with secular welfare agencies, recent administrations have devised various programs to shower tax dollars on them. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed charitable choice legislation that allowed faith-based charities to compete for federal funding of such social services as job training, nutrition, health clinics, drug treatment, and abstinence education. Compassionately conservative President George W. Bush further expanded federal funding of faith-based initiatives and President Barack Obama has basically continued that program. The amount of tax dollars that flow through these faith-based federal initiatives is hard to determine, but consider that the Catholic Charities affiliates received nearly $3 billion in 2010 (more than 60 percent of their budgets) and only 3 percent came from diocesan church contributions.
Of course, providing federal or state funds for a religious group's welfare activities frees up its other funds so that they can be used for non-secular purposes. "The Court has not been blind to the fact that in aiding a religious institution to perform a secular task, the State frees the institution's resources to be put to sectarian ends," noted Justice Harry Blackmun in the 1976 case of Roemer v. Board of Public Works of Maryland. Maryland was challenged on First Amendment grounds because it was providing an annual subsidy to private colleges that met certain criteria, in this case, four colleges affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the Court ruled that the state subsidy did not violate the First Amendment, likening it to the tax-financed provision of police and fire protection to churches.
It is clear that First Amendment conflicts will continue to multiply as government mandates and welfare programs proliferate. The fight over insurance coverage of contraception was the result of the Obama administration's new federal health care mandate covering preventive care services. Another brewing church/state fight is over gay adoptions. For example, Illinois welfare agencies cancelled $30 million in foster care contracts with Catholic Charities for refusing to abide by Illinois non-discrimination statutes and place foster children in gay households. Last year, the Every Child Deserves a Family Act was introduced in Congress; it would prohibit discrimination in adoption or foster care placements based on the sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status of any prospective adoptive or foster parent, or the sexual orientation or gender identity of the child involved. Conversely, some states have passed legislation allowing religious groups to invoke a "conscience clause" when refusing to place children in gay families all the while receiving state funds to run their private adoption and foster care services.
But there is a way to call a ceasefire in this escalating culture war battle. "Government's advantaging of the secular over the religious could be avoided if government would simply stay out of a given policy area," observe Monsma and Soper. But the two political scientists actually think that there is no way to untangle the contentious church/state social services mess into which we've gotten ourselves. I think that they are wrong.
In the first place, from a libertarian perspective, government at all levels is interfering far too much with what are essentially private activities. That being said, let's assume that tax dollars will continue to be collected for the time being and spent on various "public welfare" programs. There is still a way for government to "simply stay out of a given policy area" when it comes to current conflicts involving the First Amendment.
Consider public education. States and localities could collect tax dollars as usual and then offer school vouchers that parents could use to supply education to their children at whatever religious or secular school they choose. If states want to subsidize college students, they could again offer vouchers that students could use at whatever college or university to pay for their education.
Health insurance? The tax code could be reformed so that employers simply pay their employees the monies spent on health insurance policies and individuals would purchase whatever available private health insurance best fits their needs, including policies that cover contraception, abortion, sterilization, and stem cell treatments, etc. The poor could be provided with tax-financed vouchers to buy whatever private insurance they preferred.
Most public welfare services, say, job training, nutrition support, drug treatment, could also be converted into vouchers that recipients could redeem at whatever social welfare agency they think would work best for them. (To be honest, I am not clever enough to think of how to use some kind of voucher system to avoid church/state conflicts in the case of adoptions and foster care. Whatever is done should be done with the best interests of the children in mind.)
Santorum may believe that breaching the famous wall of separation between church and state erected by the First Amendment is a good idea, but he is very wrong. Religious groups have always been welcome to make their cases in the public square, but if churches want to be left alone, they should stop begging alms of the government. It's time to reverse the trend toward more church/state conflicts by protecting religious organizations from increasing financial dependence on government. Santorum should heed the admonition of an earlier Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who in 1984 declared, "We establish no religion in this country, we command no worship, we mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are, and must remain, separate."
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.
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