Archives for the 'Personal Liberty' Category
Selling Out Online Advertising
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Wayne Crews and I have a new C:Spin discussing a proposed New York law aimed at protecting consumers from behavioral advertising:
Online ads can be annoying. From pop-ups to flash screens, it’s hard to surf the Web for long without encountering a sales pitch for an unwanted product. A world without these ads might be pleasant, of course, but then who would pay for all the original content websites make available? Advertising explains why we can browse the Internet without pulling out our credit cards at every turn. But New York lawmakers are now considering a bill that would make this scenario a reality, spelling doom for the advertising models that could fuel the Internet’s future.
Irked by pervasive advertising, some consumers see the Wild Wild Web as a realm warranting legislative assurances that all information stays private, hidden beyond the reach of marketers without explicit consent. They prefer that we opt-in, rather than opt-out.
But an alternative interpretation of the nature of the cyberspace is that any advertiser may legitimately assemble information that has been transmitted on what is clearly a very public network.
Even Wikipedia, long funded entirely by private donations, may soon have to place ads on its popular encyclopedic entries. All the server farms and fiber optic cables that power today’s Internet are not cheap, and somebody has to pay. Ad revenues indirectly fund many of the network upgrades needed to prepare for the ever-increasing stream of global Web traffic. And since advertisers are expected to tighten their belts as the global economy slows down, effective advertising models are more important than ever. If the Internet is to realize its full potential, firms must be free to develop experimental new methods of delivering ads.
Increasingly, today’s “dumb” online advertisements are yielding to “smart,” behavioral ads. By cataloguing individualized information about a user’s browsing tendencies, behavioral advertisers like Phorm and NebuAd can guess what sort of ads might interest that person, and select which product to promote accordingly. In this model, advertisers don’t even have to record specific web addresses; rather, browsing habits are stored only under broad subject categories, like automobiles or golf. Sensitive websites like WebMD aren’t logged whatsoever. All this data is tied not to our names but to anonymous identifiers like cookies or IP address, which typically cannot be traced back to a particular individual except by court order.
Read the rest here
Suing Over What Your Co-Workers Listen To
Should you be able to sue your employer because your co-workers listen to raunchy radio programs? The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Reeves v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide says you should, under the dubious theory that it is “sexual harassment” that’s “based on” your sex. U.C.L.A. Law Professor Eugene Volokh criticizes the decision on First Amendment grounds, while I criticize the decision as being inconsistent with the language of the discrimination laws and the Eleventh Circuit’s own past rulings, and a threat to the media and freedom of the press in the long run.
Courts frequently engage in flagrantly inconsistent legal reasoning in order to first impose liability on employers and then maximize and collect damages in sexual harassment cases, and they often disregard the statutory requirements that harassment plaintiffs seeking compensatory damages show that they were harassed based on their sex, and subjected to intentional discrimination.
I don’t like raunchy radio programs, but that doesn’t mean the government should ban listening to them, much less do so under the weak argument that they constitute sex discrimination.
Want a Burger in New Jersey? Pay Up!
Politicians are always looking for the easy source of money. New Jersey legislators hoping to pay for health care want to tax fast food. Reports WCBS TV:
The sputtering economy has caused an increase in prices of many staples including gasoline, rice, ice cream, even beer. Now some lawmakers in New Jersey are considering taking food taxes a step further and install a proverbial “sin” tax on fast food.
Yes, the idea of marking up your favorite fast food burger or pack of fries is actually being tossed around, and it’s not settling well with many residents.
“They’re taxing everything. Now you’re gonna tax fast food? That’s crazy,” said Newark resident Miriam Robertson.
This proposal shows how government naturally begets government. Provide health care, so every unhealthy private action suddenly becomes a matter of public concern. Money must be raised, creating an opportunity punish the irresponsible. Taxation naturally becomes social engineering.
Michigan Social Workers Seize Child Who Inadvertently Drank
Michigan CPS workers seized a 7-year-old who drank lemonade that his father purchased for him without knowing that it contained a small amount of alcohol. (As Ted Frank notes, when CPS seized the child, he had no alcohol in his system). They put him in foster care for two days and refused to release him to his aunts. Then they released him to his mother on the condition that his father, an archaeology professor, move out of the house until a full court hearing could be held. After that later hearing, the father, found not guilty of child abuse, was finally allowed to move back into his own house. If the professor “and his wife weren’t upper-middle-class academics with access to the University of Michigan Law School clinic professors, it could have been much worse. ‘Don Duquette, a U-M law professor who directs the university’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic, represented Ratte and his wife. He notes sardonically that the most remarkable thing about the couple’s case may be the relative speed with which they were reunited with Leo.’”
CPS workers have an incentive to seize children, since the federal government gives states incentives for seizing and adopting out children, and CPS workers are more likely to be fired for failing to prevent child abuse than for wrongly seizing children, even if the seizure itself causes the child devastating psychological harm.
I wrote earlier about how temporary seizures of infants based on erroneous accusations later found to be false can become permanent, when courts rule that the infant has become attached to her foster family and thus should not be returned even if the alleged abuse that led to the seizure did not actually occur. I also discussed the violation of due process involved in the mass seizures of children in the strange FLDS religious sect, hundreds of whom were seized based on a single, anonymous, allegation of abuse by a caller pretending to be a teenager in the sect, and who continue to be held without any hearing on whether they individually are endangered (although the removal of some of the children might well be warranted if it occurred after a full judicial hearing).
Ban the Smokes, Kill the Smokers
The unintended consequences of government are wonderful to behold. Impose a minimum wage and put poor, ill-educated teens out of work. Raise auto fuel-economy requirements, and kill more people in accidents as they travel in smaller cars. Ban cigarette smoking in local bars and restaurants, and cause more drunk driving accidents as smokers drive further to find more congenial locales.
The problem with this, say Scott Adams and Chad Cotti, economists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is that smoking bans seem to have been followed by an increase in drunk-driving and in fatal accidents involving alcohol. In research published in the Journal of Public Economics, the authors find evidence that smokers are driving farther to places where smoking in bars is allowed.
The researchers analysed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%.
The findings, say the pair, are consistent with the suggestion that smokers are driving farther to alternative places to drink. This may be because they are driving to bars with outdoor seating, or to bars which are not enforcing the smoking ban.
Another explanation is that some smokers are “jurisdiction shopping” to places where they may puff. Accident rates can be especially high where border-hopping to still-smoky bars is possible. Accidents in Delaware county in Pennsylvania increased by 26% after the next-door state of Delaware introduced a smoking ban in 2002. Similarly, when Boulder county banned smoking, fatal accidents in Jefferson county, between Boulder county and Denver, went up by 40%. How this weighs up against the long-term health effects of smoking bans is unclear. But it serves as a warning to well-meaning legislators.
Makes you wonder what government is going to do for an encore!
GMU Law School Should Sue ABA Over Racial-Quota Mandates
The American Bar Association is continually threatening to pull the accreditation of George Mason University Law School for failing to adopt illegal racial quotas in admissions. That’s what San Diego law professor (and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission) Gail Heriot notes in the Wall Street Journal. The ABA first forced GMU — one of the few law schools without a marked liberal bias — to use what the ABA itself refers to as “preferential affirmative action admissions program” to radically increase its minority percentage from 6.5 percent to 19 percent. But the ABA still wasn’t happy with the results, which were insufficiently extreme for the ABA’s quota-mongers (never mind that the qualified applicant pool for a law school of GMU’s caliber is lower than 19 percent minority, as is the percentage of non-white lawyers even in heavily-minority states like California, so it’s not as if having 19 percent minorities is a sign of discrimination. Indeed, the ABA conceded that GMU has long had a “very active effort to recruit minorities,” even before adopting racial preferences in admissions). So now the ABA is demanding what are in essence racial quotas.
The ABA’s actions violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), which held in footnote 23 that racial quotas violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 (which bans both private and public discrimination) as well as the Fourteenth Amendment (which bans only governmental discrimination). Moreover, the ABA and its accreditors are liable for pressuring GMU to engage in racial discrimination under 42 U.S.C. 1981, which allows not only employers and other institutions to be held liable for racial discrimination, but also individual discriminators. And GMU and its president and law school dean, who were personally summoned to appear before the ABA in order for them to be pressured to maximize GMU’s racial quotas, have standing to sue over those quota mandates under Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v. FCC, 141 F.3d 344 (D.C. Cir. 1998), which held that the Lutheran Church had standing to sue the FCC to keep the FCC from pressuring it to take race into account in hiring employees for its religious radio stations in order to satisfy a ”diversity” mandate. (Note that GMU is a state university).
Enforcing Unconstitutional University PC
One of the most tragic manifestations of past racial discrimination has been the creation of a government-enforced racial spoils system in the name of affirmative action. That has given rise to a professional class of racial profiteers, such as the late Ron Brown, who are ever ready to help whites win the financial benefit of regulations originally approved to aid minorities.
The demand on people and institutions to abandon the principle of nondiscrimination has been particularly strong in academia. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the role of race in admissions, the American Bar Association is now pushing to institutionalize de facto quotas. University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot writes about the plight of George Mason University law school, known for its more conservative political orientation:
If you have ever wondered why colleges and universities seem to march in lockstep on controversial issues like affirmative action, here is one reason: Overly politicized accrediting agencies often demand it.
Given that federal funding hinges on accreditation, schools are not in a position to argue. That is precisely why the U.S. Department of Education, which gives accreditors their authority, must sometimes take corrective action. George Mason University’s law school in northern Virginia is an example of why corrective action is needed now.
Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater
George Mason University Law Professor David Bernstein has a thought-provoking post on the seizure of hundreds of children, including nursing infants, from their mothers, who belong to a strange polygamist sect (FLDS). At the end of the day, the sect’s disturbing practices (such as allegedly conditioning adolescents to accept underage polygamous marriages) may well warrant removal of many of the children from their parents’ custody, but the decision by Judge Barbara Walther allowing the immediate seizure of all the children, regardless of age, prior to a full judicial hearing (based on a single, anonymous, apparently false allegation of abuse), and absent an imminent threat to their health, seems indefensible and in violation of due process and the children’s constitutional rights.
Taking an infant away from its mother can be very damaging to the infant. (For example, my daughter, a very finicky eater, will not let anybody other than my wife or me feed her, and she usually only lets me feed her if it’s early in the morning. We have to work diligently to get her to eat enough). That’s especially true for nursing infants.
Being placed in foster care can be cause devastating psychological harm to a young child, as Judge Kleinfeld noted in Doe v. Lebbos.
Moreover, erroneous child abuse charges can have legally permanent, irrevocable consequences that devastate a family. In Arlington County, Virginia, parents proved themselves innocent of a false, anonymous charge that they were starving their child (who was actually at her proper weight when CPS workers snatched her), but the judge later refused to return the child to them, permanently cutting off their parental rights based heavily on his conclusion that the child — seized as a newborn — had developed a bond with her foster parents as a result of being snatched. (That ruling is on appeal).
Federal law provides financial incentives for CPS agencies to seize and adopt out children, which may lead to overzealous child-snatching.
Important new discovery: the diqule
This week brought two great writers and arbiters of truth to Washington, DC. Authors Richard North and Christopher Booker were in town to talk about their new book, Scared to Death. The book is about the politics of fright that have dominated the media and public policy on both sides of the Atlantic the last two decades, starting with the egg scare, and going right through asbestos, mad cow disease, and to the biggest scare of them all: GLOBAL WARMING. I will write more on the book later, but I wanted to write about North’s amazing new discovery, the dual international quasi-legislation/commitology mechanism.
You are lost as well? I had a long lunch in the sun with North Friday trying to unravel his important discovery. Basically, it is a mechanism by which a country’s civil service overrules its own politicians by sitting on international committees that passes down regulation to lower instance international committees, which then pass legislation by which the individual countries are bound. After our conversation, I have revisited the eminent British comedy Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which is less fun after my conversation with North. His discovery has lead North to be somewhat dismayed about the future of freedom, and we should all try to understand this organism which threatens the fight for freedom:
Here is a comment from one of the regular readers of North’s eminent blog EU referendum.
“Richard,
I must congratulate you on this important discovery, which to my shame I must admit I missed when you presented it the first time. The find of this new species must be on par, at least, with the discovery of the okapi.
Apart from the fact that both the okapi and the diqule-comm (or just diqule for short) only were known to the natives of their respective habitats until the beginning of the 20th (the okapi) and the 21st (the diqule) centuries, both species appear so unbelievably strange that mere descriptions hardly suffice to convince any learned society of their existence.”
An important aspect of diqule is the ad hoc/standing committee’s which is standing committee’s by any measure I know. The ad hoc quality of them is that membership is transient, it consists of whichever civil servants are relevant for the issue on the agenda, but it is never listed whom these civil servants might be. The agenda is also not published anywhere. Diqule is sort of a black box where issues go in, magic happens, and regulation come out in the other end years and decades longer. The Permanent Secretary tells the Minister, “We have worked on this legislation for years, and we are bound by international agreements to pass it Minister!”
The Permanent Secretary did of course attend the international meetings where the agreements where made and the legislation was formulated, so in essence he sent the instructions to himself.
“These mechanisms where not created for mere mortals to understand and access,” says North.
And for those Americans that think this does not concern you as the U.S. is not a member of the EU, think again. The U.S. is a member of UNECE, which is one of the primary commitology mechanisms for our part of the world. The federal bureaucrats have discovered diqule and you should be afraid, very afraid!!!
Legalized Child-Stealing in Arlington County, Virginia
The Washington Examiner has a must-read editorial called “Baby Snatching by Arlington County.”
It shows that if County social workers seize your baby, based on false allegations of neglect, and put your baby in foster care long enough, you might never get your child back, even if you prove yourself innocent, because the courts will say it’s in “the best interests of the child” that your baby stay with the foster parents he’s gotten used to living with. (Taking that logic to its ultimate conclusion, a kidnapper who kidnapped a newborn from a hospital and then escaped prosecution on a technicality could keep the child, because the child would have bonded with the kidnapper by the time the kidnapper was apprehended).
That’s the gist of a recent Arlington, Virginia circuit court decision described in today’s Washington Examiner. County social workers took a baby away from her parents based largely on false, anonymous allegations that she was being starved, even though she was at her proper weight at the time they seized her from her parents. And although those allegations were later ruled false by a CPS hearing officer, the judge permanently removed her from her parents anyway, claiming she had bonded with her new foster parents and thus might be traumatized if she were returned. (He also cited evidence that her natural parents were not model parents, but that is not the test for terminating parental rights under the Supreme Court’s decision in Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982). If it were, millions of healthy children could be removed from their families by social workers). Parents Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor spent a staggering $350,000 in legal bills in their losing fight for their child.
I personally am worried about this court decision, even though I and my family have never been accused of child neglect or abuse, because my wife, at the suggestion of our pediatrician, called Arlington County social workers because our baby is extremely difficult to feed, and they then visited our house earlier this year. (Our baby Sarah is 70th percentile in height and skull size, but only 10th percentile in weight). I thought nothing of this visit at the time, since our baby is lively and healthy and has never been neglected or abused, and my wife is a good mother (who conscientiously cared for many children as a nanny, and helped raise her own nephew).
Although the circuit court decision is apparently justified by the so-called “best interest of the child,” its long run effect is to harm children by discouraging even fit, non-abusive parents from seeking advice or information from doctors or social workers when their children have behaviors or injuries that might sometimes be associated with parental abuse or neglect. Good parents will now worry about talking to doctors (who are required by state laws to report any possibility of abuse or neglect to social workers) or social workers lest it lead to unwarranted (and unreversible) seizures of a child by social workers.
Parents already have to worry that if they take their child to the doctor, and reasonably disagree with the doctor’s preferred treatment, overzealous social workers will temporarily seize their child. That’s what happened to Corissa Mueller, who took her baby daughter Taige to the doctor because the baby had a high temperature, and then had social workers temporarily seize the child after she rejected the doctor’s preferred treatment (a spinal tap) in favor of a reasonable alternative she felt posed fewer health risks. (The Center for Individual Rights, my former law firm, is representing Mueller in a constitutional lawsuit against Idaho state social worker April Auker for her role in the seizure in Mueller v. Idaho. A federal judge in Idaho refused to dismiss the lawsuit, citing a 1999 ruling in favor of parental rights by the federal appeals court in that region, the Ninth Circuit.) Since conditions in foster care are often bad, even temporary seizures of a child can cause devastating emotional and psychological harm.
The Arlington County court ruling, now on appeal, radically increases the risk to parents of taking an injured, ill, or behaviorally-disordered child to a doctor, by allowing an erroneous temporary seizure of a child based on suspicions of abuse to become permanent merely because of the passage of time, even if the child turns out never to have been neglected or abused. Arlington County seems to be moving towards the situation in some foreign countries like England, where children are removed permanently from their parents based on the most meager suspicions of abuse, fueled in part by the bounties that social workers and local governments receive for seizing children from their parents and then adopting them out.
Global Warming Suit Infringes Free Speech
A global warming lawsuit by Eskimos seeks to impose conspiracy liability on oil and power companies for giving money to groups that question the degree of humanity’s role in global warming. That violates First Amendment rulings like Pfizer v. Giles (In re School Asbestos Litigation), 46 F.3d 1284 (3d Cir. 1995), which barred holding companies liable for “conspiracy” for belonging to a trade association that downplayed the dangers of asbestos. I earlier discussed this issue in the context of lead paint litigation. Southeastern Legal Foundation and American Justice Partnership have a report on the case, Native Village of Kivalina v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, entitled “The Most Dangerous Litigation in America.”
Using International “Law” to Subvert Basic Legal Protections and Democracy
International courts and “human rights” bodies issue rulings that purport to have the force of law. But much of their reasoning is based not on written laws found in any law book, or agreed to by any legislature or citizenry. Instead, it is based on vaguely-defined “customary international law,” principles of so-called “natural law” derived from a supposedly “clear consensus” by enlightened people across the globe. But that “consensus” is often illusory, since it can easily be fabricated, manipulated, or distorted by international lawyers.
Lawyers are, on average, further to the left politically than the average citizen. And so-called international lawyers are even more so. (I used to practice international law at Skadden, Arps). Just as the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence, lawyers often claim that the law is more liberal elsewhere in the world than in their own benighted country, and that such liberal norms — at odds with their own country’s law — constitute customary international law. Thus, it is commonly argued that customary international law bans the death penalty for mass murderers, and requires countries to ban disfavored forms of speech (such as ”hate speech,” or criticism of any religion), although in reality, the strongest support for bans on such speech actually comes from undemocratic regimes like Cuba and China.
It is hard to fight these claims even when they are false, because ordinary people (and even most lawyers) don’t know much about foreign law. The lawyers who fashion “customary international law” are thus largely unaccountable. Perhaps as a result, customary international law is generally of poorer quality than domestic law. Scholars have cited this fact in celebrating the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Medellin v. Texas (2008), which refused to make Texas hear yet another challenge to a murderer’s conviction (which had already twice been upheld by different court systems) when ordered to do so by the International Court of Justice (a ruling at odds with the fact that virtually all ICJ member countries permit only one appeal of a conviction, not successive appeals).
Misleading the public about foreign law is common among “human rights” officials. For example, an official in Australia’s new Labour government claims that people accused of race discrimination should have to prove themselves innocent, rather than being proved guilty. To justify this outrage, he and Australia’s “human rights” commission claim that is the practice in America, when in fact it is quite the contrary.
American law puts the burden of proof on the complainant and the government, not the alleged offender, in discrimination cases. The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly so ruled in Texas v. Burdine (1981) and St. Mary’s Honor Center v. Hicks (1993). But Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tom Calma, and the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission falsely claim that under American law, “the onus of proof” is on “the person who has been accused of discrimination.” (See “Call to Switch Onus on Racist Offenses,” The Age, News, April 5, 2008).
Joseph H.H. Weiler, a law professor who co-drafted the European Parliament’s Declaration of Human Rights and Freedoms, made American legal thinking seem more liberal than it is, by inviting to Europe to represent it two of America’s most radical law professors: the University of Michigan’s Catharine MacKinnon, who considers most heterosexual sex to be rape; and Harvard Law School’s Duncan Kennedy, who advocated having law school professors periodically exchange their positions with college janitorial staff in order to promote diversity and social equality.
By contrast, when laws across the world are more conservative than a law professor’s own, they are studiously ignored in formulating “human rights” law (like the world-wide aversion of most countries’ legal systems toward civil punitive damages and late-term abortions, which U.S. law often permits).
The very international “human rights” lawyers who insist that ”hate speech” should be curbed are often radicals who are blind to certain forms of prejudice. A classic example of this is the disturbing Richard Falk, recently appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate Israel. Falk, a liberal Princeton professor emeritus, has likened Israel to the Nazis, praised the Ayatollah Khomeini (the Iranian dictator whose regime ordered the killings and torture of many religious and ethnic minorities in Iran), and promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories that accuse the U.S. government of complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Falk’s wackiness may offend the general public and Israel, which plans to bar him from coming to Israel, but it apparently does not offend lawyers and state judges very much: it did not stop the Washington State Supreme Court from citing his advocacy of affirmative action to uphold a discriminatory, gender-based affirmative-action set-aside in public contracting, in Southwest Wash. Chapter v. Pierce County, 667 P.2d 1092 (1983).
Gay Rights vs. Free Speech Rights?
We previously wrote about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would ban private-sector employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and how the bill’s requirements regarding “conditions of employment” could restrict free speech rights. The Blade says that Congress will likely take up the ENDA bill in 2008, although a final vote may be delayed until 2009 to avoid a possible veto or filibuster.
U.C.L.A. Law professor Eugene Volokh discusses a free speech controversy over a ruling imposed under New Mexico’s gay-rights law, which has been cited by ENDA supporters as an example of a growing consensus in favor of banning sexual orientation discrimination. A photographer was ordered to pay $6,600 by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission for refusing to take pictures of a civil-commitment ceremony planned by a lesbian couple. That seems hypocritical on the part of the State of New Mexico, since it itself does not recognize gay marriage, or treat civil-commitment ceremonies as being analogous to marriage, yet it punishes wedding photographers who likewise do not treat gay civil-commitment ceremonies as being the same as marriages.
The ruling raises two interesting questions. First, does the ruling violate the free speech or freedom of religion of the photographer, given that taking photographs has long been regarded as expression that is original and copyrightable and that wedding photographs are often very distinctive and involve content-based choices and artistic judgment? Professor Volokh believes that it does violate freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and I agree that it violates both the First Amendment and the New Mexico Religious Freedom Restoration Act, based on cases like Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (1995).
Second, is the ruling even based on a reasonable reading of New Mexico’s gay-rights statute, given that that law bans discrimination based on customers’ sexual orientation, not based on the type of ceremony they wish to promote? After all, there is no evidence that the photographer refused to serve gay clients in general, only that she would not take pictures of a civil-commitment ceremony, i.e., promote a particular message. That is not discrimination based on a customer’s sexual orientation anymore than it would be discrimination based on a customer’s religion for a gay photographer to refuse to photograph a religiously-motivated anti-gay demonstration by a reactionary minister like Fred Phelps, or discrimination against blacks or women for a photographer to refuse to videotape a feminist or Nation of Islam event. (Arlington County, Virginia, recognized that fact in rejecting sexual-orientation discrimination charges against a business that refused to duplicate gay-rights videos).
It is common for wedding photographers to turn down certain types of weddings for reasons unrelated to discriminatory animus towards a customer. And a civil-commitment ceremony isn’t legally analogous to a wedding, since it doesn’t create the same binding commitments as a marriage, so photographing weddings but not civil-commitment ceremonies is not itself discrimination. Thus, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission’s ruling against Elaine Huguenin and Elane Photography and in favor of complainant Vanessa Willock should be reversed.
Court Interferes with Roommate Searches, Suppresses Rental Information
Most housing discrimination laws don’t prevent you from living with roommates of a particular sex (not surprising, given than women generally don’t want a male roommate). But they do ban you from advertising the fact that you won’t room with people of a particular sex, calling that “discrimination.” Thus, the laws pointlessly keep people in the dark about whether a room advertised in the newspaper is even available to members of their sex.
A federal appeals court recently held that Roommates.com could be sued for housing discrimination for making it easier for its customers to advertise their preference for roommates of a particular sex. The court did so despite Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that was intended to immunize online businesses like Roommates.com from lawsuits over communications by their customers. In a footnote, the court left open the possibility that Roommates.com could raise a First Amendment defense to being sued under the housing-discrimination laws.
I explain here why Roommates.com should be shielded by the First Amendment from being sued in Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com, and how such lawsuits actually harm victims of discrimination. Prior coverage of stupid “fair-housing” lawsuits can be found here.
Charlton Heston, R.I.P.
And so film legend and freedom lover Charlton Heston has left us, at age 84. There are already hundreds of obituaries and tributes, with many more surely to follow. For now, I’ll merely quote from the statement of National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre:
America has lost a great patriot. The Second Amendment has lost a faithful friend…And so has every American who cares about the Bill of Rights, individual liberty, and Freedom. My heart is heavy, but not without a sense of pride. Pride in a man who devoted his life to his profession with grace and dignity. Pride in an American who devoted himself to civil rights, to correcting injustices around him, and to standing up for what he knew was right.
Heston, of course, was known not just for his activism in support of gun rights, but of for civil rights for all Americans (as LaPierre alludes to), having marched in protests with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. To some, this made him a “paradox,” though I can’t think of anything further from the truth. A belief in personal freedom and the equality of all people before the law are twin foundations of the American idea. Heston understood and believed in both. Here’s to keeping that understanding alive.
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