In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Maine must pay the tuition of children at religious schools if it pays any private school tuition. Maine has a historic system of paying for students to go to private high schools if their own district does not have a public high school.
The state of Maine insisted that it would not pay tuition to schools that violate the state’s anti-discrimination. The two Christian schools that won the case did not accept LGBT students or students who practice a religion different from that of the church.
A Christian school in Maine must adhere to the state’s LGBT antidiscrimination policy to qualify for a state tuition assistance program while the lawsuit against the state continues, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock, a George W. Bush appointee, denied a preliminary injunction Tuesday requested by Bangor Christian Schools run by Crosspoint Church, concluding that the church’s lawsuit against assorted state officials is not likely to succeed.
He ruled that Bangor Christian Schools must follow all the Maine Human Rights Act provisions.
“The Court determines that the educational antidiscrimination provisions do not violate the Free Exercise Clause because they are neutral, generally applicable, and rationally related to a legitimate government interest,” wrote Woodcock.
“The Court concludes further that the educational provisions do not violate the Free Speech Clause because they regulate conduct, not speech. Finally, the Court concludes that the employment provisions do not proscribe any constitutionally protected conduct.”
First Liberty Institute Senior Counsel Lea Patterson, who represents Crosspoint, denounced the decision and expressed plans to appeal the ruling.
“Government punishing religious schools for living out their religious beliefs is not only unconstitutional, it is wrong,” said Patterson, as quoted by Bangor Daily News.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Carson v. Makin that Maine cannot lawfully stop parents from using a state tuition program to send their children to Christian private schools.
The lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court ruling was driven by parents from Bangor Christian School who sued Maine over the ban on state tuition assistance for families sending their children to a private school that includes sectarian aspects in its curriculum.
Jim Hightower is a Texan who represents the best of the state. He blogs at “Jim Hightower’s Lowdown.” This is a terrific post.
In my view, the greatest of America’s “Founding Fathers” was not Washington or Jefferson – nor, technically, he wasn’t even an American. Rather, he was a British immigrant and itinerate agitator for real democracy, enlightenment, and universal human rights.
He was Thomas Paine, a prolific, profound, persuasive, and widely popular pamphleteer in the movement for American Independence. With plain language and genuine passion for the cause, Paine’s 47-page pamphlet, Common Sense, was so compelling in its support of the Revolution that it was passed around from person to person – and even read aloud in taverns! But Paine wasn’t content with democratic rhetoric – he actually believed in an egalitarian society, and his post-revolution writings (including Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice) unabashedly demanded that the new hierarchy of US leaders fulfill the promise of democracy.
Even before the War for Independence, Paine called for slaves to be freed and slavery prohibited. After the war, he terrified most of the gentlemen of means who’d signed the Declaration of Independence by insisting that non-landowners be eligible to vote and hold office (John Adams was so appalled by this that he decried Common Sense as a “crapulous mess”). But Paine just kept pushing, calling for women’s suffrage, progressive taxation, state-funded childcare, a guaranteed minimum income, universal public education, strict separation of church and state, and adoption of some of the democratic principles of the Iroquois Nation.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Don’t tell small-minded, right-wing demagogues like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott – but Thomas Paine was WOKE! Some 250 years before their push to impose autocracy, plutocracy, and theocracy over us, this revolutionary founder championed social justice and economic fairness. As one historian noted, “we are today all Paine’s children,” for he imbued America’s destiny with democratic impulse and aspiration.
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John Thompson, historian and teacher, asks who was responsible for the death of Nex Benedict. In this article in The Progressive, he blames the hateful anti-rhetoric of Oklahoma’s elected officials. The officials concluded that Nex committed suicide. Who created the environment in which this child was tormented by classmates?
He writes:
We are learning more about the death of Nex Benedict, a non-binary high school student who died on February 8, the day after they were beaten in the school bathroom in Owasso, Oklahoma. We are also learning about ourselves, as Oklahomans, as we deal with the tragedy. But we are not alone. This bitter attack is a case study in the cruelty being spread across the nation by right-wing extremists.
Vigils were held across the nation in honor of Nex, who has a Choctaw heritage. The diverse crowd I witnessed at the Oklahoma City vigil was so large that I could barely hear the speakers. We still don’t fully know everything about Nex’s death, but it is clear that it must be viewed within the context of vicious attacks on LGBTQ+ youth by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and Governor Kevin Stitt as well as the fifty-plus Republican legislative bills attacking LBGTQ+ rights across the country.
Since he was elected in 2019, Governor Stitt has signed laws that restrict access to public school bathrooms; ban health care for transgender people under eighteen; ban transgender girls and women from school sports; and prohibit Oklahomans from obtaining nonbinary gender markers on official documents. He also signed, as the LGTBQ+ rights group GLAAD reported, “an executive order that defunds diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and programs in state agencies, including public colleges.”
Walters has a similar record: He has depicted transgender students as a threat in schools, and approved a permanent rule change that requires schools to get state approval before altering gender markers in a student’s records. Walters has advocated for book bans and described LGBTQ+-themed books as “pornographic material.” He also appointed Chaya Raichik, the founder of anti-LGBTQ+ social media account Libs of TikTok, to the education department’s Library Media Advisory Committee.
Beyond Walters and Stitt, state representatives have also spread hateful rhetoric in recent months. State Senator Tom Woods, for example, called LGBTQ+ Oklahomans “filth” during a panel. Days later, Woods chose to stand by his statement, saying:
We are a religious state and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state—we are a moral state . . . . We want to lower taxes and let people be able to live and work and go to the faith they choose. We are a Republican state and I’m going to vote my district, and I’m going to vote my values, and we don’t want that in the state of Oklahoma.
There was some back-and-forth on the blog today about what Trump meant when he referred to a “bloodbath” in a campaign speech.
George Conway 3rd has a wonderful twitter feed. He is a great explainer of Trump.
He tweeted today about the confusion surrounding Trump’s use of the term “bloodbath.” Did he mean that there would be a bloodbath if Biden won? Or did he refer to a financial bloodbath if his plan to slap 100% tariffs on foreign cars was not enacted?
Conway tweeted the following:
There’s some commentary on here saying we should disregard Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks last night because he was talking about potential harms to the auto industry.
That is misguided. 1/x
Trump may well have been referring to a “bloodbath” in that industry. He’s sufficiently incoherent that, as is so often the case with him, it’s hard to tell one way or the other what exactly he’s talking about at any given moment. 2/x
I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or the danger he and his rhetoric pose. 3/x
What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil. 4/x
It’s a classic trait and technique of authoritarian demagogues. He catastrophizes everything to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them willing to do his bidding. 5/x
That’s dangerous all around because he’s encouraging them to believe that conditions are so bad or will become so bad, and that the political opposition is so awful, that anything is justified—including law-breaking and violence—to prevent those conditions and to destroy the opposition. 6/x
And so it doesn’t matter what he’s specifically referring to at the moment. He could be talking about trans people in public bathrooms or the state of the auto industry or the border—it doesn’t matter. 7/x
He’s a dangerous psychopath, and after more than eight years of watching his sick behavior, we must not give him the benefit of the doubt. 8/8 (end).
One of the joys of living in New York City is the vibrant cultural life. This winter, we have seen several plays and gone twice to the Metropolitan Opera.
In December, we saw Puccini’s La Boheme at the Met, which is a wonderful opera.
Last week, we got cheap (but excellent) seats for Puccini’s Turandot. The music and singing were outstanding, as were the gorgeous sets.
And I noticed that the seat in front of me had a name plaque on it, honoring someone who had made a generous donation. The plaque said “Judge and Mrs. Samuel I. Rosenman.” The name was familiar but I couldn’t place it. I couldn’t google during intermission because there was no guest internet service.
I googled when I got home and learned that Judge Rosenman was one of FDR’s closest associates. Wikipedia said that he wrote almost every speech that FDR gave, and he assembled FDR’s brain trust of advisors. Reading more, I learned that the granddaughter of Judge and Mrs. Rosenman is married to Merrick Garland.
What’s the point? Small world. History is all around us. Can you believe it?
Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.
In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.
The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year.
Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states.
The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966.
Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign.
Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”
On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.
Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona.
Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”
Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false.
The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status.
Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]
Donald Trump is unhinged. He is running in desperation to stay out of prison. His desperation leads him to be insulting and vulgar towards anyone who stands in his way.
Former President Donald J. Trump, at an event on Saturday ostensibly meant to boost his preferred candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary race, gave a freewheeling speech in which he used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, maintained a steady stream of insults and vulgarities and predicted that the United States would never have another election if he did not win in November.
With his general-election matchup against President Biden in clear view, Mr. Trump once more doubled down on the doomsday vision of the country that has animated his third presidential campaign and energized his base during the Republican primary.
The dark view resurfaced throughout his speech. While discussing the U.S. economy and its auto industry, Mr. Trump promised to place tariffs on cars manufactured abroad if he won in November. He added: “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
For nearly 90 minutes outside the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, Mr. Trump delivered a discursive speech, replete with attacks and caustic rhetoric. He noted several times that he was having difficulty reading the teleprompter.
The former president opened his speech by praising the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump, who faces criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, called them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commended their spirit and vowed to help them if elected in November. He also repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been discredited by a mountain of evidence.
If he did not win this year’s presidential election, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”
Mr. Trump also stoked fears about the influx of migrants coming into the United States at the southern border. As he did during his successful campaign in 2016, Mr. Trump used incendiary and dehumanizing language to cast many migrants as threats to American citizens.
He asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,” he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.”
If you plan to visit NYC (or live in it or near it), I have some recommendations for you.
You are not allowed to visit NYC without taking in a Broadway show. Did you know that?
I saw three outstanding shows recently, which I unequivocally recommend.
The great and timeless Ibsen play “An Enemy of the People” is spectacular. It has been updated. It stars Jeremy Strong (“Succession”) and Michael Imperioli (“The Sopranos” and “White Lotus”). What a great show!
If you want to laugh a lot, see “Spamalot,” a hilarious comedy-musical that was written by Eric Idle of the Monty Python troupe. It incorporates some of their funniest skits. The final performance is April 7.
If you want to see a spectacular musical, see “Moulin Rouge.” Boy George is one of the stars. Prepare to be dazzled. Don’t bring the children! It’s very bawdy, and there is quite a lot of female flesh.
You can often get cheap seats at a website called TodayTix. It also sells advance seats. In the center of Times Square, there is a large booth called TKTS where you can buy same-day tickets at a steep discount. Some theaters have standing-room tickets. It never hurts to ask at the box office before the performance. Sold-out shows sometimes get last-minute returns from ticket brokers.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s adult children objected to the selection of people chosen to receive an award named for her. The five honorees included four men, although Justice Ginsberg wanted the award to be bestowed on women who had made outstanding contributions.
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of liberal causes whose advocacy of women’s rights catapulted her to pop culture fame, helped establish a leadership award in 2019, she said she intended to celebrate “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility.”
But this year, four of the recipients are men, including Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the business magnate whose empire gave rise to conservative media; and Michael Milken, the face of corporate greed in the 1980s who served nearly two years in prison. It has prompted family members and close colleagues of Justice Ginsburg to demand that her name be removed from the honor, commonly called the R.B.G. Award.
In a statement, her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia University, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother.”
“The justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees, and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards,” Ms. Ginsburg said….
In the past, the award was called the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award. This year, the award will be bestowed by the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation on one woman and four men. The foundation said it wanted to honor gender equality.
The recipients, who also include the businesswoman Martha Stewart and the actor Sylvester Stallone, will receive the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award in April at the Library of Congress, where there is typically a ceremony and gala…
Reflecting on the awards, Justice Ginsburg’s son pointed to the timing of the announcement.
“Today would have been Mom’s 91st birthday,” said James S. Ginsburg, the founder of Cedille Records, a classical music recording company. “So it would be a perfect day to correct the record on this insult to her name and legacy.”
Voters in the city of Orange appear to have ousted two conservative school board members who had spearheaded policies widely opposed by advocates for LGBTQ+ youth in a recall election viewed as a local bellwether for the culture wars in education.
The fiercely contested recall election in the Orange Unified School District intensified with the board majority’s approval in the fall of a parent-notification policy requiring educators to inform parents when a student requests “to be identified as a gender other than that student’s biological sex or the gender listed on the birth certificate or any other official records.”
A legal battle over the issue is playing out as California Atty. General Rob Bonta pursues a court challenge of such policies enacted by a handful of conservative-leaning school boards. His lawsuit asserts that the rules put transgender and gender-nonconforming students in “danger of imminent, irreparable harm” by potentially forcibly “outing” them at home before they’re ready…
The recall came to be an early litmus test on the resonance with voters of issues that have roiled school boards throughout the nation: the teaching of racism and Black history, the rights of LGBTQ+ youth versus the rights of their parents, restrictions on LGBTQ+ symbols and related curriculum, and the removal of library books with sexual content — especially LGBTQ+ content — from school libraries.
Diane Ravitch's blog 