Overturning Roe is theocratic

The news has just broken in Politico: "Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows".

We can't say for sure whether the supposed draft opinion actually is what Politico's article claims, namely, work product of the U.S. Supreme Court. If it turns out to be a hoax, well, that will be that.

However, the idea of overturning Roe unquestionably is and has been for decades an obsession of social conservatives. The whole point of the sorry history of recent Court apppointments — and more to the point, denied appointments (the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mitch McConnell's infamous and indefensible refusal to let Merrick Garland's nomination even be considered by the Senate) — has been for conservatives to appoint reliably anti-Roe Justices until a majority was in place to overturn that decision.

Now, my understanding from TV coverage is that the draft opinion attacks the "weak" Constitutional basis in the reasoning of Roe v. Wade. That has long been a criticism of social conservatives. However, it has always seemed to me a secondary excuse, one cobbled up by social conservatives to cover their real interest: they consider abortion nothing less than murder. That is why the issue is so motivational for them: nothing is as stark as the accusation that murder is being condoned under the law.

Is abortion murder, though?

Science can't tell us when (or if) a human life begins prior to a fetus leaving the womb. (At least, it can't tell us yet; I question if it ever will.) So to stake out the absolutist position that abortion is murder, one has to have a different basis for believing that an unborn fetus is alive.

The only basis for that belief is religion. Specific religious sects hold that abortion is murder.

However, not all religions or sects do. Nor, for that matter, do all nonbelievers. There is not widespread agreement, or even majority agreement, that abortion is murder. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans want abortion of some kind to be legal. Where to draw the line on times and procedures is hotly debated but the principle of access is not.

What will your good-faith belief that abortion is not murder be worth after this decision is issued? Even if that belief is grounded in your own religion's creed, too bad. The free exercise of your religious belief will be illegal.

This purported Supreme Court decision imposes nothing less than the religious beliefs of a minority on the entire population. It turns the logic of protection of minorities on its head — and it perverts the logic of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause by enshrining the creed of a handful of religious sects as the law of the land.

That's theocracy.

Pence is mistaken — as usual

The Vox piece is headlined, "Pence tells graduating Christans to be ready for attacks on their faith".

In his remarks, he warned students of the attacks they’d face just for being religious. Often, he said, they’d be asked to not only tolerate but also endorse values that go against their beliefs. He added that those who tout tolerance are often the least tolerant of traditional Christian values.

What traditional Christian values might trigger such intolerance?

Karen Pence, who sat in the crowd during the speech, received “harsh attacks” in January after she returned to teach art at a Christian school that bans LGBTQ teachers and students, Pence said in his speech. He characterized the incident as an “un-American” attack on Christian education and vowed to protect the First Amendment, which upholds freedom of religion.

Mike Pence is okay with Christians who will not tolerate the presence of LGBTQ teachers or students. He is not okay with those who object to that intolerance of LGBTQ people.

And what's the justification for calling the latter "un-American"?

Why, the fact that freedom of religion is enshrined in the Constitution.

Now, I thoroughly approve of the First Amendment's prohibition against the government supporting or opposing religion. However, I have deep misgivings about how far freedom of religion has been taken.

Too many religious adherents would like that freedom to extend further than it should: they celebrate idiocies like Indiana's stupendously misguided 2015 legislation prohibiting state and local laws that "substantially burden" people following their religious beliefs. Such laws provide cover for anything that a believer claims is required by his religion — including a religious business owner denying service to whomever he likes. Hello, colossally wrongheaded Hobby Lobby decision (which I've discussed at some length elsewhere: see the above link for the citations).

Answer me this, Mike Pence: why is your religious intolerance of non-heterosexuals just fine and dandy, but my thorough dislike and condemnation of bigoted Christians like you not okay? Why is the latter, in fact, positively un-American in your eyes?

Let me help you. The reason you can throw around the loaded expression "un-American" is that the Founders were wary of religious oppression by the government. They did not, however, mean to let the likes of you oppress others in the name of your religion. Your characterizing of criticism of your faith as "un-American" is nothing more or less than a grotesque misreading of the First Amendment.

In fact, the harm your wife suffered from criticism does not compare to the harm inflicted by you and your LGBTQ-hating ilk on a still-marginalized minority, harm inflicted by laws like the aforementioned 2015 one you tried to enact when you were governor of Indiana. You tried to elevate the privileges of religious adherents above that of everyone else. Talk about "un-American"!

You are so blinkered by your faith that you can't see your hypocrisy.

You also are so hung up on writ that you have lost sight of the fundamental decency that religion is supposed to inculcate. You dare to condemn people you don't know based on what they do with other consenting adults in the privacy of their bedrooms?

You're telling the world you think non-heterosexuals are evil: that is, after all, the only excuse your wife's school can have for banning them. I can guarantee you, though, that that school has employed, and admitted as students, people whose hearts are less pure than some of those it has refused to employ or to admit as students over the years. That's just the way life is. Being heterosexual doesn't make you purer, hard as it is for you to see that, Mike.

This post will not change your mind, Mike, I know that. You will continue to fear and loathe non-heterosexuals for as long as you draw breath.

However, you need to know that those of us not in the thrall of religious blindness see through your literally holier-than-thou bullshit.

Don't try waving the Constitution at us and bleating that loathing and reviling your bigotry is "un-American".

The rest of us are upholding this country's ideals by rejecting your intolerant principles.

This is why atheists are resentful

There are still bans on atheists serving in government in seven states. The U.S. Supreme Court declared such bans to be unconstitutional in 1961. Secularists are looking to remove the language from the states' constitutions.

Not everyone is on board with the effort.

Christopher B. Shank, the Republican minority whip in the Maryland Senate, said that while he believed in pluralism, “I think what they want is an affirmation that the people of the state of Maryland don’t care about the Christian faith, and that is a little offensive.”

There is an enormous blind spot in many people's minds that allows them to equate secularism with hostility to Christianity. Shank has that blind spot in spades. Moreover, he misses the point that the government of Maryland cannot speak for the people of Maryland on the question of whether those people "care about the Christian faith". Do you understand the First Amendment, Mr. Shank? You don't sound like you do.

Removing the patently unConstitutional language from the offending states' constitutions would say nothing about people's attitude toward Christianity (or any other faith, not that Shank appears to have thought about that, either). It would say that faith and government shouldn't be entangled. That's no more — and no less — than we should all expect.

Like the fatuous resistance to removing the ill-considered phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, the resistance to cleaning up the unenforceable and discriminatory language from state constitutions is rooted in nothing more than reflexive and thoughtless prejudice against atheists (and secularists generally).

It's disgraceful that the ridiculously easy and necessary cleanup remains undone after more than half a century.

Enough inexcusable excuses. Enough stalling. In fact, just plain enough. Enough.

The Supreme Court fears free speech

The New York Times article is "First Amendment Limit: The Supreme Court's Plaza", by Adam Liptak, the paper's Supreme Court correspondent.

The piece is an unflattering depiction of a Supreme Court that holds the First Amendment's protections to be absolute — except on the Court's own steps. The prohibition on political speech within the building or on its grounds stands in sharp contrast to a number of decisions the Court has issued protecting speech that many consider odious (protests at military funerals and anti-abortion activists confronting patients outside abortion clinics, for instance).

The Court's stance unavoidably raises the question: what are the Justices afraid of?

Liptak demolishes the two primary reasons proffered for the ban: the fear that the Justices could be improperly influenced by the protesters, and the fear that, even if the Justices aren't influenced, the public might think they were. Without using the word, Liptak effectively calls these reasons stupid.

The unavoidable conclusion is, the Justices don't particularly like free speech near them — probably because free speech can get boisterous and messy and loud. It might disrupt their gentle sensibilities. Poor things. They just don't have the robust constitution of the average poor woman seeking an abortion, who can skip blithely past a gauntlet of screaming, borderline violent anti-abortion protesters calling her a murderer.

But here's Liptak's most damning finding.

The Supreme Court is not even particularly consistent in how it treats speech on its plaza.

In a sworn statement in 2012, Timothy Dolan, deputy chief of the Supreme Court’s police force, conceded that “the court allows attorneys and parties in cases that have been argued to address the media on the plaza immediately following argument.” The court also occasionally permits “commercial or professional filming on the plaza,” he said.

It seems that people with power or connections can use the plaza.

Nice reputation, that. I'm sure it makes you proud, Chief Justice Roberts.

The Court's attempts to justify hypocrisy have never worked out well: Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States — these are shameful blots on the Court's history. The broad ban on political speech on the Court's own doorstep doesn't rise to that level of infamy, but it's not a rule in which the Justices should take any pride, either. It brands them cowards and hypocrites, unwilling to suffer what they (or at least the reactionary majority in their recent cases) righteously deem as politically necessary medicine.

On the eve of the Hobby Lobby decision

With the Supreme Court poised to deliver its decision in this case on Monday, I remind you of what I've already said about the case.

• Here is what I think of corporations and religious beliefs. The short take? Corporations don't have any. Nor should they be permitted to have any under the law.
• Here were my thoughts after oral arguments in the case.

As I wrote in the second post:

The observed attitude during oral arguments is ominous, suggesting the Court is going to make a pernicious and deeply wrongheaded decision in these cases. I hope I'm wrong, but if not, a pox on the majority.

Our bought-and-paid-for Court

On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court struck down many campaign contribution limits in its ruling on McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. The so-called conservatives carried the day. As with many "conservative" decisions, the result is the very opposite of "conservative" in its true sense.

The majority's argument is that the First Amendment presented an insuperable obstacle to the laws that kept Shaun McCutcheon from donating as much as he wanted to election campaigns. Speech, in the form of money, simply can't be denied.

If you buy the premise of the majority's argument, that money is speech, it's nearly impossible to argue with it. Nor need the argument stop there: in his concurrence, Justice Thomas openly called any contribution limits unconstitutional. None of the other Justices signed on to his concurrence, but I doubt the other conservatives refuse to countenance the idea.

Yet most of us instinctively reject the majority's reasoning. And while I'm usually suspicious of the so-called wisdom of the masses, this time I think we're on to something, something the Court deliberately ignored and hoped we wouldn't notice.

You don't need to be a political scholar or historian to know that money corrupts governments. Unscrupulous politicians already can peddle themselves to the highest bidder so brazenly that it gets the attention of the F.B.I. (California is reeling from a messy corruption scandal right now), and that's with the remnants of some anticorruption laws on the books. How much worse will things get now that many of those laws have been rendered facially invalid under McCutcheon?

The corrupting influence of money was but one evil contemplated by the founding generation. They designed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to make government less susceptible to those evils. That overarching purpose is what the McCutcheon majority ignores.

Why did James Madison, and the Congress of 1789 that ratified most of his Bill of Rights, think freedom of speech was so important? Clearly, they wanted more speech, more debate, more argument, more commerce in the marketplace of ideas — all so as to educate and to enlighten the electorate as much as possible. Today, we unquestioningly accept that a vigorous exchange of viewpoints is the only way to secure good government.

It's that second part, about securing good government, that the First Amendment absolutists, along with those who want us to equate money with speech, would have us forget. (I notice you aren't bleating about originalism and the Founders in this context, Nino.) The First Amendment isn't valuable for its own sake. Rather, the First Amendment, like all the other elements of the Constitution, is a rule that exists to serve the underlying goal of the whole project: good government.

The Constitution exists to secure good government. That is the unwritten standard against which every innovation of governance must be judged.

And the definitely novel idea that "money is speech" is completely at odds with good governance.

We all instinctively understand that neither yelling nor incessantly repeating something makes it a better idea. To the extent that money is used to amplify one voice and to drown out others, money prevents the marketplace of ideas from being useful. By the same reasoning, to the extent that money allows one candidate to monopolize the avenues of communication with the electorate, making it difficult for other candidates and opinions to find an audience, money doesn't serve the primary good of securing good government.

(Money also corrupts politicians after they've been elected. That, too, makes good government impossible.)

So money is not (always) speech: that's too simplistic a principle. Yet without that principle, the McCutcheon decision (and Citizens United) cannot stand.

But of course, these decisions do stand. They will stand unless we undertake the arduous project of amending our Constitution to disavow the pernicious idea at their heart, that money is speech. An amendment is not just the least difficult solution, it's the only solution.

What about the Court, or rather, the majority in this and Citizens United and the other decisions stating the principle that money is speech? Does the Court have any responsibility to keep our government from disappearing beneath a fetid cesspool of big money wielded by a handful of very big contending interests?

The Court sees its role as deciding whether the nation's laws are consistent with the Constitution. The argument could therefore be made that the unwritten standard of securing good government, being literally not written into the Constitution, is and must always be beyond the Court's consideration. One could further (and justly) argue that it would be the height of folly to allow nine unelected judges to decide what is good government.

Yet what are we to make of an institution that purports to safeguard our Constitutional rights, but fatally weakens the government that exists to give those rights meaning?

The Court occasionally resorts to "common sense" to justify its conclusions. I haven't read McCutcheon yet, but I confidently predict that "common sense" is not mentioned. The decision is anything but sensible. It has handed our elections over to the highest bidders, and the majority knows that. (So does the minority, to be sure.)

Perhaps the sale of elections doesn't trouble the majority because those blindly partisan Justices long ago prostituted themselves to Big Money. That, at least, is the simplest explanation for their outrageous betrayal of our political system.

[EDIT: corrected McCutcheon's first name, from "Shane" to "Shaun"]

"Our" father?

There's a story making the rounds about a South Carolinian high school student who ditched his prepared (and pre-approved) graduation speech and recited the Lord's Prayer instead, apparently to protest a school district decision to drop prayer from the ceremonies. It went over well with the audience, exclusive of the staff. You can find the thing on YouTube, no doubt.

Within his First Amendment rights? Absolutely. Is the school district's decision "to no longer include prayer at graduation" a First Amendment violation? Given the phrasing, I'd guess the district's decision passes Constitutional muster. It sounds like the district simply no longer sets aside a time for prayer in the program, not that the district is prohibiting any of the scheduled participants from conducting such activities.

(I don't provide a link for the above quotation because I'm pretty sure the article, like most of Yahoo!'s content, is highly perishable and won't be available a month from now.)

I suspect I'd be more supportive of a student who chose to highlight the tragedy of the Syrian civil war, or the ongoing discrimination against LGBTIQ youths in high schools across the country. Reflecting on my bias, I think I'm probably wrong to feel good about any of these outbursts.

I'm a big believer in propriety on such public occasions, not for its own sake but because it is a sign of respect to one's audience. They're gathered there for a purpose that has nothing to do with your political, religious, or other beliefs. You have been given the privilege of speaking, and in return they extend to you the courtesy of listening. To lecture them just because you know they're not going to deny you the courtesy they promised, violates that implicit bargain.

"But the Lord's Prayer isn't a lecture!" Oh, yes it is, certainly in this case. The student's action was clearly a protest against the district's decision.

But even if you sincerely believe that his recitation was merely a prayer, you can't argue it was a harmless act.

His prayer pushed his religious beliefs front and center, as did the audience's reaction. He and most of the audience — for all I know, it could have been all of the audience — may believe that high school graduation deserves a religious component. That doesn't make their belief right. In our pluralistic society, it is at best impolite to permit one faith a more prominent role in non-denominational ceremonies than other faiths. This was a public high school graduation, not a graduation from a private, religious institution. Any non-Christians in the audience likely felt marginalized by the recitation and the boisterous response it received. Those non-Christians didn't deserve to feel marginalized. They attended the ceremony to see a loved one graduate, not to be reminded of the overwhelmingly Christian makeup of the local population.

That's exactly the sort of coercive influence that the First Amendment was designed to prevent government from facilitating. In this case, of course, it wasn't the government taking action, it was a private citizen. That means the action was legal. But being legal doesn't make it right. Such a public display of faith during a non-denominational ceremony is simply bad manners. And just so we're clear, taking sides in the Syrian civil war or demanding equal rights for LGBTIQ youth during a graduation speech would be just as rude and inappropriate.

Students are there to graduate, not to proselytize, no matter how worthy the cause.

Faith-based charities

Peter Laarman's essay in Religion Dispatches, "Topple Church-State Wall to Save Labor?", takes on a piece in the journal Democracy by Lew Daly.

Daly illuminates little-known intersections between Catholic thought and US social history. One would have been pleased with just this much, but then Daly can’t resist grinding his axe in an unfortunate way. He wishes everyone to know that rights-based liberalism is the primary source of trade unionism’s current woes.

In short, Daly links the downfall of organized labor in the U.S. to overzealous prohibition of religious activity in the public sphere.

After taking on specific parts of Daly's piece and noting significant omissions (mention of which would have undermined Daly's argument), Laarman directly addresses Daly's vision:

Daly appears to believe that were we to just do away with the fusty constitutional barrier, the religious associations and religious organizations that would spring forth to glorious, tax-supported life would be as solidaristic as the ancient church-based models he lauds. But would they? When I look at the faith-based takers of our tax dollars, I’m not seeing a bunch of Franciscans or Discalced Carmelites, I’m seeing social conservatives who are madly in love with laissez-faire economics—with radical individualism in the economic sphere, if not in personal life.

In theory, funding faith-based charity work with tax dollars sounds like a win: the government doesn't have to set up its own soup kitchens, the charities get to do what they already do except on a larger scale (or at least without being dependent on the vagaries of individual donors), and costs might be a lot lower since I assume those who work for these charities are not paid, whereas directly government-administered assistance organizations have to hire their workers. Regulations prohibit the faith-based charities from proselytizing or denying assistance to anyone on the grounds of religion (or, presumably, on any other legally proscribed basis).

But of course, theory and practice diverge.

Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote in an opinion piece in February 2010:

One year after Obama announced his version of the faith-based office, civil rights and civil liberties groups such as mine are still fighting Bush-era battles over tax funding to religious groups that proselytize, job discrimination on religious grounds in public programs and lack of accountability.

The job-discrimination issue, you might be surprised to learn (I was), was legislated into existence during George W. Bush's term: see the Community Services Block Grant Act of 2003, Section 679(b)(3), which references 42 U.S.C. 2000e-1. The combination makes it legal for faith-based charities to discriminate in their hiring. The ostensible reason is so organizations don't have to violate their religious convictions by, e.g., hiring gays if their faith condemns homosexuality.

The federal government sacrificed this nation's principles in order to entice reluctant religious groups to accept federal tax dollars. Was this sacrifice worth it?

You're asking the wrong person, because George W. Bush's infatuation with letting religious groups gorge at the federal trough appalled me.

The ban on proselytizing by such groups is a legal fig leaf. The idea of a conservative administration, or a timid, centrist one like Obama's, actually enforcing the ban is ludicrous. Who polices these soup kitchens and counseling centers? If reports surface of violations of the ban, who investigates them? And even if solid evidence is found of violations, who punishes the violators, and how?

When Americans United urged the Department of Justice (DOJ) to discontinue Bush-era funding for four fundamentalist groups that openly discriminate and proselytize, DOJ attorneys brushed aside the request. These organizations, they assured AU, had been told not to violate the law.

Now we know how well the law is enforced.

So Bush's professed faith in faith-based charities struck me from the beginning as nothing less than a calculated attempt to subvert the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. That he succeeded, and that Obama so far has done exactly nothing to roll back this abuse of power, speaks eloquently to the power conservative religious organizations wield in this country.

You'll excuse me if this nonbeliever doesn't cheer as his tax dollars go to religious groups he despises, while they work hard with their nonfederal dollars (ostensibly nonfederal, anyway) to make him even less welcome in this supposedly tolerant land.

Faith-based charities may be doing good with federal money, but the price is just too high.

Money, speech, people, and corporations

When I started writing this entry, I was going to demonstrate the idiocy that, under the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision of earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation hypothetically could donate anonymously any amount of money it liked to nonprofit groups engaged in "issue advocacy" while Keith Olbermann would first have to advise his superiors at NBC News before donating any amount openly to a political candidate, or risk sanctions by NBC (as in fact happened). The corporation is freer than the individual person, I would have noted snarkily, and I would have advocated strongly for ending the conditions that allowed for this sad irony.

But as so often happens, on reflection I found the reality to be a lot more complex.

First, some background in case you've been asleep for the past year.

Keith Olbermann was temporarily suspended from MSNBC for undisclosed campaign contributions in violation of NBC News policy. The policy doesn't bar all contributions per se, but requires prior approval by management. (Olbermann's suspension lasted two working days.)

A while back I ran across a piece in The Atlantic that highlighted the wrongness of blaming the Citizens United case "for allowing secretive, shady, special-interest money to flow unabated into the U.S. political system, corrupting elections at an unprecedented pace."

Much of the "shadowy" spending Democrats have cited comes from groups that file under section 5014(c)4 of the U.S. tax code. Commonly known as 501(c)4's in the political world, they're tax-exempt nonprofits that engage in issue advocacy and don't typically disclose their donors. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded conservative organization that's a favorite for Democrats to demonize, has a 501(c)4 arm, for instance. The Karl-Rove-co-founded American Crossroads also includes a 501(c)4 operation.

Citizens United didn't actually change anything about what these groups can do. They could spend unlimited amounts during election season without disclosing their donors before this past January.

All that changed, therefore, is the right of corporations and labor unions to donate to those 501(c)4s. We'll never know if they do, of course.

A lot of people are concerned about the corrosive effect of money in politics. The logic is, the richer you are, the better the government treats you. Compared to most people, most corporations have a lot of money. Ergo, the government's actions are likely to favor corporations over individual people.

A factor contributing to people's anger is that the U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized corporate entities (corporations, unions, etc.) as people for the purposes of determining those entities' rights under the Constitution. This principle, by the way, was not articulated within any decision issued by the Court: rather, it was in a notation added by the court reporter to the syllabus of the decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, adjudicated in 1886. (The Wikipedia page about the case contains a fuller story, although, as with any Wikipedia article, one cannot be certain that the account is true or complete.) The Court in Santa Clara never even reached the question of whether the corporations in question deserved to fall under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, which applies only to "person"s, so no explanation exists for the Court's thinking.

Back to Citizens United:

The rule that political speech cannot be limited based on a speaker’s wealth is a necessary consequence of the premise that the First Amendment generally prohibits the suppression of political speech based on the speaker’s identity.

Whether we like it or not, the government is not allowed to make rules that discriminate against billionaires, just as it's not allowed to make rules that discriminate against ethnic or religious or other groups.

How, then, are non-billionaires supposed to counter a billionaire's spending in support of his own interests, which probably don't accord with everyone else's? The non-billionaires have to pool their money by banding together, and the collective entity has to be able to spend as freely as the billionaire.

Can you distinguish between "good" entities formed to protect The Little People and "bad" entities merely out to enlarge their share of the pie? Not in any way that would survive Constitutional scrutiny. You wouldn't even be able to arrive at popular agreement on "good" and "bad" entities: I guarantee that what you call an Evil Special Interest is your neighbor's Heroic Struggling Association Of People Trying To Protect Themselves From Your Evil Special Interest.

Ergo, either Congress or the Court almost certainly would have had to give associations of people the same right of free expression that actual human beings have even if Santa Clara had never been adjudicated. Citizens United was inevitable, because of the expansiveness of the First Amendment.

I don't like that some kinds of nonprofit groups that engage in "issue advocacy" are allowed to keep their donors secret. It seems to me that secrecy and money make for a corrupt political process. Yet I must admit that I wouldn't want my name to appear in a donor list no matter how proud I was of my support. It's the privacy-lover in me. I haven't thought about this issue in any greater depth, so I'll leave it at that.

So what about the thought that started this ramble?

Well, Citizens United is a First Amendment issue, pure and simple, because it centered on Federal law governing campaign donations. Olbermann's suspension, though it involved political donations, has nothing to do with the First Amendment because it was a corporation, not the government, punishing him.

It's still ironic that corporations are freer than most people, because corporations don't have to abide by employment contracts that restrict their actions (in some cases, even after they leave the employer). Alas, I can't see a simple way of ending the conditions that allow for this irony.

Palin and the First Amendment

I have never understood Sarah Palin's appeal. She dresses well, which is what you'd expect from a former beauty pageant contestant. Other than that, I can't name anything about her that positively impresses me. In particular, her education and intellect are substandard. Yet she insists that she is qualified to weigh in on substantive political, economic, and social controversies, in spite of her educational and intellectual deficiencies.

Here's an embarrassingly obvious example of why Palin cannot and should not be taken seriously: an analysis of her comments about Dr. Laura Schlesinger's decision to end her radio show. According to the article:

Sarah Palin jumped in and tweeted, “Dr.Laura: don't retreat ... reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence"isn't American,not fair")"

That was soon followed by a second tweet:

“Dr.Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles,so watch out Constitutional obstructionists. And b thankful 4 her voice, America!)"

As the analysis, written by Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, bluntly notes:

Though Palin speaks frequently of the need to protect the Constitution and elect politicians who understand it, in this case she is misreading the [First] amendment and how it works. ...

“Congress shall make no law” — the first five words of the First Amendment — say it all: No government body can limit our rights to speak out. In this case, there’s no government action, just public outrage and pressure.

This is hardly the first time just in the past decade that this limit on the First Amendment has had to be explained. If Palin reads as widely as she says she does, then she has got to be dumb as a rock because she missed this point the last dozen times it came up.

The more cynical reading of Palin's complaints on Schlesinger's behalf is that Palin is perfectly aware that the First Amendment does not apply to Schlesinger's situation, but is counting on her audience not to know that. If that's the case, I'll restate my objection to Palin thus: her deliberate inflaming of the passions of less educated people in the service of what she knows are bad causes shows that her ethics are substandard, and her dishonesty disqualifies her from weighing in on substantive controversies.

Palin's quoted tweets, by the way, read just like her speeches. They're brief, provocative remarks fired into the air to rouse her supporters, but that turn out to be nonsensical. They read like bumper stickers an artificial intelligence program would have churned out, if the AI were optimized for stringing boilerplate phrases together without regard for cogency.

Hmm. An AI ... I wonder ...

Is Sarah Palin a rogue Eliza program?

Nah. Eliza makes more sense.