In just the past three years, the court has sided with a religious foster-care agency that refused to certify same-sex couples as foster parents; a religious group that wished to fly a Christian flag over Boston’s City Hall; religious schools in Maine that sought public subsidies; a public school football coach who insisted on praying at midfield after games, on some accounts causing students to feel pressure to participate; and religious organizations that challenged early Covid restrictions on gathering in large groups.
The legal questions and reasoning differed, but since Justice Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court has sided with religious plaintiffs in every major religion case except a few exceptions on the shadow docket, representing an essentially unbroken streak of wins for Christian plaintiffs.
This last point is significant. Where historically some of the court’s most important religious freedom rulings have protected members of minority religions from discrimination, the big winners in the recent cases have been practitioners of mainstream Christian religions.
Chris Geidner of LawDork blog reports on the ramifications of a split three-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowing Tennessee to enforce a law that bans gender-affirming medical care for minors.
The Saturday ruling itself alters the legal landscape for these bans, at least temporarily.
First, and most immediately, Tennessee is free to enforce its ban, pending any further court orders.
While calling the ruling “wrong on the facts and on the law,” Chase Strangio, who is one of the key ACLU lawyers on this and several other challenges to anti-transgender laws, added, “We also know that things are moving quickly and for many families, waiting for legal relief is not an option. The untenable position that adolescents, their caregivers and their doctors have been put in is not only illegal, but also deeply unethical and dangerous.” [...]
It was not immediately clear, however, whether the challengers would seek to get the stay lifted, either by the full Sixth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. “We are still evaluating all our options with our primary concern of course being how can we help ensure that people in Tennessee are not cut off from the care they need,” Strangio stated.
Anthea Butler writes for MSNBC that the hate group Moms for Liberty is here to stay and is utilizing already-tested strategies known in the conservative movement for decades.
As a professor who has written for over 20 years about conservatives and women, it’s clear to me that Moms for Liberty isn’t just another flash-in-the-pan organization. It’s only existed since 2021, but in that short time, the group has quickly grown its membership and amassed clout within the Republican Party and the conservative ecosystem. Moms for Liberty has fashioned itself into the tip of the spear of the Republican Party’s culture wars, and its members may have already been raising hell at a school board meeting near you.
But that’s just a part of it. The group aims not to just take over school boards, ban books and help elect conservative candidates on the local and state level. No, as the visits to the convention from Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Hayley, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy demonstrate, Moms for Liberty intends to play a major role in choosing the Republican who runs for president in 2024.
And it likely will.
The group Moms for Liberty may be new, but its strategy is not. Education has always been a valuable culture war and wedge issue, one that often attracts allies across class, race and gender lines. Capturing school boards was a tactic religious right conservatives used to oppose progressive ideas such as sex education in the 1960s.
Casey Fiesler writes for The Conversation that in spite of the increasing number of Twitter alternatives, the eulogies for Twitter are probably premature.
Regardless of how many people ultimately decide to leave Twitter, and even how many people do so around the same time, creating a community on another platform is an uphill battle. These migrations are in large part driven by network effects, meaning that the value of a new platform depends on who else is there.
In the critical early stages of migration, people have to coordinate with each other to encourage contribution on the new platform, which is really hard to do. It essentially becomes, as one of our participants described it, a “game of chicken” where no one wants to leave until their friends leave, and no one wants to be first for fear of being left alone in a new place.
For this reason, the “death” of a platform – whether from a controversy, disliked change or competition – tends to be a slow, gradual process. One participant described Usenet’s decline as “like watching a shopping mall slowly go out of business.” [...]
What makes Twitter Twitter isn’t the technology, it’s the particular configuration of interactions that takes place there. And there is essentially zero chance that Twitter, as it exists now, could be reconstituted on another platform. Any migration is likely to face many of the challenges previous platform migrations have faced: content loss, fragmented communities, broken social networks and shifted community norms.
Jonathan Lemire and Eli Stokols of POLITICO gives us a preview of President Biden’s upcoming trip to Vilnius, Lithuania, for a NATO summit where there will be critical discussion about NATO membership for Ukraine.
Biden leaves Sunday for a trip that will have at its heart the NATO summit in Lithuania, a gathering now timed to an inflection point in Russia’s invasion of its neighbor. Held in Vilnius, just a few hundred miles from the fighting, the alliance’s gathering comes as Ukraine has slowly rolled out its counteroffensive. Biden then will visit Finland for a Baltic States summit, personally planting the symbolic flag of the West on the soil of NATO’s newest member.
Biden, his aides previewed, will use a major address Wednesday before NATO to forcefully urge for a redoubling of Western support for Ukraine. He will declare it imperative that Kyiv be sufficiently armed to make real progress before the fighting season slows for mud and then snow. He also will point to NATO’s response over the past 16 months, and the alliance’s expansion, to argue that he’s delivered on a promise to repair America’s alliances — and use the recent tumult in Russia as further evidence that efforts by allies have been working. [...]
Alarm has been increasing among many of those allies over how long, and at what cost, Kyiv can continue to be supported. And some of those wary voices have grown louder in Washington, as more congressional Republicans — and leading GOP presidential candidates — have expressed objections to bankrolling the resistance to Vladimir Putin. That, in turn, has stirred fears across Europe that a GOP White House win next year could shatter the alliance. And several points of strain will be evident in Vilnius, including sharp divides as to whether to put Ukraine on a path to NATO membership.
Evidence of Putin’s possible new vulnerability lies just across the border from the NATO summit.
In the intense discussions preparing for the summit, the Biden administration initially was reluctant to advance Ukraine’s NATO membership principally on the grounds that, with Ukraine at war, its accession to NATO could make the Alliance a party to the conflict, so accession risked igniting a NATO-Russia war, which President Joe Biden has assiduously sought to avoid. A second administration argument against advancing Ukraine’s accession to NATO was that seeking to do so would divide the Alliance, as was the case at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest. There, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, and the three Baltic States pushed to give Ukraine (and Georgia) a “Membership Action Plan” (MAP), a way station toward accession, but were opposed by France and Germany. Facing deadlock, the Bucharest Summit settled, famously or notoriously, on a compromise that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” but the agreement set no date, nor did it grant them a MAP or any specific action plan for achieving this objective-in-principle.
To the apparent surprise of the Biden administration, however, French opposition to advancing Ukraine’s NATO accession has softened in the weeks preceding the Vilnius Summit. In a major speech in Bratislava on May 31, French President Emmanuel Macron, seeming to side with the pro-accession Central Europeans, advocated “solid” security guarantees for Ukraine and said he favored bringing Ukraine into “existing security architectures,” i.e., NATO. In a June 28 press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Macron went a half-step further, urging NATO to provide “a path to give shape to Ukraine’s prospects to join NATO.” That shift, along with hints from German officials that their position on Ukraine in NATO could shift as well, especially if the U.S. position did so, undercut the Biden administration argument that raising Ukraine and NATO would split the Alliance.
The more profound argument the Biden team initially advanced against moving toward Ukraine’s NATO membership – that it risked igniting a NATO-Russia conflict – has also appeared less compelling in recent weeks. Few advocates of Ukraine’s NATO membership have argued for Ukraine’s accession while the current phase of the war continued. Rather, as an example, an open letter published in Politico on July 5 by a group of U.S. advocates (this author included) suggested that NATO make an unambiguous statement in support of Ukraine’s NATO membership and agree to provide deeper security ties while that process unfolds. Without locking in a timetable or setting forth preconditions like a permanent peace between Ukraine and Russia that might give the Kremlin an effective veto over Ukraine’s accession to NATO, the letter suggests flexibility on timing within the context of a strategic decision that the security of not only Ukraine but also Europe and the United States will be advanced with Ukraine inside the Alliance and with a program of action to reach that goal.
Why did it take China’s government so long to respond to the revolt in Russia? In all likelihood, China’s leaders were as surprised and confused by the unexpected turn of events as all other outside observers (save for the U.S. government and some of its closest allies, who had reportedly been forewarned by U.S. intelligence). Indeed, there is much to suggest that for Beijing, these events were particularly difficult to compute.
The Chinese leadership has long counted domestic threats to regime stability among its topmost policy priorities, and it has been preparing extensively for such an eventuality, whether at home or on the territory of its fellow authoritarian partner states. In this event, however, the challenge to the Kremlin’s authority came from a place that was probably quite unexpected for Beijing: not from the pro-Western liberal opposition (in the form of anti-authoritarian mass protests and an attempted “color revolution”), but from within parts of Putin’s own military apparatus and the ultranationalist forces he himself had cultivated. It is doubtful that Beijing was adequately prepared for such a scenario. [...]
The fact that such an unexpected challenge to Putin’s regime could have arisen from within his own inner circle probably means that Beijing will study the lessons from the revolt very carefully. That being said, the events are unlikely to have immediate repercussions for China’s strategic approach or the disposition of its own security organs.