Are States Allowed To Trap Pregnant Women Inside Their Borders, Berlin Wall Style? Views Differ!

In his Dobbs concurrence, Justice Kavanaugh took pains to argue that even after the right to reproductive freedom was stripped from the constitution, it was still forbidden for "a State [to] bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion." It was a very, very small sop given to the predictable calamity the Court unleashed upon women of reproductive age, who were otherwise told in no uncertain terms that their body is not their own when the state has a different agenda for them.

But Justice Kavanaugh's opinion was not signed onto by any other justice. And, much like the question of whether states can murder pregnant women, views differ as to whether they can criminalize pregnant women leaving their borders. Right now, Alabama is in court arguing that it is entitled to criminally prosecute those who aid Alabama women in leaving the state to have an abortion. After all, if Alabama has a valid interest in forcing its women into labor, then surely it has an equally valid interest in thwarting those women who might try to escape their wardens and find freedom over their bodies in other states. The term Fugitive Uterus Act is absolutely fitting and appropriate, and the passage and enforcement of such laws is a top priority for the current Republican Party.

Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence notwithstanding, the entire point of Dobbs is that a woman's right to control her own body has zero constitutional significance. That said, if we take Justice Kavanaugh at his word (far from clear we should), and if Chief Justice Roberts goes along with him (far from clear he will), then maybe this is a bridge too far for the current Supreme Court. If, if, and maybe.

[Source for the above image]

Why Winning Alabama Matters

Chris Koski makes an important point regarding one talking point aimed at dismissing Biden's Super Tuesday performance: that it's meaningless because he was only winning "red states" that will play no role in the general election anyway.

To begin, it's not really true: of all the states which have had primary elections so far, the state most likely to be "pivotal" in November is North Carolina, and Biden won there by almost 20 points. And in terms of Sanders' victories, it's not like Utah or (in the other direction) Vermont are going to play decisive roles in the general either.

But also, Koski notes, between voter suppression and high rates of racial polarization in voting, the presidential primary is one of the few opportunities for African-American voters in deep south states like Alabama to influence national and Democratic politics at all. Given that they are a core Democratic constituency, it is a good thing that they get the opportunity to make their mark in the primary process precisely because in the general the Democratic candidate won't really have the opportunity to invest any time there.

This is changing a little bit as some shallow south states become more competitive (see North Carolina again). But if the raw bloodless political calculus is that a Democratic presidential candidate really should ignore African-American voters in Alabama during the general election campaign, that makes it more important that they have the opportunity to exert meaningful influence in the primary.

71% of Jews Must Be Very Confused

It feels like a lifetime ago that a Greek newspaper, writing on Barack Obama's 2008 election, heralded it as "the end of Jewish domination" (in fact, it was over a decade ago). I remarked then that if Obama was the loyal opposition to the Jewish people, then the 78% of us who voted for him must have been very confused.

Today, President Trump's approval ratings by Jews hover somewhere south of abysmal -- he's rocking a 71% disapproval rate (against 26% approvals).

And yet over and over again, I hear people -- usually non-Jews -- describe Trump as "the most pro-Jewish President in American history". Their rationale, I imagine, is that Trump has willingly backed the right-wing tendencies of the Netanyahu government, and that is all they think it takes to be "pro-Jewish".

Of course, it fails to register that many Jews don't actually like the Netanyahu government and thus don't view this joined-at-the-hip quality to be a perk. And beyond that, since American Jews are -- you know -- American, we understandably care far more about how Trump has affected the status of American Jews in America than we do about Trump's self-professed love for us when we're citizens of another country half the world away.

But if I were to describe American philosemitism ("a philosemite is an antisemite who [thinks he] loves Jews") in a nutshell, it's non-Jews completely ignoring what Jews thinks in order to anoint their own hero as the Jews' beloved. In the philosemitic imagination, the opinions of actual Jews are utterly unnecessary (if not actively obtrusive) to the project of declaring what is good for the Jews.

(Cf.: Alabama citing the Holocaust to justify its draconian anti-abortion ban without any regard to actual Jewish teaching and practice on abortion).

Not My President's Day Roundup

Our apartment's water heater is being replaced tomorrow. That means my one true joy in life -- long, languid, hot showers -- will also have to go for the day. It will be terrible.

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China's crackdown on religious liberty threatens the tiny but ancient Kaifeng Jewish community.

One of the few Black mathematicians in American academia recounts the microaggressions and subtle racism which alienated him from his own discipline.

I think the tone of this column is a little off, but the broad point -- that leftist anti-Zionists have no friend more highly placed in Israel than Netanyahu himself -- is on the mark, and it's important that someone like Eric Yoffie is saying it.

Alabama newspaper editor urges the return of the KKK in order lynch Democrats (and insufficiently conservative Republicans). Yes, really.

Apparently, Louisiana has a bad habit of not releasing prisoners after they've finished serving their sentences.

"As a Jew, I’m either furious or eating. Sometimes both."

For all the talk of "creeping Sharia", the fact is that the American Muslim community is actually experiencing something very different: creeping liberalism. For a community that, for much of recent electoral history, at least leaned Republican (especially on social issues), the rapid embrace of feminism, gay equality, and sexual liberation among the younger generation is coming as a bit of a shock to the more conservative old-guard.

Fraud Squad! Roundup

In a meeting, I got a phone call from my bank about potentially fraudulent transactions on my credit card. Had I recently ordered $50 worth of fast food pizza? No, I hadn't -- and so the account is frozen, and presumably the charges will be reversed.

An hour later, upon returning to my desk, I had the bizarre joy of seeing a confirmation from Domino's promising me that my "pizza is on the way [to Houston, Texas]!"

Anyway, long story short: I'm getting pizza for dinner tonight.

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Jenny Singer of the Forward interviews Young Gravy, a Black Jewish rapper (and GW student). It's a really interesting and worth your time (I'm saying that not just because I think I played a role in putting the interview together!).

I think I missed this when it came out, but a Texas court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act's adoption rules this past fall, saying that act's preferences for Indian children to stay with Indian families was racially discriminatory against non-Indians. The Judge, incidentally, was Reed O'Connor -- the same guy who just struck down Obamacare. He's certainly setting himself up as the go-to-guy for tip-of-the-spear conservative judicial activism.

Alabama was all set to execute a Muslim inmate -- but refused to allow a Muslim chaplain to be present with him during the execution (they did offer a Christian chaplain, which unsurprisingly the inmate did not consider to be a satisfactory substitute). 11th Circuit stays the execution due to the "powerful Establishment Clause claim" (and plausible RLUIPA claim). Alabama is appealing to the Supreme Court.

A new poll finds that over half of Israeli Jews agree that the controversial "nation-state" law must be either abandoned outright or fixed to confirm the state's commitment to democratic equality for all citizens.

A Cameroonian official has apologized for threatening an ethnic minority group by comparing them to Jews in pre-WWII Germany, namely: "In Germany, there was a very rich community who wielded all economic power .... They (the Jews) were so arrogant that the German people were frustrated. Then one day, a certain Hitler came to power and put them in the gas chambers."

I have no takeaways from the Likud primaries except celebrating Oren Hazan's imminent departure from the Knesset. Goooood riddance.

Iraqi Jews commemorate family members who were "disappeared" by state secret police.

And To Think, For a Minute I Thought Roy Moore Really *Did* Have a Jewish Friend

As you might recall, at the tail end of his campaign Roy Moore's wife Kayla tried to refute allegations that he was antisemitic by saying their "attorney is a Jew". This set off a media manhunt to figure out who the Jew in question was, and my prediction was that whoever it was, he'd turn out to be a Messianic Jew -- which is to say, not really Jewish at all.

Sadly for me, it looked like I was wrong: reporters discovered that Richard Jaffe -- who defended the Moore's son Caleb on drug charges -- was Jewish (actually Jewish) and so likely the man in question. While disappointed that my take didn't pan out, I took solace in the fact that Jaffe was a longtime friend and backer of Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones.

But twist! Now Kayla is back in the news and claiming that Jaffe was not the Jew she was referring to. The suspect is still at large; and the hunt is back on!

Now two thoughts occupy my mind:

(1) I cannot believe this is still a story.

(2) Given that at least some of Moore's "Jewish" friends and Rabbis are indeed actually Messianic, I'm thinking that my original prediction has new life within it.

UPDATE: And boom goes the dynamite.

Search for Roy Moore's Jewish Lawyer Hones In On Montgomery Christian

When Roy Moore's wife, Kayla, bragged to the press that their "attorney is a Jew," I had my doubts. Specifically, given that she went on to say that they "fellowship" with him, I suspected that the man was actually a Christian. My money was on Messianic Jew and conservative Christian legal heavyweight Jay Sekulow.

No evidence of that, yet. But the Forward did some digging and it seems like I was one the right track. They couldn't find any Jewish lawyers who went within twenty feet of Moore. But they did find one promising candidate:

One Montgomery attorney could be our match. His name — first, middle, and last names included — was certainly very Jewish. The Old Testament names of his children were spelled in ways more typically Jewish than Christian. His specialty is business law. 

And yet. 

He’s also an active church member and a Sunday school teacher. I’m a Sunday school teacher, in a synagogue. He’s a Sunday school teacher in his church. 

This could be our — their — Jewish Attorney.

I can't think of a better way to cap this week than to find out that Roy Moore's Jewish lawyer was actually Christian.

Jones/Moore in a Nutshell

Talking Points Memo chats with churchgoers in Alabama:

In a state considered part of the Bible Belt, the allegations transformed a race into an unexpected referendum on which is better: a man accused of child molestation claims he vehemently denies or a Democrat?

For many conservative Republicans, there’s really no choice.

Sigh.

Alabama's Pro-Muslim Bias

Eugene Volokh has the scoop on a fascinating lawsuit filed by the ACLU in Alabama, alleging state religious discrimination ... against Christians and in favor of Muslims. Here are the alleged facts:

Plaintiff Yvonne Allen is a devout Christian woman who covers her hair with a headscarf as part of her religious practice. In December 2015, Ms. Allen sought to renew her driver license at the Lee County driver license office, where officials demanded that she remove her head covering to be photographed. When Ms. Allen explained her religious beliefs, the County officials responded with a remarkable claim: They admitted that there was a religious accommodation available for head coverings, but contended that it applied only to Muslims.

Assuming these claims are accurate, there is no question in my mind that the practice constitutes religious discrimination.

Yet it seems implausible, to say the least, that local governmental officials in Alabama are systematically biased in favor of Muslims and against Christians. So what gives?

One possibility is that we're seeing a weird confluence of dutiful bureaucratic obedience with a genuine belief in Fox-inspired "Muslims get special rights!" nonsense. That is, the relevant civil servants assume that in our decaying politically correct world Muslims get special rights that everyone else doesn't, and being faithful public officials they are simply following (what they take to be) the law.

But another way of thinking about this reflects something I've long wondered about religious and cultural accommodations (I could have sworn I've written a post on this, but I can't find it) -- what if the accommodation itself is motivated by some sort of degrading or stigmatizing belief about the accommodated party? Let's say one thought of a particular religious outgroup as being especially backwards and primitive. So one offers an "accommodation" to that faith that makes it easier for them to pass their GEDs. That accommodation could itself be a form of discrimination against the religious group -- a public message that they, as a collective, are the sort of people too dumb to pass high school on their own. And so here, an accommodation for Muslims-only could make sense to the extent that it marks them as other/deviant, whereas a Christian seeking the same accommodation threatens the communal sense of Christians as normal, Western, and integrated.

This type of wrong is by no means especially "conservative" in nature. It is more or less the same instinct motivating the left-wing Jewish college professor who fell over herself to be friendly to the her head-scarf wearing bus-mate when she assumed she was Muslim, but went ice-cold upon finding out that she was in fact an observant Jew. There are slight differences in valence, but in either case the "accommodation" is really a way of demarcating otherness or strangeness.

In any event, to think of Alabama as favoring its Muslim residents over its Christians is amusing enough on its own to be worth flagging. Again, the case itself seems pretty straightforward, at least on the facts alleged.

Sweet Home Alabamacare

One of the interesting points about Obamacare's supposed unpopularity is that it combines the people who don't like it because it's liberal socialist communist overreach, and the people who don't like it because they're holding out for single-payer. The GOP, naturally, really represents only the latter constituency. And while such persons do represent the majority of the loyal Obamacare opposition, breaking the numbers out is rather revealing. 41% of Americans support Obamacare, and another 12% oppose it because they wish it was more liberal. Only 38% of Americans oppose it on conservative grounds. To put that in perspective, 38% is roughly the vote share President Obama managed to win in Alabama in 2012.

Now this does raise the question of who exactly these 12% not-liberal-enoughers are. I, for example, might wish Obamacare was more liberal than it is, but I still won't say I oppose it. There are some Americans who really are left-wing enough so they oppose, on substance, mainstream liberal policy objectives, but I don't think they total 12%. There's probably some remnants of the firebagger wing of the party mixed in here. And there are probably some people who, unlike me, will vote "opposed" in a poll question of this sort of they can conceive of any policy they'd prefer to Obamacare, even if they don't find the law itself to be particularly objectionable.

In all cases, to say such people won't vote Republican is not to say they will vote Democratic, but obviously to the extent that 12% has a lean, it will lean in favor of the Democratic Party.

Artur Davis' Turn for the Worse

Former Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis has announced he is switching parties, though he has not committed to a renewed political career (if he did run, however, it would be in Virginia, not Alabama).

There's a lot of "good riddance" being put out there. And I certainly see where that comes from. But I find my feelings are mixed -- while I am deeply disappointed in the man Rep. Davis has become, I also recall the fall from what he once was.

At one point, Davis was considered a rising star amongst young African-American politicians. And while he had already spent several term in Congress (knocking off incumbent Democrat Earl Hilliard to get there)*, it was the 2010 Alabama gubernatorial race that looked to be his coming out party. Young, smart, and Harvard-educated, Davis cut a character that folks thought might have cross-over appeal and could bite into the overwhelming margins White voters were providing to Republican candidates statewide -- a Barack Obama for the south.

But therein lay the problem: Davis looked ahead to the general election and took his base for granted. He tacked hard to the right, assuming that the Black voters who made the core of Alabama's Democratic activists would continue to support him -- particularly given that his main opponent was the White Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks. He voted against the Affordable Care Act and spurned the local Black leadership. And come election day, he was not just beaten but throttled by Sparks, who took home over 60% of the vote. Rep. Davis had made an elementary mistake -- he assumed that Black voters vote on basis of race, not policy. And his rising star came crashing to earth.

After that defeat, Davis turned hard against the Democratic Party, and his recent moves reek of sour grapes. The breaking point was his endorsement of the voter fraud panic, a "problem" that is by all empirical accounts mostly non-existent but has been an effective pretext for purging the rolls of valid voters, many people of color.

The thing is, I saw Rep. Davis in Congress, and I remember being extraordinarily impressed by his savvy and intelligence. Artur Davis is a smart man, and that's what makes his decision so infuriating. He's smart enough to know that "voter fraud" is a fraud, but he's also smart enough to know that jumping on that train is a fast way to leap to prominence amongst the GOP, who are always looking for Black faces to say what White audiences want to hear.

The tragedy is that someone as smart and talented as Davis is deciding to use his talents like this -- trying to exploit the game to put himself in power, rather than to do good for the nation. People say good riddance, and in a sense they're right to -- someone who sells out like this does not deserve our respect. But I can't help but feel a twinge of regret. Artur Davis' story could have had so many endings. It's a shame he chose this one.

* I distinctly remember the Davis/Hilliard race because Hilliard had issued several anti-Israel votes (as well as a solidarity trip to Libya), which put him on the radar screen of the pro-Israel and Jewish Democratic community. Davis received strong support in the Jewish community at the start of his career (people say he received money from AIPAC, but that's strictly speaking inaccurate -- AIPAC doesn't have a political action committee and does not give money to candidates. It is true that he received strong support from various Jewish and pro-Israel groups -- both Davis and Hilliard received most of their large donations from out-of-state as the race began to be seen as a referendum on mid-east policy), and I think many of us had warm feelings towards him as someone who was responsive to us when we were feeling hurt or aggrieved. Again, that makes it more difficult when you see what he's receded into.

But in a sense, Hilliard's defeat (like Cynthia McKinney's similar defeats in Georgia) wasn't about who ran against him, but about the voters who made a decision to listen. The Jewish community said to them "your representative is hurting us", and they responded. Every minority group should be so lucky as to have their claims of hurt be met with empathy like that. I try to be empathic in the same way to others, so that when I'm a position where my community is alleged to be causing a hurt, I do my best to be responsive as well. So, no matter how Congressman Davis' career ends, Jewish voters owe a debt of gratitude to the voters of the Alabama 7th District surrounding how it began.

Reality-Based Voting Bloc

In anticipation of their upcoming primaries, PPP polls Alabama and Mississippi. They're finding that both states are essentially knotted up between Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum. But there are some interesting breakdowns once you consider the, er, unique views of many Dixie Republicans.

For example, in Mississippi only 12% of voters think Obama's a Christian to 52% who think he's a Muslim and 36% who are not sure. In Alabama just 14% think Obama's a Christian to 45% who think he's a Muslim and 41% who aren't sure. Among voters who answer this question correctly, Romney dominates, but among the Obama's-a-Muslim crowd Gingrich starts to pull back into favor (holding an 11 point lead in Mississippi and tying the race in Alabama).

Barely half of Mississippi Republicans belief interracial marriage should be legal, and Newt crushes amongst those who think it should not. Romney leads amongst the quarter of Alabamans and Mississippians who believe in evolution, while Gingrich tops amongst the majority that does not.

Basically, one thing you can say about Romney is that he does do better among the bloc of Republicans who still have at least a foot planted in reality. The problem, of course, is that this is a relatively small segment of the GOP primary electorate.

Call on Me

Sometimes when Jill and I are talking about education policy and politics, she mentions how one of the most problematic mythologies around education is the idea of the super-teacher -- that if teachers just want it enough and are committed enough, that will be the silver bullet that ensures every child gets a solid education. The problem being two-fold -- first, it's unreasonable to expect teachers to be superhuman, and second, that teachers are limited in what they can do absent fundamental, structural reform. Moreover, the super-teacher claim also is often used as a way of concern trolling against improvements in teacher working conditions -- the idea being that because "good" teachers are these altruistic Lifetime TV stars who are in it because they are "called" to the profession, they don't (or shouldn't) care how much money they make, how many hours they have to work, or what condition their classrooms are in.

This last argument was the one put forward by Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill (R):

“If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach.

“To go in and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?

“And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It’s just in them to do. It’s the ability that God give ‘em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn’t matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity.

“If you don’t keep that in balance, you’re going to attract people who are not called, who don’t need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance.”

One notes, of course, that this appears to make teaching different from nearly every other profession and, indeed, the basics of capitalist economics. For most professions, we assume that people are not altruists who do what they do "for love of the game". We don't assume they're purely mercenary, but we do think that performance is tied to pay and compensation. And the corollary is that if you want better people, you shell out more dough. If I'm repairing my roof, I can hire a cheap contractor who will likely do a shoddy job, or I can hire a more expensive one who will do the job right. You get what you pay for. This idea that the way to increase performance is to reduce pay so you only get the most "passionate" applicants is not, shall we say, a universally accepted principle, and certainly one Sen. McGill applies in his own life (he just voted to give himself a 67% pay raise. Apparently he's not "called" to legislate?). But teachers, for some reason, are a special case.

Con Law I Roundup

I taught my first class of Constitutional Law today (thus, as one of my colleagues put it, making me officially a "professor of constitutional law"). I think it went well -- particularly the part where we had a vibrant discussion about the merits and demerits of what they did not know to be the North Korean constitution's equivalent of a bill of rights.

* * *

In shocking, shocking news, new research shows that people aren't actually any more upset when decisions they dislike come from the courts rather than the legislature.

The tide has turned: opposing the Voting Rights Act may be the new GOP consensus position.

Buy Newt, get Palin along for the ride. What could be better?

Supreme Court blocks an Alabama execution of a man who missed an appeal deadline because, unbeknownst to him, all his attorneys had stopped representing him without telling anybody (the client, the courts, the family ... anyone at all, really). Scalia and Thomas dissented. Incidentally, the elite NYC law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell does not come off looking good in all of this.

Eugene Volokh asks a fair question, which is what critics of the "corporations have First Amendment rights" folks have to say about the actions of Google, et al, in vociferously protesting SOPA.

Massive protest by Ethiopian Jews against racism in Israel.

Pryor Restraint, Part II

What is going on in Birmingham? I just wrote a post about how Judge Bill Pryor, known as one of the more conservative judges on the 11th Circuit, keeps on joining surprisingly liberal opinions (I attributed this to the presence of a friend of mine who is currently clerking for him). And here is another one, perhaps the most shocking of all, since it flatly reverses an opinion by the same panel.

The case is one I commented on before, centering around whether calling a Black employee "boy" is evidence of racial animus in an employment discrimination case. The 11th Circuit had previously ruled "no", and was reversed by the Supreme Court. Then on remand, it answered "no" again (with respect to the facts of this case), and remanding the case for a new trial. And now, the trial having been completed again, with another verdict for the plaintiff, the 11th Circuit has finally caved, vacating its last opinion and upholding the verdict (save for the punitive damage award).

The New York Times observes that the opinion of the court reads more than a little begrudging (Pryor did not author this opinion), taking it upon itself to chastise an amicus brief by a group of civil rights leaders and concluding that the "verdict could have gone either way, and it went Hithon's way." But still, wow. It's rare to see a panel reverse itself like this, and a serious pattern with Pryor is emerging.

The question is whether it will continue without my secret agent in his chambers. Only time will tell.

Mega Travel Roundup

I'm going to Maryland, and then to Illinois, and then to Minnesota, then back to Illinois, then to Nevada, then back to Illinois, then to New York! Yeaargh. (This is over the next month and a half, starting tomorrow).

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Do teachers dislike creativity?

Poor Mitt Romney. Every time he has to converse with actual human beings, the threat of disaster looms.

Fascinating article about the Black QB at a private Virginia school that was founded as part of massive Southern resistance to school integration.

Jeffrey Goldberg explains why the support of Christian "Zionists" won't sustain an US-Israeli alliance in the event American Jews are permanently alienated from the Jewish state.

Israelis look on nervously as GOP candidates race to be further right-wing than the Israeli right.

Russell Simmons urges Americans of all stripes to protest Lowes' decision to give in to anti-Muslim bigotry and pull their advertising from "All-American Muslim". Also, Adam Serwer points out that the attack on shows like "All-American Muslim" demonstrates that -- shock of shock -- Islamophobes have a problem with Muslims, not "radical Muslims".

I hate having to link to Commentary, but there is a point that "Israel-firster" (used by some CAP folk as well as M.J. Rosenberg) has uncomfortable anti-Semitic overtones. Of course, this from the magazine that posted Jennifer Rubin's anti-Semitic article on why Jews dislike Palin, so, you know, pot and kettle (it only adds to the irony that Rubin herself has been at the forefront of attacking CAP).

Good post on False Dichotomies regarding how the nature of anti-Zionist rhetoric poisons any possibility of a one-state solution where Jewish citizens are viewed as equal. Simply put, if you view essentially all of Israel's Jews as colonialist Nazi interlopers, the odds that you're going to tolerate them wielding any sort of substantial political power or autonomy is relatively small. Which, come to think of it, characterizes a lot of anti-Zionist rhetoric towards Jews worldwide now.

Alabama discovers some foreigners aren't Latino -- indeed, some are executives at factories employing countless Alabamans -- panics about its anti-immigrant law.

Alabama Governor: Non-Christians are not my "Brothers"

In a speech to a Black church in Alabama meant to bolster his race-relations credentials, Alabama Governor-elect Robert Bentley promised that though "I was elected as a Republican candidate ... once I became governor ... I became the governor of all the people."

A lovely sentiment. Except for what happened next:

"There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit," Bentley said. ''But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister."

Bentley added, ''Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother."

I'm not sure how many folks in a church don't "have living within them the Holy Spirit". But the bigger point, obviously, is the gratuitous demeaning of Jews and other non-Christians, with the Governor explicitly telling them that they are lesser people in his eyes.

The reason the Constitution forbids official religious endorsement is that, in the words of Justice O'Connor, "Endorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community." Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 688 (1984) (O'Connor, J., concurring). Alas, public pronouncement of the governor's views -- absent any legal effect -- are likely outside the purview of constitutional review. But the effect is the same -- everybody in Alabama now has had it made starkly clue which faith groups are insiders, and which are outsiders, in the current administration.

UPDATE: Jon Chait reminds us that "it's been months since the last neoconservative column upbraiding American Jews for their inexplicable failure to vote Republican."

UPDATE #2: Governor Bentley has apologized.

It's a Pirates Life for Me, Maybe? Roundup

Yes, yes -- these roundups are the epitome of lazy blogging. Sorry. I'll snap out of it eventually.

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Big Labor pushes through majoritarian democracy.

I was waiting for the first person to argue that two straight female SCOTUS nominations (making for three of nine female justices total) equals a de facto exclusion of men. Thanks, K-Lo!

A mild surprise in West Virginia, as centrist Dem Alan Mollahan (D) goes down in the primary to an even more conservative candidate.

Seattle police officer taped beating a Latino robbery suspect (who turned out to be entirely innocent, not that it matters).

Ta-Nehisi Coates on why Obama's anti-X-box-ism is genuine.

Andrew Sullivan's haywire gaydar re: Elena Kagan is really starting to piss me off.

Recently defeated (at the GOP nominated convention) Utah Senator Bob Bennett (R) is in no rush to decide his next move.

If you're a Republican in Alabama, believing in science is a smear.

Griffith Bolts to the GOP

Alabama Democratic Representative Parker Griffith is switching parties, citing differences with party leaders (particularly over health care) as the cause.

Obviously, Rep. Griffith has every right to do this (as did Senator James Jeffords, or Arlen Specter, or any other historical party switcher). Republican leaders, furthermore, are surely correct to trumpet the implications of a House member deciding to defect to the minority, which I imagine is a rarity. On the other hand, Matt Yglesias is also correct to note that Griffith came from a district whose Democratic control was essentially unsustainable over the long term. Rep. Griffith was the furthest thing from being a progressive while he was a Democrat; so progressives already understood that we would need to know how to push our agenda forward without him.

Nullification Returns

Iowa Republicans simply want to ignore the Iowa Supreme Court's ruling striking down the gay marriage ban:

“If I have the opportunity to serve as your next governor,” Bob Vander Plaats told a crowd of about 350 people at a rally, “and if no leadership has been taken to that point, on my first day of office I will issue an executive order that puts a stay on same-sex marriages until the people of Iowa vote, and when we vote we can affirm and amend the Constitution.”
[...]
Co-founder of Everyday America, Bill Salier, told the crowd that state lawmakers need to thank the Supreme Court justices for their opinion but say it’s merely opinion and the law is still on the books.

Salier said: “(Lawmakers) can face down the court and say, ‘We passed DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. You claim that it is stricken. And yet unless some magic eraser came down from the sky, it’s still in code.’”

Anyone who knows a pittance about legal doctrine knows this is flagrantly illegal. Whether that includes any Republicans is an open question.

Speaking of nullification, ousted Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore -- who rose to prominence by attempting to defy the federal courts and keep his 10 Commandment monument on courthouse grounds -- may take another crack at Alabama's governor's mansion.