Street name “Seven in Heaven Way” upsets American Atheists

This summer, the city of Brooklyn renamed a neighborhood street “Seven in Heaven Way” to honor seven local firefighters who gave their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. A nice thought, right? Simple, symbolic, sincere. But sadly, the commemorative gesture has since generated controversy.



The New Jersey-based American Atheists, the same group that brought the country “God Less America” Fourth of July aerial banners, promptly objected to the street name.

“It’s improper for the city to endorse the view that heaven exists,” American Atheists president David Silverman said. “It links Christianity and heroism.”

Additional objections: Sept. 11 was an attack on “all of America,” so no memorial of it should “break” the Constitution — and, also, the street sign presumes to know what the seven firefighters themselves believed.

But, as The Heritage Foundation’s Jennifer Marshall points out, the group’s objections reveal a misunderstanding of freedom of religion.

Godless secularism – or a “naked public square” denuded of all religious references and symbols, as the late Richard John Neuhaus put it – never was intended to be the character of our American republic. Religious freedom, the cornerstone of all freedom, is freedom for religion, not hostility toward it.

Yes, the Founders wisely separated political from religious authority in our federal government, but they didn’t intend to divorce religion from public life or politics. They based the American model of religious liberty on a favorable view of religious practice.

Far from privatizing or marginalizing religion, the Founders assumed religious believers and institutions would take active roles in society, engaging in the political process and helping to shape consensus on morally fraught questions. …

Most nations are dominated, demographically anyway, by adherents of particular faiths. But every denomination – and the atheist camp as well – is a small minority somewhere on the planet. This reality underscores why religious liberty, not the radical secularist or theocratic systems at either end of the spectrum, should be precious to everyone.

But on a more practical level, the objections reveal an acute sensitivity that seems unwarranted in this situation. A street name with the word “heaven” doesn’t automatically imply an endorsement of Christianity — many other religions include a paradisal idea of the afterlife, too. Nor does it even necessarily imply an endorsement of the belief that heaven is real. Are no streets named for mythical places or fictional characters? Additionally, more than 400 New York City streets have been named for 9-11 victims and heroes. Clearly, the sign was named with the simple motivation of recognizing seven men who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Perhaps that’s why one First Amendment lawyer described the situation this way: “The area of religion is so complex and nuanced that you could argue nearly anything … But a [legal] challenge in this case would be far-fetched.”

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from: hotair

Report: DeMint, Jim Jordan nix McConnell’s debt-ceiling plan; Update: Dems are considering it, says Durbin

DeMint’s opposition isn’t confirmed yet but Robert Costa of NRO has it on good authority. That might not be an insuperable obstacle to passage in the Senate given the fact, per Bret Baier below, that Reid seems open to the idea. If he can bring the Dems into line then all they’d need is the usual suspects — Brown, Snowe, Collins, Murkowski, and a few others — and they’re golden.


But Jordan’s kiss of death in the House will make things hard for Boehner:

Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, tells NRO that while he hasn’t review all the details of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R., Ky.) “contingency plan,” he doesn’t see much of a future for it in the House.

The RSC has 175 members. If all or most walk away, Boehner would need practically the entire Democratic caucus plus 50-60 Republicans who are willing to break with conservatives and lock arms with the left in the name of ceding control of the debt ceiling to Obama. They’d be doing it in the name of averting a default and boxing in The One as the candidate of debt next year, but I doubt that’d save them from primary challenges. How does Boehner get McConnell’s bill through the House under those circumstances? No wonder he seems so noncommittal about it; watch his reaction when Baier presses him on it at 1:30 of the clip below.

The key here, as is increasingly the case, might be Cantor. Whether there’s a rift between him and Boehner or not, he’s banked enough conservative cred by holding the line on taxes throughout the negotiation that he might be able to pry away some RSC members if he backed McConnell’s plan. Has anyone heard his reaction to it yet? If so, please tip us and I’ll update the post. I’ll leave you with a link to this brief but must-see vid (via NRO), which contains what must be one of the most ominous pauses in modern political history. No wonder McConnell’s thinking about Plan B.

Update: The Senate might be ready to play ball:

A back-up plan proposed by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell that would keep the U.S. government from defaulting on its debts next month is viable and under consideration by Senate Democrats, according to Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber.

“We’re talking about it as one of the options, yes,” Durbin said in response to a question about whether the McConnell plan is viable.

Update: Still no word on Cantor vis-a-vis McConnell’s plan, but this quote from earlier today speaks volumes:

Across the Capitol, a closed-door caucus of House Republicans broke up with the leadership conceding that it’s frankly at a loss about getting the votes before Treasury’s Aug. 2 deadline.

“Nothing can get through the House right now,” Cantor said after the White House meeting. “Nothing.”

“Sister Wives” clan to challenge constitutionality of Utah’s polygamy law

Who’s angrier about this? Traditional marriage activists, or gay rights activists who don’t want to see the debate about same-sex marriage dragged down the slippery slope when they’re trying to build on momentum from New York?

Nationally-known constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the lawsuit to be filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City will not call for plural marriages to be recognized by the state. Instead, it asks for polygamy between consenting adults like his clients, former Utahn Kody Brown and his wives, to no longer be considered a crime.

“We are only challenging the right of the state to prosecute people for their private relations and demanding equal treatment with other citizens in living their lives according to their own beliefs,” Turley said in a press release. The Browns star in the TLC network show “Sister Wives.” There is no word yet on whether they will appear in a press conference scheduled for Wednesday…

The complaint to be filed Wednesday, Turley said, presents seven constitutional challenges to the state’s bigamy law. It is largely based on the right to privacy.

“In that sense, it is a challenge designed to benefit not just polygamists but all citizens who wish to live their lives according to their own values—even if those values run counter to those of the majority in the state,” said Turley, a member of the faculty at George Washington University.

If the distinction between decriminalization and state recognition seems confusing (which it did to me at first), it helps to know that Utah’s bigamy statute includes cohabiting with one person when you’re legally married to another. And in fact, this guy is only legally married to one woman; the other three are, er, “sister wives.” Basically, he’s arguing that he doesn’t care if the state recognizes them as legal spouses or not, just that he doesn’t want the cops to come knocking and lock him up when they find out. In that sense, his court claim mirrors the current legal regime in most states where gay marriage is banned but gay sex is constitutionally protected.

So, no lawsuit to legalize polygamous marriage — yet. But legal precedents have a funny way of building on each other:

The lawsuit is not demanding that states recognize polygamous marriage. Instead, the lawsuit builds on a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the “intimate conduct” of consenting adults. It will ask the federal courts to tell states that they cannot punish polygamists for their own “intimate conduct” so long as they are not breaking other laws, like those regarding child abuse, incest or seeking multiple marriage licenses…

The questions surrounding whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry are significantly different from those involved in criminal prosecution of multiple marriages, Ms. Pizer noted. Same-sex couples are seeking merely to participate in the existing system of family law for married couples, she said, while “you’d have to restructure the family law system in a pretty fundamental way” to recognize polygamy.

Professor Turley called the one-thing-leads-to-another arguments “a bit of a constitutional canard,” and argued that removing criminal penalties for polygamy “will take society nowhere in particular.”

Ah, but they’re not asking to change family law, just to take polygamy out of the penal code. The family law case will be the next lawsuit. FYI, the Supreme Court already upheld laws against polygamy — 130 years ago, rejecting a Mormon challenge based on the Free Exercise Clause. So there’s precedent here if SCOTUS wants it when it eventually hears a case along these lines. Two important footnotes, though. One: The Court’s language in Lawrence v. Texas, a decision authored by Anthony Kennedy, was famously broad in its implications (a point noted by Scalia in dissent at the time), so there’s no telling whether that earlier precedent is still good law. And second, Lawrence itself overruled a much more recent precedent in Bowers v. Hardwick to arrive at its holding. So yeah, there’s quite a fair chance that the Brown clan might pull this off.

Exit question: Speaking of people who aren’t eager to watch this court/media battle play out, how excited do you think Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are right now?

Opioids’ molecular magic unmasked

Proteins turned on by opium and similar substances in the body have now been caught in action. Two new snapshots show how cellular proteins lasso molecules in the opium family, revealing the 3-D structure of such pairings for the first time.

The work represents a major step toward designing more specific analgesics and other drugs that lack opioids’ nasty side effects, two teams of researchers report online March 21 in Nature.

“Both are landmark studies,” says Gavril Pasternak, a neuroscientist who designs opioids at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City, and who wasn’t involved in either study. “These structures will quickly be utilized with goal of developing nonaddicting painkillers and new ways to combat drug abuse.”

Smallest planet yields big surprises

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Mercury is even weirder than expected, NASA’s MESSENGER probe is showing.

For starters, the planet’s interior is built differently than anything else scientists have blueprints for. Unlike Earth’s, Mercury’s core — which gobbles up 85 percent of the planet’s radius — consists of three layers instead of two. At the planet’s heart lies a probable solid layer, surrounded by a swirling liquid iron layer, all encapsulated by a third, solid iron-sulfur layer.

The new MESSENGER results were presented on March 21 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, as well as in two papers appearing online in Science. One paper discusses the gravity measurements leading to the new model of the planet’s interior, and the other describes surface features in the northern hemisphere.

Vesta seems more planet than asteroid

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — The enormous asteroid Vesta is more like a small, rocky planet than other space rocks wandering around the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Among other planetlike characteristics, Vesta’s interior is probably divided into layers like Earth’s — and scientists have detected traces of an ancient magnetic field.

“We have a hard time working on this body and not thinking about it as a planet,” said UCLA’s Christopher Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn spacecraft that has been buzzing around Vesta since July.

Like Earth, Vesta probably has an iron core, a mantle and crust. Scientists don’t know how thick the crust is, but Dawn measurements suggest that the core’s radius is between 107 and 113 kilometers, Carol Raymond of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on March 22 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Vesta is only about 530 kilometers across, meaning that the core occupies almost half its diameter. And new gravity maps from Dawn reveal anomalies in the crust, or areas where there’s “likely mantle material close to the surface,” Raymond reported.

Jeb Bush: Make Rubio the VP nominee; Update: Perry: “I have a better gig”

posted at 9:15 am on March 22, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Yesterday’s endorsement of Mitt Romney by former Florida governor Jeb Bush sent the implicit message that the time had come to wrap up the nomination process and begin focusing on the general election.  Bush made that more explicit in an interview with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s Salena Zito — and Bush had an idea how to make the ticket even stronger:

    Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush says Republican front-runner Mitt Romney has earned the right to take on President Obama in November.

SCOTUS hits EPA with an epic smackdown on Sackett

posted at 8:40 am on March 22, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

It’s possible to overstate the impact of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision yesterday on Sackett v EPA, which reversed an EPA compliance order that kept an Idaho couple from building a home on land expressly zoned for that purpose.  As Ilya Somin notes, the court never took up the question of the Fifth Amendment, but rather limited its scope to the Administrative Procedure Act, which means that a Congressional repeal of the APA could undo Sackett, at least temporarily.  As things stand now, however, the Supreme Court has changed the manner in which agencies have to act when issuing compliance orders, which now — despite the Obama administration’s best legal efforts — have to be subject to judicial review before the EPA can start levying massive fines as an extortive device to keep from having their orders challenged.

House votes to abolish IPAB

The House of Representatives today voted 223 to 181 to abolish the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a 15-member panel of experts that has the power to, as its name suggests, independently of Congress cut Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals.

IPAB is one of the worst elements of Obamacare and would contribute mightily to the evolution of a single-payer system, as Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson explained in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Valentine’s Day Love in a Cool Climate

CHIANGRAI TIMES – Valentine’s Day falls next Tuesday but if you can’t take the day off work, try escaping up to Chiang Rai with your sweetheart for a romantic weekend this month and making the most of the cool breezes before summer rolls round.

The Northern Province is at its very best this time of year with magnificent sunrises and sunsets and Himalayan cherry trees in full bloom. You can stay in town and spend the days visiting some of the area’s lesser known attractions.

Bristol Palin to Obama: When should I expect your call?

posted at 1:20 pm on March 19, 2012 by Tina Korbe

Like her mother, Bristol Palin has been on the receiving end of incredibly cruel criticisms. The negativity has run the gamut from passing remarks about a lack of intelligence to hateful indictments of the mistakes she’s made (and earnestly attempted to rectify). But perhaps no one has been more unkind to the Palins than Barack Obama’s million-dollar man, Bill Maher. Maher’s mean-spirited, unrepeatable remarks about Sarah Palin have been well-documented, but he also once said Bristol Palin was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.” Who says that sort of thing about an unwed teenage mother? Who says that sort of thing about anyone?