Law prof: SCOTUS Ruling Wasn’t About the Cake
Noah Feldman at Bloomberg sums up Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that a baker could not be found liable for refusing to prepare a wedding cake for a gay couple as: Win by animus, lose by animus. That’s because the court, led by Justice Anthony Kennedy, found that the baker had been treated with “hostility” based on his religious beliefs by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. By disparaging his Christian faith and comparing his conduct to slavery and the Holocaust, Colorado violated his free exercise of religion. But the decision is “also important for what it did not say, but only implied”: Kennedy “avoided a general pronouncement that religious believers should be exempt from anti-discrimination law” or that “the baker had a free-speech right not to make the cake.”
From the left: Time To End This Russiagate Insanity
Former Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock at The Nation decries the daily “hysteria that dominates our Congress and much of our media” over the Russia investigation. Fact is, “there is no evidence” the Russians thought Donald Trump would win “or that they could have a direct influence on the outcome” of the election. Nor is there any evidence “Russian activities had any tangible impact on the outcome.” Or of “any direct coordination between the Trump campaign” and Russian officials. The “most important fact, obscured in Russiagate hysteria, is that Americans elected Trump under the terms set forth in the Constitution.” And while Matlock considers Trump dangerous, “charges that Russian actions interfered in the election, or for that matter damaged the quality of our democracy” are “ludicrous, pathetic and shameful.”
From the right: Bill Clinton Says He Was Scandal’s Hero
Rarely do you see “such a symphony of hypocrisy and not-so-suppressed” rage, says National Review’s Jim Geraghty, as former President Bill Clinton’s insistence Monday that “he was the hero” during the impeachment scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. After all, said Clinton, “I defended the Constitution.” He then railed against voters not seeming to care about “all of these serious allegations against the current occupant” of the Oval Office.” Whoa, says Geraghty: That may be a valid point, but Bill Clinton is the last person who gets to complain “about the public not taking allegations of presidential sexual misconduct seriously enough.” Adds Geraghty: “Dear God, have some self-awareness.”
Urban critic: Hudson Yards Is Now the Story of NYC
Most of the headlines about Hudson Yards, the massive West Side development, concern the escalating battle between construction unions and the developer. But Crain’s New York’s Greg David insists “the bigger story is the way Hudson Yards has — faster than anyone expected — fulfilled the two goals of the government officials who set it in motion: create capacity for the New York economy to expand and revive a moribund waterfront section of Manhattan.” Moreover, “competition from Hudson Yards forced the rezoning of Midtown East to allow the kind of office space construction that companies want.” And with the World Trade Center redevelopment “adding even more capacity, New York faces no limits to growth.” For that, we can thank “more than $600 million in direct public investment and a very lucrative tax break.”
Culture critic: Cellphones Are the New Cigarettes
Cellphone usage “is becoming the new smoking,” contends Diane Francis at The American Interest, calling the devices “every bit as annoying, addictive and dangerous to our health as are cigarettes.” This “social autism” also causes “second-hand cell damage for the rest of us in public spaces, as others talk within earshot on buses, at airports, on playgrounds, in lobbies and on park benches.” Now, “many schools forbid phones, and more may follow, as evidence mounts that phones are the chosen tool of cyberbullies. In the long run, “phones are killing conversation, and face-to-face relationships are becoming less prevalent in families and workplaces.” The phone has become just “another utensil at mealtimes. The result is that essential social communication skills are disappearing before our eyes.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
