The Jury's In
The Origin of Specious
I recently picked up a very disturbing book. No, it wasn’t Sarah’s Palin’s “Going Rogue.” It was Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”
A couple weeks ago, swarms of evangelicals and creationists descended on college campuses around the country, including Harvard, to distribute their unauthorized version of “The Origin,” complete with an insidious introduction by Ray Comfort, the creationist author.
A Texas-Sized Injustice
This has been quite a year for Republican governors. First there was Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who spent five days crying in Argentina and came back to tell us that he just met a girl named Maria. Then there was Sarah Palin of Alaska, who resigned her post because she’s a point guard, gosh darn it, and she knows when to pass the ball of freedom so that America can dunk it into the basket of small government. And now there’s Rick Perry, governor of Texas, whose story is less scintillating but more jaw-droppingly, head-shakingly unethical.
The sad tale goes like this. In 2004, under Perry’s watch, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for setting the 1991 fire that killed his three daughters. A few days before the execution, Perry and the Board of Pardons and Paroles received a report from independent fire expert Gerald Hurst, which said that there was not “a single item of physical evidence” to suggest arson. The governor and the board could have delayed the execution to find out more, but they didn’t.
The Crosses We Bear
I really didn’t want to write another column about Antonin Scalia, but sometimes the crazy fruit is so low-hanging that you can’t help but pick it. Witness Justice Scalia during oral arguments in the latest case involving a religious monument on government property.
The dispute revolves around a big, white cross that was placed on federal land in the Mojave Desert as a memorial to the American World War I dead. A lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union reminded the court that there are ways of honoring all American soldiers, not just the Christians. Incredulous, Scalia responded, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.” The ACLU lawyer, whose father and grandfather were Jewish war veterans, retorted that he has never seen a cross in Jewish cemeteries. Getting frustrated, Scalia replied, “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead.”
Scalia’s Bright Idea
Even Antonin “Just ’Cause You’re Innocent Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Execute You” Scalia sometimes has good ideas. This spring, during the first set of oral arguments in the controversial “Hillary: The Movie” campaign-finance case, Justice Scalia floated a novel constitutional approach that would favor the Hillary-hating movie producers but also provide campaign-finance laws with a stronger footing—at least in my estimation. Because everyone knows Scalia didn’t really mean it, his suggestion has gotten short shrift among mainstream commentators. That’s a shame, because Scalia’s idea, even though it probably won’t be reflected in the final decision, reminds us why we want campaign-finance laws in the first place.
First, a little background. McCain-Feingold prohibits using corporate funds to produce and distribute “electioneering communications” in the heat of an election season, and “Hillary: The Movie” is pretty clearly the sort of communication the law had in mind. As Justice Breyer clucked, “it is not a musical comedy,” but rather political advocacy tantamount to saying, “Don’t (for the love of God) vote for Hillary Clinton.” Ditching their attempt to mischaracterize their own film, the producers refocused the court’s attention on the broad constitutional question: Shouldn’t corporations be allowed to spend and say whatever they want in the hopes of influencing an election?