While hate crimes are often committed by members of one religious (or racial or ethnic) group against another, history is replete with examples of internecine violence.
This year, we celebrate ... Jewish American Heritage Month, and we're also commemorating an important anniversary. One hundred-fifty years ago, General Ulysses Grant issued an order –- known as General Orders Number 11 –- that would have expelled Jews, “as a class,” from what was then known as the military department of the Tennessee. It was wrong. Even if it was 1862, even if official acts of anti-Semitism were all too common around the world, it was wrong and indicative of an ugly strain of thought.
But what happened next could have only taken place in America. Groups of American Jews protested General Grant’s decision. A Jewish merchant from Kentucky traveled here, to the White House, and met with President Lincoln in person. After their meeting, President Lincoln revoked the order -- one more reason why we like President Lincoln. (Laughter and applause.)
And to General Grant’s credit, he recognized that he had made a serious mistake. So later in his life, he apologized for this order, and as President, he went out of his way to appoint Jews to public office and to condemn the persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe.
This case is difficult because it couples issues of equal protection and federalism with the need to assess the rationale for a congressional statute passed with minimal hearings and lacking in formal findings. In addition, Supreme Court precedent offers some help to each side, but the rationale in several cases is open to interpretation. We have done our best to discern the direction of these precedents, but only the Supreme Court can finally decide this unique case.
Although our decision discusses equal protection and federalism concerns separately, it concludes that governing precedents under both heads combine--not to create some new category of "heightened scrutiny" for DOMA under a prescribed algorithm, but rather to require a closer than usual review based in part on discrepant impact among married couples and in part on the importance of state interests in regulating marriage.Describing recent Supreme Court equal protection decisions, the 1st Circuit said:
In a set of equal protection decisions, the Supreme Court has now several times struck down state or local enactments without invoking any suspect classification. In each, the protesting group was historically disadvantaged or unpopular, and the statutory justification seemed thin, unsupported or impermissible.Concluding that "Congress' denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest," the court explained:
In reaching our judgment, we do not rely upon the charge that DOMA's hidden but dominant purpose was hostility to homosexuality. The many legislators who supported DOMA acted from a variety of motives, one central and expressed aim being to preserve the heritage of marriage as traditionally defined over centuries of Western civilization. ...
For 150 years, this desire to maintain tradition would alone have been justification enough for almost any statute.... But Supreme Court decisions in the last fifty years call for closer scrutiny of government action touching upon minority group interests and of federal action in areas of traditional state concern.
To conclude, many Americans believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and most Americans live in states where that is the law today. One virtue of federalism is that it permits this diversity of governance based on local choice, but this applies as well to the states that have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage.CNN reports on the decision.
We are of the view that it is necessary in this day and age for the authority to regulate the teachings or preachings of the religion in order to control, if not eliminate deviant teachings. The integrity of the religion needs to be safeguarded at all costs. That is what Section 53 of the enactment purports to do.
Dr Emad Gad, MP and deputy director of Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, said this campaign against the Copts is a prepared strategy by the Muslim Brotherhood to increase the chances of their candidate in the run-off election, by promoting a lie that votes of the Copts helped Shafik to advance. "This is not true at all. The largest block of votes for Shafik was in the four provinces of the Delta, namely Sharkia, Gharbia, Menoufiah and Dakahila, where the Copts make up only 5% of the total population."Meanwhile, CNN reports that yesterday several thousand protesters in Tahrir Square urged Egyptian courts to disqualify Shafik. Other protesters broke into Shafik's campaign headquarters and set it on fire. Three of the losing candidates in the first round have filed appeals with the election commission charging fraud. (AP) According to Bloomberg News, many youth groups and secularists who led last year's revolution favor Hamdeen Sabahi, a socialist candidate who came in third in the first round of the election. These activists want Shafik disqualified under a law that took away the political rights of some Mubarak era officials. Others want Morsi to step aside to allow Sabahi to run against Shafik.
the Guidelines issued this week emphasize students’ First Amendment rights over the responsibility to create a safe learning environment for all students – especially vulnerable minority, disabled, and LGBT students. While we agree that students’ free speech and religious expression rights are important, we strongly disagree with the Guidelines’ direct implication that such rights have been given short shrift in current federal and state law and policy and need greater protection.The American Muslim has extensive background on the Guidelines and the controversy they have generated. [Thanks to Michael Lieberman for the lead.]
any law, legal code or system of a jurisdiction outside of any state or territory of the United States, including, but not limited to, international organizations and tribunals and applied by that jurisdiction’s courts, administrative bodies or other formal or informal tribunals.The legislation is based on a model act promoted by the American Public Policy Alliance.