Brennan on Religious Freedom

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

I'm a little confused by a post by Patrick Brennan at Mirror of Justice. Since Brennan doesn't allow discussion, I'm hoping that someone who agrees with him (or at least understands him) might be able to clarify things here. The root of my confusion comes from Brennan's very distinctive picture of religious liberty:

The Church's much-dicussed "liberty" is not justified on the ground that Catholics have a right to stay inside unmolested by the culture. The Church's right to liberty is grounded in the Church's being Christ's own mystical body continued in the world by divine command. Christ's mystical body is to be present and active in the world in order to correct and transform that world so as to save souls.

Does that mean, according to this particular brand of religious thought, that if secular society does not accept the premise that the "Church [is] Christ's own mystical body continued in the world by divine command," then secular society has no grounds on which to grant the church any special freedoms that it denies to other groups?

Federal Prosecutor May Ask Court For Approval To Murder

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been arraigned in federal court, on charges including a count of using a weapon of mass destruction (18 U.S.C. 2332a). It's good to know that the Obama Administration didn't listen to the certifiably insane suggestion by Senators McCain and Graham to keep Tsarnaev out of the justice system. What's not good news is that 18 U.S.C. 2332a is one of those federal statutes which potentially carries the death penalty.

I've written at great length about the evils of the death penalty. I won't rehash all of those arguments here, except to say that it would be a shame to taint all the heroics and selfless acts that arose in the wake of the bombing — everything that made me proud to be an American — by adding to the body count with a government-sponsored murder.

We're better than that, America.

Stupid Reactions To Boston

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

Here are two among many:

"It doesn't matter why they hate us, they just do," by Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe, which includes such insightful and helpful commentary as "Kids who went to Rindge and Latin High School with Dzhokhar said he was a terrific wrestler, which makes sense. In the country he was born, the Kyrgyzs are among the best wrestlers in the world," and "At least let’s see how this ends. At least let us bury our dead first. At least let us heal our wounded. At least let us take care of our first responders. Then maybe I’ll listen to “what did we do to make them hate us” claptrap. Then maybe I’ll go to some soul-searching debate about how our foreign policy is screwed up and how we’re creating too many enemies and too few allies. But then, maybe I won’t."

"Fool me once...," by Stewart Baker at the Volokh Conspiracy. The argument in the picture he posted seems to be "The ACLU and the EFF opposed surveillance cameras in public spaces. Surveillance cameras may have helped catch the Boston marathon bombers. The ACLU and the EFF also oppose CISPA. Therefore, you should support CISPA." Need I say more?

Bangladesh: A Retrograde Joke Of A Democracy

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

I don't know much about Bangladesh. But these two stories (both courtesy of Eugene Volokh) say all you really need to know.

"Bangladesh protesters demand blasphemy law" — Islamist thugs are demanding that the government pass a law which would make "insulting Islam" punishable by death.

"Bangladesh: Crackdown on Bloggers, Editors Escalates" — The government of Bangladesh has arrested four "atheist bloggers" for "instigating negative elements against Islam to create anarchy."

History comes full circle?

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

At least one Catholic is apparently concerned about "certain beliefs not only being unwelcomed but being pushed out of existence." What prompts this concern, which he apparently views as a unique problem of the modern age, is not the Christian church's long history of persecuting heretics and apostates in order to preserve their favored interpretation of some books (continued in the modern day, albeit in a more civilized and less murderous manner), but rather Johns Hopkins University's student government's reluctance to recognize an anti-abortion student group over concerns about their tactics.

The in-group bias is strong with this one.

Should Boston Have Been Shut Down?

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

UPDATE 4/23: I should have been more clear in the paragraphs below that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is merely accused of taking part in the Boston Marathon bombing, and that he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. That does not, however, change the analysis of the police actions: the standard for pursuing and arresting a suspect is that there must be probable cause to believe he or she is guilty of a crime, and I think it would be hard to argue that probable cause was lacking in this case.

I'm not sure. I'm really not. I'm usually quite skeptical of police actions, as anyone reading this blog should know. But the Boston lockdown is not an easy case, one way or the other. I genuinely don't know whether I think the Boston PD and the FBI did the right thing here.

What I do know is that many of the arguments against the lockdown are complete crap.

Here are some key points to remember in thinking about the lockdown and its justification:

• The Boston marathon bombing was an act of terror, not an ordinary murder.

Many people have been arguing that Boston shouldn't have been shut down because no major America city goes into lock down whenever there are a few murders. But acts of terror like the marathon bombing are fundamentally different from ordinary murders. They are directed at strangers and at the city at large. Everyone in Boston, to some extent, could be said to be a possible target of a subsequent attack; the same cannot be said of ordinary murderers. Acts of terror like the marathon bombing are often not isolated events, but part of a larger campaign involving multiple attacks. At the time of the initial lockdown, police had reason to believe that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had explosives and was willing to use them (in fact, he and his brother had already used them against police, during the shootout when Dzhokhar ran his brother over with the stolen SUV).

Acts of terror are also responsive to very different incentives than ordinary murders. The marathon bombing was not a suicide attack, and so it's reasonable to think that the Tsarnaev brothers were hoping to get away without being caught. (That the elder brother was later killed in a shootout with police should do nothing to change this calculus.) Terrorists like that are likely to be intimidated and hence deterred by the large show of force involved in the lockdown and manhunt. Many murderers would not be similarly deterred (because most murders are not preplanned with evaluations of chances of escape).

• The severity of the bombing cannot be measured in terms of deaths.

The comparison of the lockdown to the ordinary law enforcement response to murders usually treats the bombings as though "three deaths" is the only important fact. But that metric drastically understates the true damage of the bombing. The bombs were designed to maim, not to kill, and they maimed with remarkable efficacy. Ignoring those horrific injuries in order to minimize the effect of the bombing is indefensible.

• The lockdown was not mandatory.

This Time piece has more details, but suffice it to say that the governor did not use all of the power available to him to declare a state of emergency. Instead, he issued a "shelter in place" order, which in reality is just a request to citizens to stay where they are. Unsurprisingly, the citizens of Boston, by and large, respected the request. I have seen no evidence that the lockdown was backed up by force or the threat of arrest, though I'd welcome pointers to anything suggesting that. But the key point is that any argument based on a comparison of the Boston lockdown to illegal imprisonment of citizens by the state is nonsense. Those who remained in their homes did so voluntarily.

• There are risks as well as benefits to having civilians aid in the search

Arguments against the lockdown are bolstered by the fact that Tsarnaev was only found after the lockdown was lifted, and he was found by a citizen who noticed something suspicious about his boat. Would more eyes on the streets have made this a quicker search? In retrospect, maybe. But at the time the decision was made, the answer to that question was a lot less clear. Having citizens out on the streets would have meant far more people looking for Tsarnaev  But it also would have created crowds in which he could potentially hide to escape the city. With the city on lockdown, anyone moving about would have been extremely conspicuous, which is probably why it seems like Tsarnaev was hiding in a single place throughout the lockdown. Without it, he may well have had enough freedom of movement to make it out of Boston, or at least to get to a crowded place to launch another attack. And having hordes of ill-trained civilians out on the hunt would have certainly increased the rate of false identifications, and possibly caused a risk of mobs attacking innocents who happened to look like Tsarnaev. Reddit clearly demonstrated such mobbing behavior on the internet, and it's not unreasonable to think it might have happened physically, as well.

Does any of this mean that the decision to shut down Boston was the right one? No. As I said, I'm not sure whether it was. Would any of it excuse any civil liberties violations that may have been perpetrated against the citizens of Boston during the lock down and manhunt? No, and I hope that anyone who may have been victimized has the courage to come forward. But while the BPD/FBI lockdown should certainly be debated (the police are not sacred or immune from criticism just because they were responding to a terrorist attack), we should expect and demand an intelligent and informed debate. Civil libertarians should not latch on to every weak justification out there for criticizing the lockdown; they should be rational, weigh the facts in a balanced way, and not be afraid to admit that sometimes, the police might just get it right.

Ashley Judd

(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

I don't know much about the actress and political activist who is reportedly considering a run against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2014. I don't think I've ever seen one of her movies, and until just now I didn't know that she's been a powerful voice in the fight against AIDS and world poverty. (Update: I also didn't know, but have just been told, that in 2010 she earned her masters degree in public administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.)

What I did know is that a site dedicated to opposing Democrats on all fronts could only find two things with which to attack her: she's had nude scenes in several films and her 'spiritual guide has been criticized by Christian scholars.'

That, I think, says most of what we need to know about Judd: if that's all that the extreme right wing can find to smear her with, she sounds like a solid candidate moving into 2014.

But let's talk about that extreme right wing a little more. It's hard to say whether the Daily Caller's targeting of Judd for her history of nudity is sexist or simply political opportunism (to see that it's one or the other, compare their writing on this topic to their fawning over Republican Scott Brown when it came out that he'd posed naked for Cosmo while in law school.) But either way, it's hard to see what value Taylor Bigler, "Entertainment Editor," thinks there is in writing this story. Unless, of course, Ms. Bigler got caught surfing MrSkin.com at work, and had to come up with a "journalistic" cover story on short notice.

And then there's the Christian bigotry seeping out of Patrick ("Investigative Reporter") Howley's post about how the man who influenced Judd's spirituality is criticized by Christians. Howley isn't able to find anything actually bad about the path of spirituality in question. By all appearances, it's not a cult and they don't hold any particularly irrational beliefs. But he still thinks that publishing a few weak critiques of the spiritual leader by Christian theologians (basically of the "we don't like him because he reads the Bible in a different way than we do" variety) constitutes valid journalism about a potential political candidate. And the Daily Caller, as they put it in their digest email with a link to this story, apparently considers this an "obstacle" to her Senate run. This is the world we live in.

It's nice when the extreme right is this obvious in their attempts to use bigotry to attack those who support worthy causes. The trick, of course, is in noticing it when it's hidden behind a veneer of intelligence and sophistication.