Salem Political Snark

Supreme Court majority acting like politicians, not judges

This week the United States Supreme Court added to its string of outrageous decisions by voting 6-3 to ban affirmative action in college admissions, to prevent the Biden administration from providing student debt relief to those who took out loans, and to allow a Colorado woman to not offer her web site design service to LGBTQ people -- thereby giving religious bigots a license to discriminate.

Previously, of course, the court voted 6-3 to reverse Roe v. Wade, the more than 50-year precedent of abortion rights, a decision that had been upheld in several subsequent decisions by the Supreme Court.

The six justices in the majority on those and other controversial cases are the court's conservative members, while the three justices in the minority are the court's liberal members. That's bad, since Supreme Court decisions are supposed to be based on the Constitution and the law, not politics.

But as Chris Hayes eloquently stated on his All In show on MSNBC today, the court's conservative majority is acting like unelected legislators, because now that they have the power on the court they're choosing to overturn liberal priorities just because they can, not because the law demands it. (The 9-minute video linked above is well worth watching.)

What's especially galling is how the six conservative justices are willing to trash legal principles just so they can force their right-wing agenda on the country. Hayes described this well on his show today.

For example, the Supreme Court is supposed to resolve disputes between two parties, one of whom believes that it has been injured. That's the notion of "standing." You can't file a suit against somebody for no reason. You have to demonstrate standing, that's you've been injured somehow.

But in the case of the woman who didn't want to design a wedding web site for a gay couple, she hasn't even started her web site design business, so obviously she's never been forced by Colorado anti-discrimination law to do this.

The woman is just worried that one day she might have to design a wedding web site for a gay couple. This opens the door to all kinds of frivolous lawsuits from people who are worried that something bad might happen to them in the future -- which makes the judicial system into a future forecasting enterprise, not a means of addressing actual wrongs.

Here's some tweets about the Supreme Court that appealed to me on my Twitter feed today.

Bill Maher wrongly makes fun of Portland schools "wokeness"

I've watched Bill Maher for many years, most recently via his Real Time show on HBO.

Generally I enjoy Maher's blend of political humor and observations, but sometimes his tendency to criticize perceived liberal excesses rubs me the wrong way.

Not because I object to Maher making fun of extreme left-wing stances, which indeed can be deserving of ridicule now and then. Rather, I don't like it when Maher oversimplifies a complex issue just for the sake of making it a more convenient object of scorn on his show.

Yesterday Maher had a bit in his New Rules segment where he featured a headline from a story along with a quotation.

Maher didn't mention that the author of the story was Christopher Rufo. Today the Oregonian had a story about Maher's ridiculing Portland Public Schools for claiming in its elementary school curriculum:

When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here.

The Oregonian story describes Rufo.

Rufo, who lives in Gig Harbor, Washington, is a controversial figure who makes frequent appearances on the Fox News Channel and who, as The New York Times noted, is a conservative activist “who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right -- and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance.”

So in no way is Rufo a scholar of our nation's early history, or a respected commentator on childhood education regarding gender issues. Maher offered a platform to a controversial conservative.

In his story Rufo shares a slide presentation that does look like an authentic product of Portland Public Schools, though whether it was actually used by teachers is another question. I didn't read all 198 slides thoroughly, but I scrolled through the slides looking for the ones that referenced colonization.

Here's screenshots of what I found, along with my comments on the slides.

Discussion of gender as it relates to colonization of our country comes in a 4th and 5th grade section. Thus when Maher combined the title of the story, which mentions kindergarten, with the content of material intended for 4th and 5th graders, that's misleading the viewer.

Maybe I'm excessively woke also, but I don't find much, if anything, to criticize in this slide. I suspect what it says would be endorsed by most reputable scholars of early American history.

I've heard about the notion of Two-Spirit but don't know much about it. Some Googling indicates that gender fluidity indeed was a part of Native American culture. For example, see here. 

This slide also strikes me as being mostly or entirely accurate. 

Here's a video of yesterday's New Rules segment. The Portland mention is at about the 5 minute mark.

Scott Hosner speaks at 2021 Salem Gay Pride event

Last night my wife heard about a mostly unpublicized Gay Pride event in Riverfront Park.

We checked it out this afternoon, taking our canine companion along to mix our support for the LGBTQ community with a park dog walk.

It was a colorful event. I snapped a few photos.

I enjoyed Scott Hosner's seven-minute talk. A video is below. He spoke about how far the gay community has come from his days in high school, when coming out wasn't an option. Now he feels that Salem embraces LGBTQ people.

Near the end of his talk Hosner says that he hopes future Gay Pride events will be public, not private as this one was. It does seem a bit incongruous that a Gay Pride event would be in the shadows, so to speak.

He notes that this was done because of Covid and security concerns, though the get-together was outdoors and it's unlikely that anyone would cause trouble. Here's the video I made.

In a masterful stroke of online shopping, after seeing a Facebook ad for Keen Uneek sandals I ordered the most colorful pair. They came this afternoon, just in time for the Gay Pride event.

In his talk, Hosner mentioned a Gay Pride flag flying over South Salem High School. Yesterday a friend sent me this photo of the flag.