​Jeff Davis County in Texas is almost the size of Delaware. Home to the Davis Mountains, it is a place of stark beauty and small towns.
 
Covering this vast region is The Big Bend Times, “news for the Trans-Pecos,” a website with strong social media reach, amassing 285,000 followers on Facebook. It carries news about local jobs, business openings and closings, economic development, and local feature stories. It currently features a poignant and frightening account from a county politician about how he and his family barely escaped the recent floods in Central Texas.
 
With content like this, it is easy to see why regional public radio and other news outlets often turn to The Big Bend Times and its independent publisher, David Flash, for stories and leads. The Big Bend Times helps many far-flung communities keep up with developments in this vast region, including the public meetings of local officials.
 
Carlos Nogueras Ramos in the Texas Tribune reports on an incident at one such meeting held by Jeff Davis County commissioners on June 27. Flash set up a camera and then moved around the room, taking photos of the commissioners meeting from various angles. He had previously been banned from coming within 300 feet of county officials, employees, and buildings over “claims of harassment and terroristic threats.” Flash denies that he harassed or threatened anyone, unless you count news coverage of public figures as such.
 
In this incident, the sheriff warned Flash that his movements were distracting the commissioners. Ramos reports that after Flash tried to take a photo of a deputy sheriff, she handcuffed and forcibly removed him. Flash was later hit with a charge of “disorderly conduct.”
 
In many ways, Flash’s case is reminiscent of that of another Texas citizen-journalist, Priscilla Villarreal of Laredo, who was arrested for “misuse of official information”’ – reporting police information about a fatal traffic accident. While undergoing the booking process, Villareal reported that she was subjected to jeers and ridicule by the police, many of whom did not consider this citizen-journalist with a Facebook news site to be a “real” journalist.
Officials question whether Flash should also be treated as a journalist. Although he has a journalism degree, Flash’s LinkedIn page shows him serving as the sales and marketing director for a steam cleaning company. But his status as the publisher of a news site should render that question moot.
 
More important than his status as a journalist, however, is Flash’s status as a citizen, freely exercising his rights under the First Amendment. Texas law, like those of most states, allows any citizen to record any open meeting.
 
To be fair, there are signs in Ramos’ account that Flash may have distracted the hearing with his pacing around. Public commissions in Texas do have the right to impose reasonable rules of decorum in hearings. But his treatment was surely an overreaction.
 
So what might one conclude from this case?
 
First, local officials in Texas (and elsewhere) need to do a better job of acquainting themselves with the First Amendment. There is no reason for officeholders to get flustered, panicked, and angry when they are confronted by a journalist. Second, Flash’s management of a news site should dispel any questions about his status as a journalist protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. Third, there is perhaps too much focus on the “journalist” part of “citizen-journalist.”
 
You have the right to ask your public officials questions, and to memorialize their public meetings with a camera, whether you consider yourself a member of the press or not.
 
Perhaps the most important part of the moniker “citizen-journalist” is “citizen.”

In recent years, we’ve chronicled the rising tide of states – 18 now, with recent legislative victories in Texas and New Hampshire – that have embraced universal school choice.

But what about parents who live the other 32 states? Thanks to decisive action in Congress (yes, you read that correctly), the ability of parents to choose high-quality private schools, whether religiously based schools, STEM-oriented or arts-centered, will gradually increase.

Congress – with the leadership of Rep. Adrian Smith, chairman of the subcommittee of jurisdiction on Ways & Means in the House, and Sen. Bill Cassidy in the Senate – passed the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA) just before the July 4th holiday. This bill made available a 100-percent federal income tax credit of $1,700 for donors. This credit is available to donors in all 50 states to support scholarship-granting organizations that allow parents to send their children to a high-quality private school.

There are several aspects of this new law that will transform the American educational landscape from the national level, as governors are doing in the states.

• This tax credit is permanent. It would take a future act of Congress to undo it, something that once granted would be politically difficult to achieve.

 

• It will only take future amendments to the law to increase the tax credit and to broaden the base of donors to include businesses and other well-resourced groups.

 

• The law does limit scholarships to students who live in states in which the governor or designated agency under state law decides to opt-in to the program. But nothing keeps donors living in an “opt-out” state from donating to scholarship organizations around the country.

 

• Even in states in which politicians have been hostile to school choice it will be difficult for governors to turn down free money from the federal government to support private schools options in-state.

We again quote a recent Chicago Tribune editorial, where politicians have long been resistant to competition in education:

“Opponents of school choice believe that education is a zero-sum game, and that private schools are a threat to the public system. We believe the opposite – that a thriving private and charter system and a strong traditional public system create an educational ecosystem that can serve everyone’s needs. There are things private schools can do that public ones can’t, and the same is very much true in reverse.

“School choice remains popular in Illinois, with a clear majority of residents supporting the concept.”

With polls showing overwhelming support for school choice among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, expect to see intense pressure from parents to allow these scholarships in every state.

Another big win came with the passage and signing into law of the Student Empowerment Act, which expands 529 plans – a tax-advantaged investment account designed to encourage saving for future education expenses, such as college or K-12 tuition – to help families save for public, private, religious, and homeschool students and families.

• This bill – passed with the leadership of Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Kevin Hern – will allow parents to transfer any unused funds in a 529 account from leftover college expenses to, for example, the private religious elementary school of grandchildren.

These two measures, coupled with the rising tide of states that have embraced universal school choice, show that the school choice movement – and its support for First Amendment values – is not only here to stay, but to grow as well.

• Both the ECCA and the Student Empowerment Act give religious schools the same access to these programs as any other kind of private school.

​
With victories in the states and in Washington D.C., the national success of the school choice movement now appears to only be a matter of time.

A lawsuit filed by the National Religious Broadcasters and two Texas churches resulted in a ruling last week from the IRS in a joint motion that lifts a long-standing ban on religious leaders discussing political issues before their congregations. The new rule even allows pastors, priests, rabbis and imams to explicitly endorse candidates from the pulpit.

Overall, Protect The 1st welcomes any liberation of Americans’ right to speak from IRS regulation. Remember that little phrase in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law”? We would welcome it if this new rule opened a larger debate about the regulation of speech through the tax code.

But first, there will be much to clarify about this rule that reduces the reach of the 1954 Johnson Amendment ban on political speeches in churches. This law was authored by Sen. Lyndon Johnson, who was smarting from conservative opposition from Texas churches to his re-election. The IRS now holds:

“When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith, it neither ‘participate[s]’ nor ‘intervene[s]’ in a ‘political campaign,’ within the ordinary meaning of those words. To ‘participate’ in a political campaign is ‘to take part’ in the political campaign, and to ‘intervene’ in a political campaign is ‘to interfere with the outcome or course’ of the political campaign.

“Bona fide communications internal to a house of worship, between the house of worship and its congregation, in connection with religious services, do neither of those things, any more than does a family discussion concerning candidates. Thus, communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted.”

Religious leaders can thus endorse a candidate without any requirement to give an opposing candidate equal time. The clause concerning “customary channels in communications on matters of faith” includes church bulletins and other religious materials. Presumably, this also includes the websites of houses of worship, though this was not made clear.

There are, however, open questions in this new IRS policy. Among them are:

• Many worship services are live-streamed or broadcast. Lakewood Church in Houston, for example, draws 10 million viewers a week. Will the IRS make a further distinction between endorsements to congregants during an in-person service and streamed or televised events? What if some services start to look more like campaign rallies than a “family discussion”?

 

• The IRS ruling does not include non-religious non-profits. Will the Trump Administration take the next step and broaden restraints on the speech of these nonprofits?

 

• Why should the IRS stop with this one ruling? Why should the charitable 501(c) 3 version of, say, the Sierra Club or a gun rights organization be restricted in its right to speak on political issues, reserving those rights only for its “C-4” version? Is it equitable to give houses of worship speech rights typically associated with a C-4, but not a charity, nonprofit NGO or academic organization?

 

• The IRS ruling echoes language from the Johnson Amendment about “interference” in political campaigns. While it is understandable that the IRS would directly address the statutory definition of that law, the conflation of speech and political participation with “interference” is unfortunate. This is an inappropriate term for the free exercise of the most basic rights in the U.S. Constitution. 

​
This new rule should be welcome by all free speech advocates. But its most salutary effect may be to spark a larger debate about the whole system of speech regulation through the tax code.

Päivi Maria Räsänen is the former Minister of the Interior of Finland, former chairwoman of the Christian Democrat Party, and in perennial danger of being sent to prison in her country because she dares to espouse traditional views about sexuality and abortion.
 
You might agree with Räsänen or loathe her views, but if she were an American, the First Amendment would afford her absolute protection from state prosecutors who want to imprison her for “hate speech.” And yet she remains in danger of going to prison in Finland for calmly and politely espousing traditional Biblically based views. She has long been a target for prosecution under Finnish law, which five U.S. senators in 2022 called a “secular blasphemy law” because it targets Orthodox Jews and Muslims, as well as traditional Christians.
 
So far, you might be thinking, okay, that’s a bad precedent for free speech in Northern Europe. Now what’s on Netflix tonight?
 
But you should care. You might not be all that invested in opposing the speech censorship regime in Europe, but that censorship regime is now preparing to try to regulate your speech here in the United States.
 
This is happening because at the start of this month, the European Union’s Digital Services Act’s (DSA) voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation transformed into an actual law that stamps out disapproved state speech. The threat this law, designed to “protect democracy” and promote “safety,” poses to speech in America was laid out by Thomas O’Reilly in National Review. He sets out Europe’s new requirements and their consequences that should concern any speech-loving American, regardless of your beliefs.
 

• Large social media platforms are required to remove ill-defined “illegal content” that is out of compliance not only with the regulations of Brussels, but also the laws of member states. This could be tricky. In Finland, making a traditional religious criticism of same-sex relations can be treated as a crime. In Hungary, the government tried to outlaw a peaceful LGBTQ march. Speech in Europe might easily become a game of Twister.

 

• In a move reminiscent of the now defunct system of Facebook “fact-checkers,” European speech will be subject to the approval of what O’Reilly describes as “EU-approved nongovernmental organizations and ‘trusted flaggers,’ which will identify content for removal.”

 

• Platforms that fail to remove content quickly enough will be subject to fines of up to 6 percent of global revenues. Even for a Big Tech social media company – most of which are U.S. companies – enough such fines could result in a financial death penalty. Why should Europe be able to fine the global revenues of American companies?

O’Reilly writes:

• “Alarmingly, the DSA does not matter for freedom of expression just in Europe – it threatens to censor the speech of Americans, too. There is the possibility that platforms will set their global content-moderation policies to EU standards, which would regulate online speech across the whole world in line with the regulation. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation exported EU data privacy standards worldwide and, in a similar way, the Digital Services Act could impose European speech controls beyond the continent.”

O’Reilly adds that the extraterritorial impact of the DSA “is that it applies to any platform accessed within the EU, regardless of where it is based. Online American speech could be geo-blocked within the EU if it is judged to be ‘disinformation’ or ‘hateful’ …”

• Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the European Commission in January noting that “because many social media platforms generally maintain one set of content moderation policies that they apply globally, restrictive censorship laws like the DSA may set de facto global censorship standards … Indeed, the establishment of a global censorship law appears to be the DSA’s very purpose.”

​
If this strikes you as science-fiction, consider the action of a high European Union official Thierry Breton, who last year threatened social media company X with severe legal consequences if it did not pull down a post. And what was the offending post? It was Elon Musk’s interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
 
Whatever your views about Donald Trump, it was a mind-blowing act of censorship to try to use state power to “protect” Europeans from an interview with a man who was a major party nominee in the United States and at the threshold of the presidency. That is representative of the hall of mirrors that European law has become, in which consumers are protected from exposure to world leaders and traditional views held by the Pope… all coming soon, to the American social media platform app in the digital device in your hand.

The Federalist Society’s recent Freedom of Thought Conference featured a panel on varied conservative perspectives about censorship in the digital age, with both the more liberal and more populist conservative panelists congenial to greater control over speech. This left it up to Protect The 1st Policy Director Erik Jaffe to make “an old school textualist” defense of robust First Amendment protection of free speech, regardless of the technology or medium. While others called for more government control of algorithms, Jaffe expressed deep wariness of expanding government influence over speech-related technologies.
 
Stanford’s Jud Campbell emphasized the Founders’ views of speech as tied not only to natural law, but also to “the public good.” Jaffe challenged the notion of a general public-good exception to the First Amendment, and contended that the constitutional text, not original applications or anticipated outcomes, must govern today. He warned that interpreting rights based on past state practices or public morality risks “gutting the First Amendment.”
 
The panel debate became animated over the nature of algorithms and how much responsibility their designers have for their results. Jaffe argued these software codes, and the rules they apply when promoting content, are “not anything different [from traditional speech and editorial judgments] except in speed.” They are fundamentally tools that execute human editorial choices, and the constitutional rules limiting or imposing liability for those choices should be the same whether the choices are executed in digital or analog form.
 
John Ehrett, Chief of Staff and Attorney Advisor to FTC Commissioner Mark Meador, pointed to companies’ conflicting legal positions, which call algorithms black boxes in liability cases, yet editorial speech when they make First Amendment defenses. “I don’t see how you can have this both ways,” Ehrett said. Jaffe saw no dichotomy – when a social media company designs an algorithm to treat speech in a certain way, that company is simply “making an editorial choice.” While a particular individual may not be able to follow the interaction of various rules for each and every choice, he observed that algorithm-driven programs are no more of a black box than the human brain.
 
Jaffe was equally blunt in opposing the idea that platforms like Facebook or TikTok constitute the “modern public square.” He argued that attempts to treat private companies as public utilities are “always abused” and rejected the premise that when platforms reach a certain degree of popularity, they become public property. “If you want to make a platform a ‘public’ space, go take it under the takings clause,” he said. “Pay the billions of dollars and run it yourself.”
 
On Section 230, there was some agreement that reform is possible, but Jaffe was alone in emphasizing the practical risk of overcorrection. He warned that removing liability protections could lead platforms to suppress lawful content out of fear: “Everybody and their mother starts suing Facebook,” he said. “Facebook starts saying, ‘well, sorry, none of you can speak on our platform now.’”
 
The panel also addressed the growing concern over government efforts to influence content moderation by private platforms, a practice often described as “jawboning.”
 
Jaffe concluded this is a threat that is not receding, just taking new political forms. “The Biden administration was more subtle about the threats,” he said. “The current administration is not subtle at all … they’re beating people to death with the jawbone of an ass.”
 
Jaffe said claims that behind-the-scenes pressure effectively turns private companies into government agents raises serious constitutional concerns. This practice also creates troubling interactions with the so-called government-speech doctrine, which can wrongly insulate heavy-handed government censorship from First Amendment scrutiny. While panelists generally agreed that coercion is troubling, Jaffe went further, calling for enforceable remedies. He endorsed legislative proposals to allow lawsuits – called Bivens claims and §1983-like actions – against federal officials who violate the First Amendment by pressuring platforms to suppress speech.
 
Jaffe closed with a warning against paternalism. While some panelists called for new legislative frameworks to balance expression with social harms, Jaffe pushed back hard. “The First Amendment has an assumption underlying it that people are not sheep,” he said. “The danger of treating them like sheep is too great.”
 
Watch the full panel here: 

​When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Kari MacRae, a Massachusetts teacher fired over social media posts made before she was hired, Justice Clarence Thomas took to his pen. He issued a scorching rebuke of lower courts, particularly the First Circuit, calling them out for botching the application the First Amendment in public employee speech cases.
 
“This case is the latest in a trend of lower court decisions that have misapplied our First Amendment precedents in cases involving controversial political speech,” Thomas wrote, warning that if left unchecked, government employers will increasingly restrict “disfavored or unpopular speech in the name of preventing disruption.”
 
Thomas didn’t dissent from the Court’s decision to deny certiorari, recognizing that this case may not have been the best vehicle to revisit the legal test known as the Pickering-Garcetti framework. Under that standard, public employees have First Amendment protection when speaking as private citizens on matters of public concern, unless their speech unduly disrupts the government’s ability to function as an employer. But as Thomas emphasized, that balance cannot be twisted to give the government a free pass to punish speech it merely dislikes, especially when expressed outside the workplace and before employment even begins.
 
“It undermines core First Amendment values to allow a government employer to adopt an institutional viewpoint on the issues of the day and then, when faced with a dissenting employee, portray this disagreement as evidence of disruption,” Thomas wrote. He found the First Circuit’s reasoning “deeply flawed” for dismissing MacRae’s speech because of its supposedly “mocking, derogatory, and disparaging manner.”
 
Quoting Snyder v. Phelps, Thomas reminded his colleagues that “speech on matters of public concern is at the heart of the First Amendment’s protection.” If the Supreme Court could protect vile funeral protests by the Westboro Baptist Church, “I do not see how the First Circuit could discount the First Amendment value of MacRae’s comparatively mild posts.”
 
MacRae’s memes, which included critiques of gender ideology and calls for colorblind policies, may have been controversial to some. They also reflected positions shared by a substantial portion of the public. For the First Circuit to reduce the weight of her First Amendment interest based on tone, or to treat pre-employment political speech as grounds for termination, sets a dangerous precedent.
 
The Court may have passed on this case, but Thomas’s warning is clear: Without a course correction, the First Amendment rights of millions of government employees and future applicants will hang by a thread.

Should the Roman Catholic sacrament of confession be turned into a form of law enforcement surveillance?
 
That is exactly what a new Washington State law does, requiring Roman Catholic priests to report any knowledge of child abuse that emerges during confession.
 
The author of this law, state Sen. Noel Frame, said she could not “stomach any argument about religious freedom being more important than preventing … abuse,” that it was “traumatizing to have colleagues … tell me to my face that religious freedom is more important than protecting children,” and “you never put somebody’s conscience above the protection of a child.”
 
An eloquent brief before a federal court in Tacoma, Washington, from Catholic bishops makes both a passionate and practical case demonstrating why Sen. Frame’s argument and this new law is wrong-headed. It harms both the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion while taking away the prime means the Church has of disciplining and stopping child abusers.
 
As a law intended to protect children, it scores an own goal. Here are a few choice excerpts from the bishops’ brief.
 
The Washington State law presents priests with a “Hobson’s choice” between eternal damnation and criminal prosecution.
 
“A priest who directly violates the sacramental seal incurs a latae sententiae excommunication – i.e., automatic excommunication – thereby risking eternal damnation. Accordingly, the historical record is replete with examples of Catholic priests choosing death as martyrs rather than succumbing to government demands that they violate the sacramental seal.”
 
It overturns a principle recognized in American law for more than 200 years.
 
The new law “runs directly counter to longstanding caselaw recognizing the confessional seal as part of the Catholic Church’s autonomy protected by the First Amendment. For example, in People v. Philips, one of the earliest-known religious freedom cases in the United States, the Court of General Sessions of New York City refused to force a Catholic priest to testify in a criminal case about what he heard in the Sacrament of Confession …
 
“As that court observed, ‘The sinner will not confess, nor will the priest receive his confession, if the veil of secrecy is removed.’”
 
The new law violates the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by replacing church governance with government regulation.
 
“The Sacrament of Confession and the meting out of penance is one of the means by which the Catholic Church disciplines its members. By requiring that Catholic priests disclose what they hear in confession, Washington is directly intruding upon, and chilling, that form of discipline.”
 
It singles out priests while exempting lawyers, law school clinics, and others.
 
In addition to lawyers, the new law exempts parents, domestic partners, and family members. It simply targets priests.
 
Above all, the new law will hurt, not help, the reporting of child abuse and rescue of children from dangerous situations.
 
“Moreover, when the priests in each diocese, including all Plaintiffs, hear confessions involving sins of child abuse or neglect, they could counsel the penitent to self-report and obtain the necessary temporal intervention and help.
 
“And priests in each diocese, including all Plaintiffs, who suspect based on what is disclosed during confession that the penitent is suffering from abuse or neglect, the penitent has engaged in abuse or neglect, or some third party has engaged in abuse or neglect, could invite the penitent for counseling outside of the Sacrament of Confession and, if the penitent agrees to that counsel, the priest must report any information learned in that counseling session required to be reported by diocesan policies …”
 
When the law requires priests to report child abusers to the police, no child abuser will confess. And without a confession, no priest can impose discipline by requiring the penitent to go to counseling and to turn himself into the police. It is the Washington State law that removes those tools to protect children that should make one sick to the stomach.

Protect The 1st applauded the Senate’s passage of landmark school choice legislation with tax credits as part of the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
 
“A seemingly small provision in the budget reconciliation bill passed by the Senate will uplift American school children and promote the future health of our nation,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Senior Policy Advisor for Protect The 1st. “With support from the House, for the first time in American history the right of parents to choose the best school for their children will be supported by a federal tax credit.
 
“This day is a great achievement by Sen. Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Finance Chairman Mike Crapo, supported by the longtime leadership of Sen. Bill Cassidy and Sen. Tim Scott,” Goodlatte said. “Their leadership, along with Sen. Ted Cruz, made the day.”
 
Gene Schaerr, Protect The 1st general counsel, said: “The measure is the mustard seed that is sure to grow into a sheltering tree. With 19 states having passed some form of universal school choice, this national bill will facilitate private school scholarships that will elevate the lives of American students and their families for decades to come.
 
“These scholarships will allow children from low-income households to have access to quality education previously reserved for well-to-do families,” Schaerr said. “And it will allow families to exercise their First Amendment rights by selecting the quality religious or secular school of their choice.”
 
Goodlatte added: “The House, having passed this once, now has the happy duty of advancing the measure in its current form and getting it to President Trump’s desk.”

​When Arizona’s Proposition 211 forced the disclosure of nonprofit donors, it trampled on a bedrock principle of American liberty: the right to speak, associate, and advocate without government surveillance or coercion. The Buckeye Institute, an Ohio-based think tank focused on free-market policy and constitutional liberties, is now urging the Arizona Supreme Court in a powerful amicus brief to strike down this law as a threat to free association and free speech under both the U.S. and Arizona constitutions.
 
The Buckeye brief echoes concerns we’ve raised before: public disclosure of nonprofit donors invites harassment, threats, and even violence. Buckeye’s evidence isn’t abstract. It includes firebombings of offices, armed raids, and death threats, all targeting people for their beliefs or the organizations they support.
 
Technology only worsens the problem. With a few clicks, bad actors can compile and weaponize personal data against donors, publishing maps to their homes, attacking their families online, or pressuring employers into firing them. Witness the recent murder of a pro-choice state legislator and her husband in their Minnesota home. The Buckeye brief cites doxing sites targeting Tesla owners, threats against donors to Canadian truckers’ protests, and the public outing of supporters of one California proposition who lost jobs and faced violence.
 
Buckeye itself became a target after opposing Medicaid expansion in Ohio. The IRS, already embroiled in a scandal over political targeting, launched a field audit shortly after Buckeye’s advocacy succeeded. Donors, fearing retaliation, began giving anonymously or stopped donating altogether.
 
The Buckeye brief also includes historical notes, touching on “Publius, Cato, and Common Sense … just three of dozens of pseudonyms the Founding Fathers used to communicate and publish during the Revolutionary War.”
 
“The Founders’ ability to organize, associate, and speak anonymously was fundamental to the public acceptance and ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and likely remained at the forefront of their minds when drafting the First Amendment,” Buckeye declares. It quotes a constitutional scholar: “The bottom line is that it is highly probable that the United States would not exist without anonymous speech.”
 
Yet a lower court “suggests that organizations must all but endure a serious act of violence before availing themselves of judicial intervention.” Buckeye rightly argues that Proposition 211 is not only dangerous but unconstitutional at the state level. Arizona's Constitution provides even stronger protections for free speech and association than the First Amendment. And since Alabama v. NAACP, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that donor disclosure chills protected speech and deters lawful participation in civic life, especially when governments collect this information without a narrowly tailored need.
 
The Arizona Court of Appeals wrongly dismissed these dangers as speculative. But Buckeye’s brief to that state’s Supreme Court leaves no doubt – violence and harassment are real, widespread, and predictable. A government should not wait for a tragedy before upholding Americans’ constitutional rights.

​They knew it when they saw it. In a 6-3 opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton that a Texas “age-gate” law restricting porn sites to adults is constitutional. Civil libertarians are sure to hotly debate whether there are principles here that will be applicable to any other First Amendment cases outside of the regulation of pornography.
 
The Court held that the Texas law, which requires adults to upload documentary proof of their age online before visiting a porn site, has only an “incidental effect on protected speech.” The Court found:
 
“The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective. That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech. It follows that no person – adult or child – has a First Amendment right to access such speech without first submitting proof of age.”
 
Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting, wrote:
 
“Speech that is obscene for minors is often not so for adults. For them, the category of obscene – and therefore unprotected speech – is narrower … So adults have a constitutional right to view the very same speech that a State may prohibit for children. And it is a fact of life – and also of law – that adults and children do not live in hermetically sealed boxes. In preventing children from gaining access to ‘obscene for children’ speech, States sometimes take measures impeding adults from viewing it too – even though, for adults, it is constitutionally protected expression.”
 
State legislators in future debates are sure to analyze and discuss the Court’s decision. Many will see a precedent that could require similar ID checks to visit websites that are not pornographic, but also inappropriate for children – such as downloading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Are such adults-only age-gates truly “incidental,” or are they so cumbersome as to amount to a serious restriction on speech?
 
Others will say that Court’s ruling is actually a modest recognition of the right of the states to reasonably protect children from the internet’s torrent of full-motion, high resolution pornography.
 
Sex. Porn. Age. Free Speech. This one has all the vibrant and racy elements for a debate that itself promises to exercise the First Amendment to the fullest.

​Political speech in New York may soon come with strings attached. A new bill introduced by State Sen. Patricia Fahy would force independent expenditure groups to plaster the names of their top donors across political ads, mailers, robocalls, and digital messages. What proponents call “transparency” is, in truth, a direct threat to donor privacy and a likely violation of the First Amendment.
 
Fahy’s legislation would compel any group making independent expenditures to list its top three donors, those who have given more than $1,000 in the past year, on every public communication. It would also require the campaign treasurer’s name and a link to disclosure filings with the State Board of Elections. While these groups already report donor information to the state, this bill would take it one step further by forcing the disclosure directly into the content of an ad.
 
Fahy claims this is about accountability, pointing to outside groups spending millions on state and local races. She argues voters deserve to know who is behind the messages they receive. But the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that forcing groups to reveal their donors, especially in public-facing messages, poses a serious risk to First Amendment freedoms.
 
In Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021), the Court ruled that California’s demand for donor lists, even for internal regulatory use, was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts called such compelled disclosure a “restraint on freedom of association,” citing the Court’s landmark 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama. That case protected civil rights donors from being exposed to violent reprisals.
 
We have seen what happens when donor identities become political weapons. After California forced disclosure of supporters of Proposition 8, donors were doxed, threatened, and harassed. Some received envelopes of white powder. Others saw their personal information mapped online. The chilling effect was unmistakable.
 
New York City already mandates direct donor disclosure on independent expenditures (IE) in local races. Under rules enforced by the NYC Campaign Finance Board, IE ads must list the spender’s principal officer and their top three donors, along with a link to the CFB’s disclosure site. But this local law should serve as a warning, not as a model. Expanding this flawed policy statewide invites litigation and fails the Supreme Court’s exacting scrutiny standard.
 
The Constitution does not bend to political convenience. While regulators may seek clarity in campaign finance, they must do so within constitutional bounds. Sen. Fahy’s bill fails that test. It treats compelled speech as harmless and public exposure as inconsequential. It ignores the real dangers that come with making people’s political beliefs a matter of public record.

​The U.S. Supreme Court has once again stepped in to remind the State of New York – and any state tempted to do likewise – that religious liberty is not a favor dispensed by bureaucrats but a constitutional guarantee. On June 17, the Court ordered New York courts to take another look at Diocese of Albany v. Harris, a case in which religious organizations are challenging a state mandate requiring employers to provide abortion coverage in their health insurance plans.
 
The plaintiffs include Catholic dioceses, Anglican and Baptist ministries, and faith-based social service providers like the Carmelite Sisters, who run nursing homes, and the Sisterhood of St. Mary, a contemplative Anglican order. Their objection is simple: They believe life begins at conception, and they refuse to be complicit in taking it. New York has bizarrely decided that this belief – shared by millions – is not worthy of respect if such a religious group is also willing to serve the public without religious discrimination.
 
When New York first proposed the abortion coverage rule, it included a broad exemption for religious objectors. But under pressure from abortion-rights activists, the exemption was narrowed to cover only those that teach religion and serve only those who share their faith. This would leave out virtually every real-world religious charitable ministry. As Lori Windham, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, noted, not even Jesus or Mother Teresa would qualify under New York's miserly exception for religious freedom.
 
The case is part of a broader legal conflict that traces back to the contraceptive mandate imposed under the Affordable Care Act. Religious groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor, who serve the elderly poor, spent a decade in court fighting the federal government over being forced to cover contraceptives and abortifacients. The Supreme Court repeatedly sided with them. But New York has pushed even further, mandating coverage for surgical abortions and setting up a restrictive exception for religious associations, denying the religious legitimacy of ministries that serve people of other faiths.
 
The Supreme Court already told New York to reconsider this case once – instructing state courts to account for its ruling in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which held that governments cannot condition public benefits on abandoning religious beliefs. But the New York Court of Appeals upheld the mandate again this May. That refusal led to another trip to the Supreme Court and another remand back down to try again.
 
A new pivot point is the Court’s unanimous June 5 decision in Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission. In that case, Wisconsin denied Catholic Charities a religious exemption from unemployment insurance rules, arguing that serving the poor wasn't inherently religious. The Court rejected this reasoning emphatically. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that such theological judgment by the government is “a textbook violation” of both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.
 
With that decision in hand, the Supreme Court sent the Diocese of Albany case back to New York, making clear that religious groups don’t need to prove that their service is “religious enough” to be protected. If a ministry’s charitable work is rooted in its religious beliefs, it cannot be penalized for refusing to uncharitably limit its charity to its co-religionists. New York, for its part, has already conceded that its abortion coverage scheme cannot stand under the new precedent.
 
This is a victory not just for the nuns and ministries involved, but for anyone who believes that religious liberty does not vanish when faith communities choose to serve the public. The First Amendment does not allow states to punish religious conviction by substituting their own standards for religiosity or demand a cramped notion of religious charity.
 
Meanwhile, another case on the Supreme Court’s docket – Mahmoud v. Taylor – could further define the constitutional boundaries of religious liberty in public education. A decision is expected as early as this Thursday.
 
All eyes on Mahmoud.

​Recent live news television in Los Angeles, a tradition going back to O.J. Simpson and his white Bronco, could have been clips recycled from Escape from LA.
 
Mass protests erupted after aggressive federal immigration raids, followed by the deployment of U.S. troops on city streets. Demonstrators rallied outside detention centers, federal buildings, and City Hall, waving signs and chanting against what they saw as an authoritarian crackdown. Some protesters blocked highways and staged sit-ins. Others vandalized and set fire to multiple Waymo self‑driving cars – at least five vehicles were torched, making movie-effects-worthy explosions when their lithium batteries detonated. Storefronts in the downtown core were also smashed. The unrest, spreading to cities across the country, has reignited fierce debate – not just over immigration, but over the boundaries of lawful protest and the government's willingness to respect or suppress it.
 
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a recent televised address, framed the crisis in constitutional terms: “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes – the moment we’ve feared has arrived.” He accused President Trump of seeking escalation: “He’s delegitimizing news organizations and assaulting the First Amendment.” Gov. Newsom warned that the use of military force against demonstrators risks criminalizing dissent.
 
President Trump, speaking at Fort Bragg the same day, countered that the protests were orchestrated by hostile actors. He said they were “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion,” and accused California officials of hiring “troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists” to “nullify federal law and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders.”
 
Both leaders are responding to real dangers, but neither is addressing the whole picture. Newsom is right to warn against federal overreach, but he overstates the case when he frames all protest activity as protected expression. The First Amendment is not a shield for lawlessness. When protesters torch Waymo cars or threaten businesses, they’re not engaging in political speech. They’re committing crimes. Likewise, when a man in Minnesota assassinates a Democratic politician and her husband, that’s not protest. It’s murder and terrorism. These acts deserve prosecution, and not even the suggestion of a constitutional defense.
 
President Trump’s reaction presents a danger from the opposite direction. To conflate the criminal acts of a few with the constitutionally protected assembly of millions is to delegitimize democratic participation. People wave Mexican flags at immigration protests to express heritage and critique policy. That strikes many, including millions of U.S. citizens of Latino descent, as an inappropriate and offensive way to stand up for the rights of people to immigrate to the United States. But being offended is not a legal standard. Protest is not a crime because it challenges power or offends sensibilities.
 
The rule of law is simple: We don’t treat protests differently based on its viewpoint. Speech that supports Palestine or criticizes Israel, that calls Trump’s immigration policy “fascist” or Biden’s border policy a political ploy, are all protected. The First Amendment doesn’t take sides. It protects expression as long as it doesn’t cross into violence or incitement.
 
Governments may regulate protest through time, place, and manner restrictions. But those rules have to be content-neutral, narrowly tailored, and leave open alternative ways to speak. That’s the test from Ward v. Rock Against Racism (1989). The problem in that case wasn’t when or where people were protesting. It was what they were protesting about. “The regulation thus slips from the neutrality of time, place, and circumstance into a concern about content,” Justice Marshall wrote in an earlier case. “This is never permitted.”
 
That principle matters more in moments of unrest than in moments of calm. When public officials want to silence dissent “for public safety,” we must scrutinize their motives. Are they protecting the peace, or silencing those who offend them?
 
We can walk and chew gum and we can denounce criminal violence and defend peaceful protest. We can prosecute arson and still protect the unpopular protester holding a sign. That’s the American way. Democracy can feel like a loud family dinner. Everyone’s talking. Some people shout. Someone says something stupid or hurtful. But the worst thing we can do is flip the table. Our strength comes from staying in the room – arguing, disagreeing, even offending each other – and still believing in the right of everyone to be heard.

A new Club for Growth-sponsored poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates confirms what other polls have shown – that supermajorities of Americans in both parties support school choice.
 
McLaughlin’s findings, resulting from a survey of 1,000 likely voters taken between June 9-11, show that 82 percent of voters agree that “every parent in America should be empowered to send their child to the public, private, charter, or faith-based school of their choice.”
 
And while that sentiment is somewhat higher among Republicans at 87 percent, some 79 percent of Democrats and Independents agree.
 
Likewise, strong majorities support the principles of the Educational Choice for Children Act, which recently passed the House and is now before the Senate Finance Committee. Seventy-three percent of both Republicans and Democrats back “providing federal tax credits to individuals and businesses that make charitable contributions to non-profit education scholarship funds that provide financial assistance to K-12 students for tuition and other educational expenses.”
 
The McLaughlin poll is at least the third of its kind in recent years to verify that around or above two-thirds of voters support school choice. A 2022 poll from the American Federation for Children found the same – as did another from RealClear Opinion Research.
 
What explains such high levels of support for school choice, especially given the polarization of Americans on so many other issues? Parents are fed up with the failures of the American public school system. A full 50 percent of McLaughlin respondents (parents with children in K-12) said that they have moved or have considered moving their child to a different school. And nearly three-quarters (72 percent) said that they would be likely to send their child to a non-public or church-run educational institution if afforded the opportunity.
 
Politically speaking, school choice is a winning issue – one that goes to the heart of the First Amendment. There is no greater expression of First Amendment values than how a parent chooses to educate their child. And, increasingly, it’s looking like more and more parents will be able to make that choice.
 
New Hampshire recently became the latest state to offer universal private school choice, the 19th state to do so. Which state will be next? And when will Democratic governors and state legislators begin to embrace an issue that is overwhelmingly popular with Democratic voters?

The Senate Finance Committee just released its text for the budget reconciliation bill, a.k.a. the One, Big, Beautiful Bill. The text (see p. 168) builds upon the provisions the House passed a few weeks ago for a national federal scholarship, the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).

The Senate language creates $4 billion a year in permanent tax credits that grant 100 percent, non-refundable credits against individual income taxes for donations to qualified scholarship granting organizations. These scholarships would be available for student families to pay for private-school tuition, books, and teaching materials for home schooling expenses, and educational therapies for children with disabilities.

“Credit goes to all the energetic supporters of this bill in the Senate Finance Committee, including Finance Chairman Mike Crapo and the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Bill Cassidy and Sen. Tim Scott,” said Bob Goodlatte, Senior Policy Advisor to Protect The 1st and former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “Of course, the Senate and the House will need to work out a few differences. Then the way should be clear to get it to the president’s desk.
​
“Those who support this bill will be aligning themselves with the supermajorities of Americans of both parties who want families to have options in the quality and character of their children’s education,” Goodlatte said. “Abundant evidence shows that competition in education is proven to improve the quality of public schools, and it is certainly in the best interests of America’s schoolchildren.”

​The Babylon Bee has a knack for predicting the future. In 2021, they joked that Kamala Harris was taking likability lessons from Hillary Clinton – weeks before reports confirmed Clinton allies were advising Harris’s team. They parodied Trump claiming to have done more for Christianity than Jesus, and two years later, he said nearly the same thing. They mocked economic spin with “9 Reasons Not to Worry About the Tanking Economy” – just before The Washington Post published “7 Ways a Recession Could Be Good for You Financially.”
 
What is their latest prophecy come true? Hawaii just made it a crime to joke about politicians online.
 
In July 2024, Gov. Josh Green signed Senate Bill 2687 into law. It criminalizes online content – particularly satire and parody – that could be considered “materially deceptive” and harmful to a candidate’s reputation or campaign. The law mandates disclaimers on satirical posts and threatens violators with fines and jail time.
 
Alliance Defending Freedom, representing The Babylon Bee and Hawaii resident Dawn O’Brien, is challenging the law in federal court. ADF attorney Mathew Hoffmann called it “censorship, pure and simple,” and warned that satire is among the most protected forms of speech under the First Amendment.
 
“We’re used to getting pulled over by the joke police, but comedy isn’t a crime,” said Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon. “We’ll never stop fighting to defend that freedom.”
 

• O’Brien, who says the law stifles her ability to share political humor, explained: “‘Hawai’i’ and ‘Aloha’ are both rooted in ‘ha’ – the breath of life. No ‘ha’ means no aloha and no Hawai’i. Our lawmakers are trying to steal inalienable rights from our ‘ohana’ [friends].”

 
The Hawaii Office of the Public Defender warned that the bill would chill free speech. The Motion Picture Association requested an exemption for parody and satire. Despite these objections, the legislature passed it nearly unanimously.
 
While this might sound like a one-off overreach, the path Hawaii is treading is familiar—and dangerous.
 

• In Germany, people are criminally prosecuted for memes, fake quotes, or insulting politicians. Authorities call it protecting democracy; in reality, it stifles dissent. That’s what laws like S.B. 2687 do. They weaponize vague language to intimidate people into silence. If the government decides what counts as a joke or what harms a candidate’s image, it holds veto power over speech itself.

 
The First Amendment protects offensive jokes, political parody, and even biting satire – not because they’re always tasteful, but because they keep power in check.
 
This case is about far more than internet humor. It’s about the freedom to criticize, to joke, and to laugh at those in charge. If this law stands, it won’t stop at memes. It’ll spread. And the joke will be on us.

​Is teaching yoga on the beach a protected First Amendment activity? Yes, according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed a lower court’s ruling and found that banning group yoga classes on the beach was an unconstitutional restriction on protected speech.
 
This case centered on Steven Hubbard and Amy Baack, yoga instructors who teach free classes in San Diego's shoreline parks. A 2024 city ordinance banned “teaching yoga” to groups of four or more in these parks, labeling it a prohibited “service” and excluding it from the city’s definition of “expressive activity.” This targeted restriction meant that yoga classes – even donation-based ones – were criminalized on the beach, while other forms of teaching or performance were permitted.
 
The Ninth Circuit firmly disagreed with the city’s claim that yoga instruction wasn’t expressive. The court recognized that yoga classes often involve the communication of philosophy and spiritual practice. As Buddha said, it is one way through which “peace comes from within.” The Ninth ruled: “A person who teaches yoga is communicating and disseminating information about this philosophy and practice through speech and expressive movements.”
 
The court found San Diego’s ordinance was “not content neutral” and therefore “presumptively unconstitutional.” Judge Holly Thomas wrote: “The Ordinance defines regulated speech by particular subject matter, drawing distinctions based on the message a speaker conveys.” That’s the very definition of a content-based restriction that must face strict scrutiny.
 
The city failed that test. It offered no credible reason why yoga posed a special threat to public safety or enjoyment. “The City has provided no explanation as to how teaching yoga would lead to harmful consequences,” the court stated, adding that “the Ordinance fails as hopelessly underinclusive” since it allows many similar group activities, from tai chi practitioners to actors performing Shakespeare.
 
The ruling is a reminder that expressive conduct isn’t limited to marches or speeches. It includes shared mindfulness, physical conditioning, and philosophical reflection – even on a beach. As the opinion explained, “The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
 
The City of San Diego sought to narrowly define what counts as protected expression. The Ninth Circuit refused. And in doing so, it affirmed that public spaces are meant to be alive with diverse forms of expression – including yoga mats in the sand and sun salutations by the sea.
 
So, San Diego – you need to be more flexible!

The great German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that if you board the wrong train, it is no use running down the corridor in the opposite direction. More than a few influencers, international organizations, and commentators need to change trains on the subject of religious freedom in Ukraine.
 
It all began with criticism of Ukraine President Zelenskyy’s restrictions imposed on the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and on some clergy and activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). In August 2024, Zelenskyy formalized these restrictive policies by signing amendments to a law that allows his government to ban religious organizations in Ukraine. In December, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized Ukraine for establishing “disproportionate restrictions on the freedom to manifest one’s religion or belief.” In April, the U.S. Commission on International Freedom chimed in, calling on Ukraine to “ensure that enforcement of the amendments comply with international human rights standards.”
 
Earlier this year, President Trump – perhaps misled by commentary in the blogosphere – called Zelenskyy a “dictator.” This leaves many Americans to wonder: Have the United States and NATO been supporting a dictator and what one podcaster calls a “very dark force” that delights in persecuting Christians?
 
This is a good time to take a deep breath and reassess what is really going on in Ukraine. It is time to recognize where the real dark forces are located in this war zone.

• The Ukrainian law is partially a response to the ROC, led by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, a former Soviet-era KGB operative who propagandizes for his close ally and patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kirill echoes Putin’s imperialistic Russky mir ideology, which blends nationalism with religion, asserting a civilizational right to control neighboring countries. Kirill has even dispatched priests to sprinkle holy water on Russia’s nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

Russians refer to the fusion of this state and the church as symphonia, in which the two play a supporting and complementary tune. If ever there was a good argument for the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on the establishment of an official religion, it is Patriarch Kirill and his cheek-by-jowl connection to the Kremlin.
 
The Ukrainian law affects the UOC, which the ROC considers to be a branch of its church. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, many clergy and laity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate severed relations with Moscow, but some ambiguity remains. The Ukrainian law asserts authority to regulate religious organizations with ties to foreign powers with which the country is at war. Unlike the Russian-occupied eastern portion of the country, no churches have been closed, and no worship ceremonies invaded by soldiers wielding truncheons.
​

• In contrast, the ROC’s fellow travelers in Ukraine are wedded to a Russian regime that crushes churches in the occupied parts of Ukraine, murdering, torturing, and imprisoning Evangelical Christian Baptists, Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, and Muslims. According to Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, 67 clergy members of several faiths have been murdered in Ukraine’s occupied eastern provinces, along with the destruction of 640 places of worship.

 

• This is the “Christian” faith that operated as a fifth column of spies and propagandists within Ukraine. We are rightly proud as Americans of our commitment to religious freedom. But a country being bombed and torn apart cannot be expected to tolerate those who use religion as a shield for espionage and enemy propaganda.

President Trump took a commendable risk for peace in the early days of his second term by reaching out to Putin. Rather than seize this opportunity to solidify his position, however, Putin met the president’s open hand with a slap in the face. The Russian president violated his own Easter ceasefire, firing rockets into city centers in Ukraine, targeting civilians.
 
Ukraine is a country that protects religious diversity. The free expression of religion is enjoyed by Eastern Orthodox worshippers, Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Protestants, Muslims, and Jews, one of whom is now the nation’s president. In other words, it shouldn’t be confused with Russia.

You might support or loathe the views of the Family Research Council, which advocates traditional marriage and gender roles. But does its advocacy of traditional values make it a “hate group” worthy of being lumped in with the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party? And if it is, could the same be said for the Roman Catholic Church? How about two Catholic men from the American heartland, one of them now the Vice President of the United States and the other Pope Leo XIV? Are they terrorist adjacent?
 
These far-out assertions are natural conclusions of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which produces a “hate map” that was helpful to an outraged man who took a gun in 2012 to the headquarters of the Family Research Council with the intention, he told prosecutors, of killing as many staffers as he could. Thanks to the heroic intervention of one security guard, the gunman only managed to wound that one person. The SPLC has since designated a number of conservative, but by no means radical, organizations and people as “hate groups.” Now Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) are appealing to the FBI to direct field offices to not rely on the characterizations of the SPLC.
 
Thanks to the efforts of Sen. Grassley and the forthcoming response from FBI Director Kash Patel, we now know the role that SPLC played in inspiring the infamous memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office that targeted “radical traditional Catholics.” The FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics was rooted in smears from the SPLC, which Sen. Grassley correctly calls “thoroughly discredited and biased.”
 
A public release of internal FBI documents by Sen. Grassley undercuts dismissive statements from former FBI Director Christopher Wray that the Richmond memo was the product of one field office. Documents unearthed by Sen. Grassley reveal that the Richmond field office consulted with Bureau offices in Louisville, Portland, and Milwaukee to paint Catholics who adhere to “conservative family values/roles” as being as dangerous as Islamist jihadists. There were similar efforts in recent years in Los Angeles and Indianapolis.
 
The original memo from the Richmond field office found SPLC as a trustworthy enough source to assert that there will be a “likely increase” in threats from “radical traditional Catholics” in combination with “racially and ethnically-motivated violent extremism.”
 
Another memo produced by Sen. Grassley reveals the conclusion of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence after the memo was revealed and the Bureau found itself mired in a scandal. The FBI concluded: “The SPLC has a history of having to issue apologies and retract groups and individuals they have identified as being extremist or hate groups.” But this should have been clear to the FBI for years.
 
It is helpful, at least, that an FBI assistant director wrote that since the Richmond memo implicated First Amendment rights by targeting “a branch of a religious group,” that “there should have been more care to caveat this information.” Another memo from a leader of the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division added that the FBI does not now use the phrase “radical traditionalist Catholic” and that “the FBI does not open investigations based upon First Amendment-protected activities … Political or religious affiliations (such as ‘far-right’) are not used to describe or identify violent extremists.”
 
Those critiques are welcome, although they might be seen as institutional posterior coverage in light of the firestorm ignited by the Richmond memo.
 
Let us hope that this searing moment for the FBI serves as a permanent reminder to take great care in surveilling Americans for the free exercise of religion and political expression, whether of the left or the right. Partisans may throw around loose accusations about their ideological opposites (and certainly some on the right do that), but the loose standards of the blogosphere make for poor criteria in terrorist threat assessments.
 
And above all, it is time for the FBI to end its reliance on the characterizations of the scandal-ridden Southern Poverty Law Center as a source of reliable information.

Protect The 1st has followed the long, sorrowful saga of the Illinois Invest in Kids scholarship program, a lifeline for very low-income families to escape failing and dangerous public schools with scholarships to quality private schools.

This 75 percent tax credit served kids whose families were below 300 percent of the poverty level. When the public teachers union flexed its muscle, however, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) and state lawmakers bowed to the union’s raw political power and let the program die.

The Chicago Tribune writes: “Now these kids have reason to hope.”

What is that hope? The Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), which passed the House and is now a part of the reconciliation bill before the Senate. The ECCA would provide $5 billion a year in tax credits for donations to scholarship-granting organizations for disadvantaged students nationwide to attend quality private schools.

The Tribune writes:

“Opponents of school choice believe that education is a zero-sum game, and that private schools are a threat to the public system. We believe the opposite – that a thriving private and charter system and a strong traditional public system create an educational ecosystem that can serve everyone’s needs. There are things private schools can do that public ones can’t, and the same is very much true in reverse.

“School choice remains popular in Illinois, with a clear majority of residents supporting the concept. More importantly, choice introduces accountability into a system that, for decades, has faced little real competition. When parents have options, schools must respond – whether by improving curriculum, addressing student behavior issues more effectively, or offering stronger support for struggling learners.”

The Tribune concludes:

“Springfield has moved on from the thousands of low-income students it left behind a year and a half ago. Now, the ECCA is their best shot. We hope that the Senate passes a version of the reconciliation bill that includes this program.”

Jesus told his followers that whatever “you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do for me.” He didn’t specify anyone who might be outside of the orbit of care, be they Samaritans or Greeks. Nor did he say that one must proselytize while providing food, clothing, or shelter to the needy.

It is on that basis that the Catholic Charities Bureau, the social ministry of the Catholic Diocese in Wisconsin, provides services for the disabled, the elderly, and the impoverished regardless of their faith. This generous, ecumenical care may square with Jesus, but it fell short of the high standards of Wisconsin regulators and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The state court ruled that because the charity’s care was given to people of all faiths, it is not inherently religious. For that reason, the charity was forced into the state unemployment compensation system instead of being allowed, as other religions are, to pay into its own more efficient network.

The Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court – from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other – did not hold back in forcefully overturning this Wisconsin ruling on Thursday. “It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain ‘neutrality’ between religion and religion,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the Court. “There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule, but this is not one.”

Justice Sotomayor found that the Wisconsin Supreme Court had engaged in “denominational discrimination” for holding that Catholic Charities was not religious in character because it serves people of all faiths. The state, she wrote, had wrongly imposed “a denominational preference by differentiating between religions based on theological choices.”

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion criticizing the state court for ruling that the Catholic charity is a “distinct organization” from the Diocese.

“Both the basic principles of church autonomy and the history of religious corporations establish that religious institutions are more than the corporate entities that they form,” Justice Thomas wrote. “It follows that the government may not use such entities as a means of regulating the internal governance of religious institutions.” He added: “The First Amendment’s guarantee of church autonomy gives religious institutions the right to define their internal governance structures without state interference.”

Justice Sotomayor made a key distinction sure to resonate:
​
“When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny. Because Wisconsin has transgressed that principle without the tailoring necessary to survive such scrutiny, the judgment of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is reversed.”

​Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Christian-owned, women-only spa in Washington State must serve biological males if they identify as transgender. That means, dissenting judge Kenneth Lee wrote, that “under edict from the state, women – and even girls as young as 13 years old – must be nude alongside patrons with exposed male [parts] as they receive treatment.”
 
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling is as constitutionally suspect as it is nonsensical. Olympus Spa is a Korean business drawing from a centuries-old cultural heritage. Such spas “require their patrons to be fully naked, as they sit in communal saunas and undergo deep-tissue scrubbing of their entire bodies in an open area filled with other unclothed patrons.” As such, they separate patrons by sex in accordance with their religious beliefs – which merits protection under the U.S. Constitution.
 
The facts of the case are fairly straightforward. When a pre-op transgender woman was apparently denied entry into Olympus Spa, she filed a discrimination complaint with the state’s Human Rights Commission. Eventually, Olympus brought suit on First Amendment grounds, arguing that the state’s enforcement action violated its free speech, free exercise of religion, and free association rights.
 
The Ninth Circuit dismissed the case, finding that the Washington Law Against Discrimination (WLAD) “did not impermissibly burden” those rights. The court majority asserted that the law is both neutral and generally applicable, and that the burden imposed was “no greater than was essential to eliminate discriminatory conduct.” The court further found that the spa’s activities did not constitute expressive activity.
 
Judge Lee, a Korean American, took issue with the majority’s findings – and particularly with its statutory interpretation of WLAD. The plain text, as Lee points out, bars discrimination based on “sexual orientation” and not gender identity. Moreover, he writes, the majority’s broad reading of the statute has the effect of discriminating against other protected classes – in this case, a discrete racial group of practicing Christians.
 
Lee writes:
 
“The Washington Human Rights Commission threatened prosecution against a protected class – racial minority members who want to share their cultural traditions – to favor a group that is not even a protected class under the statute. To be clear, transgender persons, like all people, deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. But showing respect does not mean the government can distort the law and impose its will on the people the law was intended to protect.”
 
Legitimate questions of statutory interpretation aside, we agree with Olympus Spa that it has strong First Amendment claims in need of recognition. Businesses, like individuals, have First Amendment rights (see Masterpiece Cakeshop). If this case goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is likely these principles will be applied.
 
Protect The 1st will report on any further developments in this case.

​It was bound to happen. Is AI-generated content “speech” for the purposes of the First Amendment? A federal district court in Florida, for now at least, says “no.”
 
The circumstances surrounding Garcia v. Character Technologies are tragic. Here’s the background.
 
Character Technologies is an AI software company that allows users to interact with anthropomorphic chatbots, whose conversational abilities are designed to mimic those of real people on traditional messaging apps. The company does this using the same technology underlying products like ChatGPT – namely, large language models. In fact, the company’s founders first developed the application while working for Google on its LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) program.
 
Character Technologies became available to the public in late 2022. Two years later, the app had been downloaded more than 10 million times.
 
One of those 10 million users was 14-year-old Sewell Setzer. Just weeks after downloading Character AI, Setzer became outright addicted, spending more and more time with the chatbot characters, including a version of Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen. He withdrew from social interactions, quit his basketball team and began exhibiting signs of mental illness. Setzer’s parents eventually confiscated his phone, but as many children often do – he found it.
 
On February 28, 2025, Setzer sent the following messages:
 
Sewell: I promise I will come home to you. I love you so much, Dany.
 
Daenerys Targaryen Character: I love you too, Daenero6. Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.
 
Sewell: What if I told you I could come home right now?
 
Daenerys Targaryen Character: ... please do my sweet king
 
He shot himself shortly thereafter.
 
Character Technologies sought to defend itself against the Setzer parents’ lawsuit by invoking the First Amendment. The company argued that its output constitutes speech that its users have a constitutional right to receive.
 
In an order ruling on Character Technologies’ motion to dismiss, Judge Ann Conway accepted the defendants’ argument that Character Technologies can assert the First Amendment rights of its users, noting that “Courts regularly recognize the First Amendment rights of listeners.” (see: Citizens United) But Judge Conway also rejected the argument that “words strung together by an LLM are speech.”
 
Courts have recognized film, music, video games and even social media content moderation as forms of protected speech because they are inherently expressive. Character Technologies analogizes itself to these mediums and activities. But, as Conway points out, the “Court’s decision as to the First Amendment protections Character A.I. receives, if any, does not turn on whether Character A.I. is similar to other mediums that have received First Amendment protections; rather, the decision turns on how Character A.I. is similar to the other mediums.”
 
One way it is not similar is that your average movie was scripted, acted, and directed by humans. A chatbot is programed by people, but its responsive calculations are not the result of sentience. It therefore cannot engage in “expressive” activity.
 
Extending speech rights for a coded product – devoid of any directed, active expression – is ludicrous on its face; but there’s no doubt we’ll see this sort of thinking again as AI becomes more versatile. Are the rights of people behind this technology implicated? Justice Amy Coney Barrett has already raised questions about this stance. In her Moody v. NetChoice concurrence, she asked:
 
“What if a platform’s owners hand the reins to an [A.I.] tool and ask it simply to remove ‘hateful’ content? If the [A.I.] relies on large language models to determine what is ‘hateful’ and should be removed, has a human being with First Amendment rights made an inherently expressive ‘choice . . . not to propound a particular point of view?’”
 
Courts will no doubt continue to grapple with the legal status of AI-generated content. In litigating outcomes, product creators should vigorously invoke and defend their constitutional rights. Their products probably cannot.

​Steven Greenhut in Reason cautions those on the left and right who want to call a Constitutional convention to revamp our founding document that anyone “who has watched the moronic sausage-making in Congress and state legislatures should be wary of opening Pandora’s Box.”
 
Greenhut points to the United Kingdom to get a sense of where we’d be if the Bill of Rights were up for grabs. Every year, thousands of Britons are detained, questioned, and prosecuted for online posts. Greenhut recounts the story of a 74-year-old grandmother who was arrested by four police officers for holding a sign in proximity to a Glasgow abortion clinic reading, “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.’”
 
He writes that in contrast to the “Congress shall make no law” clarity of the First Amendment, the British speech code allows such quashing of speech to “protect national security,” “territorial integrity” “public safety,” “disorder or crime,” “health or morals,” etc., etc.
 
“A constitutional amendment stating, ‘no law’ is more protective than a statute with asterisks and exceptions,” Greenhut concludes. “With the political Left devoted to limiting speech based on its fixations on race and gender and the political Right's willingness to, say, deport students who take verboten positions on the war in Gaza and malign reporters as enemies of the people, I'd hate to see how speech protections would fare in a refashioned constitution. Traditionally, the Left has taken a ‘living and breathing’ approach, insisting its plain words and founders' intent are up for reinterpretation.
 
“Sadly, modern conservatives, who previously defended originalism, seem ready to ditch the Constitution when it hinders their policy aims.”
 
He quotes Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis from a 1927 free-speech case, Whitney v. California, who noted that the founders, who had won a violent revolution, were not cowards who wanted order over liberty. The Justice wrote: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
 
Greenhut concluded: “We don't need to revisit the Constitution, but to uphold the protections already within it.”