McAffee Machinations

As a progressive with a Mormon heritage, this year has been a difficult one, as I’ve been forced to witness sheer religious bigotry by the religious right, some of whom have justified opposition to Mitt Romney because he is Mormon.  Such evangelical Christians believe this means that he belongs to a non-Christian religious cult—as though [...]

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum objected strenuously to the Ninth Circuit’s ruling that California’s Proposition 8 violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Santorum objected, for one thing, to the court’s ruling that “a constitutional amendment” was unconstitutional. He said: “Imagine that. The Constitution is unconstitutional.” More centrally, he objected to the court’s purported rationale [...]

Republican presidential candidates, “conservative” members of Congress, and many Catholic leaders are up in arms over the Obama administration’s initial decision to mandate that various Catholic institutions that supply health insurance to employees—except those who qualify for a narrowly defined “conscience” exception, limited to churches themselves and their employees—include coverage for birth control.  Part of [...]

In the last year, not only has the Supreme Court—unanimously enough—affirmed the idea that there is a “ministerial exception” that the clause guaranteeing the free exercise of religion requires be “read into” federal employment discrimination statutes, but also went on to hold that it supplies an effective barrier to a claim of gender discrimination as [...]

Protesters are being arrested for wearing masks in New York at the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, based on a law enacted over 150 years ago.  This raises serious questions about our society’s commitment to free speech protections, despite rationales for the law. The spirit of the law is to prevent people who might be encouraged [...]

I once got in big trouble – with my wife – for supporting the 7th Circuit decision in Collin v. Smith, affirming a holding that ordinances designed to penalize/discourage the National Socialist Party of America (basically American Nazis) from parading through Skokie, Illinois–where about 5,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps lived—violated the free speech clause [...]

On June 17, 2011, the director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) circulated a memorandum designed to guide the inevitable exercise of prosecutorial discretion in taking legal actions to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.  The memorandum drew on similar efforts setting forth criteria for making deportation action decisions, going back to 1976 and [...]

I was recently asked to contribute to a symposium where the participants were to offer their nominations for the most unhelpful, or even disastrous, Supreme Court opinion in American history.   The problem was not to identify a decision thought to be clearly and unequivocally wrongly decided, but the one with long-term consequences that have been [...]