It wasn’t because Jack Phillips’ cakes were so delicious, although they are apparently in great demand, but because Autumn Scardina wanted to “get him.” And Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones held she did.

The cake in question was ordered for a birthday. The woman who called Masterpiece Cake Shop to ask for it wanted pink on the inside, surrounded by a layer of blue frosting. She explained to the shop employee it was to honor her gender transition.

At that point, the woman at the shop said they likely could not make it. Continue reading →

When they learned one of their “brothers” had been charged, they resigned. En masse. Much like their counterparts in Buffalo and Albuquerque did before them. They had enough.

A group of about 50 police officers who had served voluntarily on a specialized crowd control unit in Portland, Ore., have stepped down from the squad after a year of sometimes violent clashes with protesters, the city’s Police Department said on Thursday. Continue reading →

On the heels of the Eighth Circuit’s rejection of the facile argument that while colleges are concededly biased, it’s not a bias against male students but a bias in favor of “survivors,” the Tenth Circuit has finally found its way over the hump and similarly refused to play the game anymore.

The decision in the case of “John Doe,” as the former student is identified, comes one year after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit dismissed a similar lawsuit from a male student who also claimed DU’s investigatory process was biased against men and toward women. At the time, a three-judge appellate panel decided that a process generally favoring victims who were largely women did not necessarily equate to discrimination against men. Continue reading →

Some states have legalized weed. Not the feds. Some states call themselves sanctuaries for immigrants, despite the feds controlling immigration and deportation. And some states have laws about allowing the possession of guns, even as the feds want to limit and control it. Each of these scenarios has produced widely different reactions, some based on law but most based on preference.

Missouri Governor Mike Parsons signed a bill that takes control of gun rights in his state.

Gov. Mike Parson signed House Bill 85 at Frontier Justice in Lee’s Summit. Continue reading →

Every once in a while, someone writes something that is far more worthy of your time than whatever I was going to write. This is one of those times.

In this age of social media, where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it, as Jonathan Swift wrote.

Chimamanda Adichie lets it all out. Forget me. Read her today.

Maybe a decade ago, a guy with a significant following on the twitters complained that there was nobody in the Harry Potter series who “looked like him.” I replied, “So write some books as good as J.K. Rowling and make the characters look like you.”* Lin-Manuel Miranda did just that in his love letter to his neighborhood, Washington Heights.

It was the first movie I’ve seen in a theater in more than a year, and I thought it was great. I know Washington Heights very well, having spent a lot of time up there with clients. The scenery was the real deal, even if they managed to not include a bar, a money-exchange or the Local Motion cab driven by undercover detectives from the 34 Precinct that everybody knew were cops. Where were the guys selling dime bags on the corner? Where were the car stops to  illegally search for clavos? Where were the kids smoking weed? Where was the bodega cat? But then, this was Miranda’s love story. isn’t he allowed to clean the streets up a bit? Continue reading →

I remember reading the list of names proffered by Demand Justice as potential Supreme Court nominees, and thinking they were not just batshit crazy, but dangerously off the rails. Some of their choices weren’t there because they were smart, open-minded, and brought different experiences to the Court. Some were there because they swore fealty to being biased.

If confirmed, the corporation would always lose, the black guy would always win unless his adversary was a trans woman of color, in which case he was screwed. Forget law. Forget reason. Don’t even bother to argue. Their vote was in before the briefs were filed. And in the minds of the unduly passionate, this was good because outcome was all that mattered to groups like Demand Justice. Continue reading →

One of the most persuasive arguments is that two things correlate. Crime went down significantly in New York City when the “stop & frisk” was a predominant police tactic, and cops took credit for the drop in crime. Makes sense, right? Except crime went down across the country, where other departments didn’t engage in stop & frisk. So it no longer makes sense. It’s the logical fallacy that correlation does not imply causation. They could be connected, but they also may not be. Correlation, alone, does not answer the question.

In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, whose parents were part of the Weather Underground crew who perpetrated the notorious Brinks Heist in 1981, was elected district attorney. Why he wanted to be DA is a curious question. I have no desire to be a district attorney and wouldn’t take the job if it were handed to me on a silver platter, but that’s me. He wanted the post, ran for it and won. Continue reading →

Robert Jackson has a point. So what if he was a probationary employee at the time? So what if he thought it wise to take his superior to task for engaging in conduct that he and some of his similarly-situated colleagues found reprehensible? He worked for the organization that once stood for civil liberties, but is now supposed to stand for Robert Jackson.

Robert Jackson filed a lawsuit Tuesday in New York District Court accusing the ACLU of not treating its own Black employees with the kind of equity that one would expect from a bastion of American values, equality, and justice. He says he and his Black colleagues were told to “keep quiet” about their criticisms concerning the organization’s lack of leadership diversity, and he claims his bosses eventually tried to push him to quit his job. Continue reading →

A foundational belief of liberalism is that no one in this wealthy and wonderful nation of ours should go to sleep (or school) hungry, die for lack of basic health care or lack a place to sleep at night with a roof over their head. This is the social safety net, the bare minimum we, as a society, must provide. We’ve done this poorly, partially because problems move faster than solutions and partially because our conflicted bureaucratic demands make delivery of these minimal fixes overly expensive, burdensome and ripe for abuse.

But even if we could do this well, it would not mean that poverty would be eradicated. Can it be? Should it be? Could we survive without it? Ezra Klein, late of Vox, can’t break the ‘splainer habit. Continue reading →