Regardless of your views on abortion, there just wasn’t a hard legal issue that a pregnant, under-age undocumented immigrant on American soil had a right to one. You don’t have to like the rights we afford people here, but them’s the breaks. And so the government sticking its nose into Rochelle Garza’s case was, itself, bizarre and shocking.

Garza, in her capacity as Doe’s court-ordered guardian, is the named plaintiff in Garza v. Hargan, a class-action challenge to what the ACLU calls the Trump administration’s exercise of a “veto power over unaccompanied immigrant minors’ access to abortion in violation of their Fifth Amendment rights,” among other constitutional claims.

The public only learned of Doe’s plight when it made national headlines last month, but by then she had been waiting for nearly a month — since Garza and another local attorney, Marie Christine Cortez, convinced a Texas judge that it was in their client’s “best interest” to let her decide for herself that an abortion was right for her.“

The administration stuck its nose in this mess because their proxy at HHS, Scott Lloyd, who is charged with caring for unaccompanied undocumented minors, is against abortion, and uses his office to convince his charges not to get one. This alone wouldn’t be a bad thing, a nice chat to make sure Doe appreciated her choice and was sure of it. But when she stuck to her choice, the government decided that this was a mountain it was prepared to die on. And die it did. Continue reading →

Michelle Obama raised two lovely daughters, so naturally that qualifies her to opine about raising boys.

“It’s powerful to have strong men but what does that strength mean?” asked Obama. “Does it mean respect? Does it mean responsibility? Does it mean compassion? Or are we protecting our men too much so that they feel a little entitled and a little, you know, self-righteous sometimes?”

“And that’s kind of on us, too, as women and mothers,” Obama added, “as we nurture men and push girls to be perfect.”

What does that “strength mean”? Better question is what does any of that mean*, as it’s a string of words that suggests most of us have grossly overestimated Michelle Obama’s ability to be cogent. Since a guy is a misogynist if he points out that a woman is irrational, women get away with being irrational because no one can say so. Except someone who doesn’t care about being called names. This makes no sense at all. Continue reading →

There are dots that people just don’t seem to connect anymore. And there are beliefs so deeply embedded that people just can’t see beyond them. Neither of these things stopped billionaire Joe Ricketts from shuttering DNAinfo and the Gothamist a week after they went union, and people are furious.

A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.

On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

The law entitles employees to unionize. It also allows the owner to close the business. Ricketts explains why. Continue reading →

Poor Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt. They put a great deal of work into their post at Reason about the harm done to young people by bubblewrapping them from harm, whether physical or emotional, whether real or imagined. Despite the best of intentions, we’ve created the Fragile Generation.

We’ve had the best of intentions, of course. But efforts to protect our children may be backfiring. When we raise kids unaccustomed to facing anything on their own, including risk, failure, and hurt feelings, our society and even our economy are threatened. Yet modern child-rearing practices and laws seem all but designed to cultivate this lack of preparedness. There’s the fear that everything children see, do, eat, hear, and lick could hurt them. And there’s a newer belief that has been spreading through higher education that words and ideas themselves can be traumatizing.

How did we come to think a generation of kids can’t handle the basic challenges of growing up?

But life comes at you fast. Continue reading →

While rampant anti-Semitism in Mahwah, New Jersey, has brought the state’s attorney general down on the locals, who have no issue with the good Jews but only with the bad ones, Councilman George Ervin runs for election on the Confederate Towel Party line.

So is this just an anomaly in the Garden State? No. No it’s not. Continue reading →

Until he was nominated for a seat on the Eighth Circuit, I never heard of Steve Grasz. From what Lambda Legal says, he’s pretty much the embodiment of everything they despise in a judge.

Since 2015, Steven Grasz has served on the Board of the Nebraska Family Alliance.

• He is currently its Board Director.
• The Nebraska Family Alliance is a religious-based organization affiliated with Focus on the Family that has advocated extensively against LGBT rights.
• Steven Grasz’s family connections to the anti-LGBT Nebraska Family Alliance run deep. His son, Nate Grasz, currently serves as Director of Policy for the organization.

Not their policy positions? Not mine either, but then, I’m not president (or even a measly senator), so my policy positions have no bearing on who is nominated for a circuit judgeship. What is clear is that his personal political views on the issue of sexual orientation go past conservative and into reactionary territory. Continue reading →

As Linda Greenhouse has been trolling the Supreme Court in her effort to de-legitimize it in the Era of Gorsuch, so too have the second-stringers like Dahlia Lithwick. Apparently, she has now seen the light!

[C]onservative and libertarian legal commentators (many of whom were on the challengers’ side opposing Obamacare in the 2010 litigation) are now accusing individual judges — and sometimes entire federal courts — of shirking their institutional roles as neutral magistrates and “joining the resistance” in the various suits against President Trump.

Wait, what? Legal commentators are accusing judges of engaging in TrumpLaw? Who would be so malevolent and evil?

From National Review to The Wall Street Journal, these critics are voicing the idea that if President Trump loses any of his legal battles, it will be because progressive judges are out to get him. The fact that many of these rulings have come from Republican appointees or centrist Democrats and that they are often rooted in sound doctrinal principles is left out. Continue reading →

Last week, Stephanie West Allen sent me a link to The Dartmouth, the student newspaper at the tiny Ivy, announcing that three very well-known and well-regarded psychology professors had vanished from campus amidst allegations of misconduct. I didn’t have a clue what to make of it.

Misconduct? Were they running a meth lab? Fixing college football games? A Satanic cult sacrificing virgin frosh to their pagan god?

Psychology and brain sciences professors Todd Heatherton, Bill Kelley and Paul Whalen are on paid leave and under “ongoing investigations into allegations of serious misconduct,” according to a statement from College spokesperson Diana Lawrence.

Dartmouth named the miscreants, all male tenured profs, but why?

“We are engaged in a thorough and impartial process that protects the rights of all parties and promotes the safety of our campus community,” Lawrence wrote.

Continue reading →

Moana? Do you really wanna?

The Maui question may have been settled, but this year, there are plenty of tweets out there asking the internet (and Lin-Manuel Miranda) if it’s OK to dress as Moana for Halloween.

At this point, you might be saying something like: “But, I dressed up as Jasmine as a child, and I’m not a racist!”, or, “It’s just a Halloween costume, please chill the f*ck out.” But one of the best things about time is that it moves forward. You should too. You can (and should) strive to be better than you were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. If you missed the mark when you were younger, maybe think about using this Halloween as an opportunity to teach your kids about the importance of cultural sensitivity. If your child’s dream costume feels questionable, don’t just throw up your hands and hand over your credit card. You’re the parent here, and the onus of what your child wears falls on you. If your kid wears a racist costume … you’re kind of wearing it too.

So your little darling just adores Moana and wants to dress as a Maui princess. Who can blame her? Moana’s adorable, and who would blame a child for wanting to be a Disney character they love? But if you let her, you’re a racist? At least it’s better than the neighbors refusing to give candy to your bigoted kids. Continue reading →

There are some countries in the middle east that are less than friendly to people of less-than-binary sexual orientation. Literally horrifying? One might think, and perhaps in relation to the ordinary cis-heteronormative white male emir, it would work. But it’s not that simple at the University of Texas.

A bisexual male student at the University of Texas–San Antonio said during an informal conversation outside class that he was uncomfortable with Islam because people still receive the death penalty for being gay in 10 Muslim-majority countries.

For expressing this thought, the student—Alfred MacDonald, who no longer attends the school—was instructed to meet with the chair of the philosophy department, Eve Browning.

You will not be surprised to learn that MacDonald was not given an award for his steadfast dedication to the cause of sexual freedom. Continue reading →