Prayer at school board meetings

Back in 1983, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case Marsh v. Chambers that the practice of ceremonial opening prayers of the Nebraska state legislature was constitutional. In his strong and cogently argued dissent, justice William Brennan warned that allowing any ceremonial prayer at all, whatever the constraints imposed, would result in the Supreme Court getting involved in endless disputations about what kind of prayer and settings should be allowable and what should be disallowed.
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Mobs rampage in support of Indian religious rapist

It is not just in America or in the Catholic church that we find religious people exploiting the trust people place in them and indulging in sexual abuse. This happens frequently among Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim religious figures as well, though not reported as widely here. Just today in India, supporters of a flamboyant Indian ‘holy man’ Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh went on a rampage after he was convicted of a 2002 rape. At least thirty people have been killed and over 250 injured.
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Satanist to give city council invocation

Following the US Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in the case Greece v. Galloway that ceremonial opening prayers were permissible at meetings of local government bodies provided that there was no consistent pattern of discrimination in favor of or against one sect, a Satanist will be giving the invocation at tomorrow’s meeting of the Grand Junction City Council meeting in Colorado.
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Abusing the ‘qualified immunity’ provision to terrorize ordinary people

One of the truths of law enforcement is that if you give police extra powers that are supposed to be invoked only in extreme situations, they will find ways to use those powers more routinely, either to enrich themselves (as we have seen with civil asset forfeiture) or to show off their power and might, as we seen with the use of surplus military style equipment that has been distributed to local police departments. SWAT team that are supposed to be used in extremely dangerous situations are instead used indiscriminately because police love the drama and visibility of SWAT raids. It looks good on the nightly news.
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Making legalized theft great again

In the recent past, police departments across the country went of a spree, taking advantage of the 1984 ‘civil asset forfeiture’ law that allowed them to confiscate the property of people who were merely suspected of being involved with crime even if they were never actually charged with anything. These people had no means of getting their stuff back even of they were innocent unless they were prepared to hire lawyers for a protracted battle, which many were too poor to do.
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Does a threat of doxing constitute blackmail?

Merriam-Webster defines ‘dox’ to mean to “publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge” and the practice is generally frowned upon. Some of you may be familiar with the recent case involving CNN and the person who modified an old video clip of Trump engaging in a phony wrestling fight with someone. This person had superimposed the CNN logo over the head of the person getting ‘pummeled’ by Trump and Trump had (of course) re-tweeted the clip. CNN uncovered the identity of the person who had created the video and in the process found out that he had also posted racist and anti-Semitic content on the web.
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South African court bars schools from promoting any one religion

Last month I wrote about a legal challenge brought by a of South African secularist group OGOD (Organisasie vir Godsdienste-Onderrig en Demokrasie that translates as Organisation for Religious Education and Democracy) challenging the practice of many public schools that promoted Christianity, thus subverting the neutral official religious instruction policy as outlined in the government’s National Policy on Religion and Education. They took aim at six schools that were accused of promoting Christianity and suppressing the teaching of evolution.
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You cannot be stripped of your citizenship as easily as the government wants

I wrote last month about a case that had been argued before the US Supreme Court about whether one can be stripped of one’s citizenship because one had lied about anything on your citizenship application or whether the lie had to be one that might have materially affected the decision. The government had argued that any lie would be cause for such stripping, even not revealing offenses for which one had not been arrested, such as speeding.
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Fighting religious indoctrination in South African schools

I have been hearing from Christopher, a reader of this blog and is a secular activist in South Africa, about a court case that being waged in that country to remove religious bias in their public schools. The group that has brought the case is called OGOD which is an acronym for the Afrikaans Organisasie vir Godsdienste-Onderrig en Demokrasie. The group challenged the practices of six schools that are explicitly teaching Christian doctrine.
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