Religious liberty as right wing Christian identity politics

I don't think we know the answer, but one important question about this case is whether they denied relief despite thinking Biden Admin was right on the merits, or whether they had a preliminary view of the merits and then ultimately changed their minds when the case got a full hearing

What is this bill supposed to do? Nudge the NYPD into increasing its use of security perimeters around educational institutions? It doesn't mandate any policy change and any such change would be subject to First Amendment scrutiny legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationD...

There are some side-issues but my takeaway from this interview and related Bluesky discourse is that the main disagreement left between Baude and Vladeck is between "the Court has clearly been partisan" and "there are too many variables to say definitively" www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/o...

Transphobia is always gender policing and the gender policing never stops with trans people

Not the Divided Argument post everyone is talking about, but I thought this was interesting, in part because it provides a path to adhering to Establishment Clause precedents, at least at school, that is consonant with the Supreme Court majority's commitments blog.dividedargument.com/p/guest-post...

The two places I have met dates are (a) dating apps and (b) gay parties. Not sure if there is a straight equivalent of (b)

The numbers are appalling, but the NYPD's attitude -- at the individual and organizational level -- will not surprise anyone who has ever covered transportation in New York.

FWIW, I think folks are dramatically underestimating the likelihood that the Virginia Supreme Court will invalidate the redistricting amendment.

This is just because the objectively correct romance option in WOTR is Daeran

This is a good thread. Neo-Bundism should be understood in terms of the social conditions of 2026, where it represents an understandable rejection of the prevailing alternatives, not as a literal attempt to recreate an organization that arose in a different social context

Imagine a state mandating a poster in every classroom: 1. You shall regard everyone as the sex corresponding to their gender identity 2. You shall regard same-sex relationships as morally equal to different-sex relationships. 3. Remember and observe the sixth month, LGBTQ Pride

Something tells me that this narrow reading of Mahmoud by a federal appeals court won't get a shadow docket rebuke

If the Trump Administration really thought SPLC was funneling liberal donor money to far-right hate groups, they would give them a medal, not an indictment

Sorry for the confusion: I had meant the case “raised” that question, not “raises,” because the Supreme Court cut the question — and had intended to follow up with this to show that they cut that (but got distracted with arguments). The court still is circling, was my point. Apologies again!

As a practical matter, I expect that when the Court is done: - it will be impossible to exclude religious orgs from government programs that contract with private entities - it will be impossible to impose unwanted non-discrimination norms on religious orgs that participate in those programs

The other LGBTQ-related news from this morning's order list is that they denied cert in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, which raises essentially the same substantive due process argument against anti-outing school policies that the Court accepted in Mirabelli. www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?...

The Supreme Court should just overrule Smith and give us a real test instead of abusing neutrality/general applicability. Tell us why you don't think it's a big deal to exclude same-sex couples from publicly funded preschools.

I don't know how the disarmament standoff will be ultimately resolved but this strikes me as a very minimal concession, substantially less than the handover of heavy weapons that has been floated as a possible compromise a few times www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/w...

I have been curious for a decade about those marriage stay orders though. (They did it twice, for Utah and for Virginia in August 2014.) It's not a big mystery why they did it but the applications obviously didn't meet the standard so what did the discussion look like

My tentative view is that I would vote for Carl Wilson in this primary (I weight Bottcher's endorsement heavily) but complaining that Lindsey Boylan isn't gay is the worst identity politics brain gothamist.com/news/mamdani...

Early reports coming in of another arson attack on a Synagogue in Britain last night - this time Kenton United Synagogue. This the third attempted firebombing of a Jewish building in London this week.

Would sure be a telling follow-up to Chiles if the Supreme Court saves John Eastman on free speech grounds

1. Viewpoint neutrality and promoting viewpoint diversity are different goals. 2. Sometimes what we should want is actually (limited) viewpoint neutrality (and not viewpoint diversity per se). It's not good to have a political test for hiring physicists (though viewpoints about physics may matter)

The difference is the difference between 6 and 3

There are some criticisms that are appropriately made of justices by other justices and other criticisms that are more appropriately made by other people and Sotomayor's criticism of Kavanaugh seemed to be in the second category to me. I'm glad she apologized.

Another striking example of treating a court ruling about the meaning of a particular term in a single statute as constituting a comprehensive settlement of a contested policy issue

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Hungary's opposition leader Peter Magyar says Prime Minister Viktor Orbán conceded his election loss in a phone call.

Guys if this was real you would have a better source than this aggregator account (also it makes no sense on multiple levels)

Bread!

I'm not sure Iran actually loses much by reopening the Strait. They've shown they can keep it closed under fire and that's what they need for leverage.

Actually it's gravely wrong even to merely insincerely threaten genocide

This is the correct stance

Six Supreme Court justices, the Roberts court majority, were very concerned about the risks of Donald Trump personally, and a future president hypothetically, not being able to commit crimes without consequence. It was a top priority for them, and they used their power to ensure it wouldn’t happen.

Bluster or not, the way that places like Iran are treated in our collective imagination and culture allows for this unfathomable rhetoric and fuck it is just horrifying in every way.

Khalil says a lot in this interview, much of which is good, but at the end of the day you're not going to get credibility among the vast majority of Jews if you can't straightforwardly acknowledge Hamas's acts of mass murder on October 7

This response is indistinguishable from ppl who dissemble on Israeli atrocities by saying "yes starvation is bad but Hamas steals aid and could surrender today" & the idea that this person represents a consistent and principled universalism on this issue is an insult to our intelligence & morality

Straightforwardly genocidal rhetoric

I find critiques of "neo-Bundism" based on arguments that the Bund failed or granular points about its history to be largely uninteresting because they take neo-Bundism too literally. Jewish circumstances today are very different--which cuts both ways.

The critical senator on removing Trump from office is the 67th most likely to vote for removal. Chris Murphy, like 45 of his fellow Democrats, is much more likely to vote for removal. So there's not really much point in yelling at him about this

When the president says "fuckin," you can't censor it, sorry

Seems worth noting that Trump's threatened war crimes violate both the legal and the moral obligations of everyone tasked with executing them

They don't even have Kavanaugh lol

So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

This year the l'ochlei kitniyot options have been more robust than I've ever seen before (this is Upper East Side, NYC) and I'm curious how many of the buyers are people who don't traditionally have the custom versus people like me who do but don't adhere to it

All this Supreme Court stuff is very distracting for Erev Pesach

Chiles v. Salazar all but definitively holds the challenged law unconstitutional but it was clever to leave the formal execution and burial work to the lower courts. Together with Kagan and Sotomayor joining the majority, it wrecks the politics of running against the decision

Nobody was ready for Chiles because nobody expected it to come down in March

I think a law that is literally Colorado's law but in reverse--no talk therapy with the goal of generating acceptance of trans id--would be struck down even by this Supreme Court. And I think it would be harder to strike down such a law on the state's or the dissent's theory of the case.

probably the most productive approach is to do the SPLC strategy of bankrupting the orgs by bringing tort claims--I think they used consumer fraud against Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality)