U.S. Supreme Court Hands Unanimous First Amendment Win to Christian Postal Worker

U.S. Supreme Court Hands Unanimous First Amendment Win to Christian Postal Worker

By Eric Lendrum June 30, 2023

On the same day as the Supreme Court’s historic affirmative action decision, the high court also made a unanimous ruling on a major case involving freedom of religion in government service.

As reported by Fox News, the case involved U.S. Postal Service employee Gerald Groff, a Christian man in Pennsylvania who was ordered to continue working on Sundays, even though he considers Sunday to be the day of rest as per Biblical tradition. When he refused to work, he was ultimately forced to resign.

In its unanimous 9-0 ruling, the court determined this to be a violation of his First Amendment right to freedom of religion. In the process, the court overturned a precedent set in 1977, in the case Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, which declared that employers could deny such religious accommodations if they determined that such a decision would result in a “more than a de minimis cost” on the employer.

Groff’s attorney Aaron Streett successfully argued for the elimination of the “de minimis” requirement, saying that the high court should instead consider approaching the question from the perspective of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to make religious accommodations for their employees, unless this would somehow lead to an “undue hardship” for the employer.Ringing Ears? When Tinnitus Won’t Stop, Do This Immediately!Urologist: Plenty of Men With An Enlarged Prostate Do Not Know About This Simple Solution

“The government believes undue hardship arises whenever there is lost efficiency, weekly payment of premium wages, or denial of a coworker’s shift preference,” said Streett during the oral arguments. “Thus, under the government’s test, a diabetic employee could receive snack breaks under the ADA but not prayer breaks under Title VII, for that might cause lost efficiency.”

In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito agreed with Streett’s assertions that the prior “de minimis” standard had resulted in lower courts abusing the precedent to rule against religious objections, and that the new “undue hardship” standard would be fairer to those making First Amendment complaints against employers.

“To be sure, as the Solicitor General notes, some lower courts have understood that the protection for religious adherents is greater than ‘more than … de minimus‘ might suggest when read in isolation,” said Justice Alito. “But a bevy of diverse religious organizations has told this Court that the de minimus test has blessed the denial of even minor accommodation in many cases, making it harder for members of minority faiths to enter the job market.”about:blankReport Adabout:blankReport Ad

The Postal Service issued a statement affirming that it would obey the court’s ruling: “We agree with the Supreme Court’s clarification, which accepts the arguments we made before the Court, and which is fully consistent with the standard we apply when seeking to accommodate the sincerely held religious beliefs, observances, and practices of our employees.”

The Rampaging LGBTQ Rights Smashing Tyranny: Michigan House passes bill that could make using wrong pronouns a felony, fineable up to $10,000

MichiganPublished June 30, 2023 1:39pm EDT

Michigan House passes bill that could make using wrong pronouns a felony, fineable up to $10,000

Under the new bill, ‘intimidating’ an individual in regards to their gender identity can result in prison time or a $10,000 fine

By Timothy H.J. Nerozzi | Fox News

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A recently passed bill in Michigan could make it a felony to intimidate someone by intentionally using the wrong gender pronouns, according to some legal experts.

Michigan’s state House of Representatives has passed bill HB 4474, a piece of legislation that criminalizes causing someone to feel threatened by words. 

Under the new bill, offenders are “guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000.” 

MICHIGAN LAWMAKERS APPROVE LEGISLATION BANNING CONVERSION THERAPY FOR MINORS

Front of Michigan State Capitol Building

Michigan’s state House of Representatives has passed a bill that could make it a felony to use someone’s preferred pronouns in a way that “intimidates” them. (Google Maps)

“‘Intimidate’ means a willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened,” the bill reads.

The bill specifically addresses “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression” as protected classes.

According to the bill, “‘Gender identity or expression’ means having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth.”

Critics are accusing the bill of violating the First Amendment.

“Make no mistake about it. Those advocating for this legislation will wield these policies as a weapon capable of destroying conservative expression or viewpoints grounded in the sacred,” Distinguished Professor Emeritus William Wagner told media outlet The Daily Wire.

MICHIGAN LAWMAKERS WORKING QUICKLY TO PASS BIPARTISAN STATE BUDGET BEFORE BEGINNING OF JULY

“The state of Michigan is now explicitly allowing the gender delusion issue to be used as a ‘protected class.’ This opens up numerous issues when it comes to the courts and the continued weaponization of the system against conservatives,” State Rep. Angela Rigas said of the bill. 

She continued, “We saw similar concerns when they wanted to pass blocks on ‘conversion’ therapy. It seems Dems want to be in the business of telling people how to think.”

The bill was passed by the Democrat-controlled state House in a 59-50 vote. It now moves to the Michigan State Senate for consideration. 

If approved by the state senate, it will be sent for approval to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is expected to sign it.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer delivers her State of the State address to a joint session of the House and Senate at the state Capitol in Lansing. (AP Photo/Al Goldis, file)

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Michigan lawmakers gave final approval to legislation banning “conversion therapy” for minors as Democrats in the state continue to advance a pro-LGBTQ+ agenda in their first months in power.

The legislation would prohibit mental health professionals from trying to convert youths who are LGBTQ+ to heterosexuality and traditional gender expectations.

Big Tech companies are at war with Social Media sites Gab and Parler!

Big Tech companies are at war with Social Media sites Gab and Parler!

The biggest ones are probably the removal of Gab from the App Store and Google Play store.  In addition to that, mainstream online financial services companies such as PayPal and Stripe curtailed all the access from their platforms to Gab.

Reason:  Gab joins other less restrictive social media platforms that have seen a surge in traffic since the November general election and recent blocks of accounts of Trump and his high-profile supporters.
In addition to Gab, these platforms include Parler (recently banned from Google Play and App Store as well), TheDonald, and MeWe.

This trend embodies a growing need of people to freely express themselves in the wake of pressures they experience regarding what they are allowed to say.

The restrictions to the freedom of speech that are happening these days are genuinely unprecedented in American history.

The President has not only received a permanent ban on his personal Twitter account but also saw some of his tweets from the official presidential Twitter account removed.It is understandable how more and more people each day are switching to alternative platforms such as Gab in order to be able to raise their voice.


Big Tech strikes again, Twitter in particular to Censor, Violating the First Amendment.

After the tech wide ban of Donald Trump, the inconsistencies of social media platforms remain laughable.Twitter and Facebook stated that permanently removing President Trump’s accounts was to protect people and stop the ever-growing incitement of violence.  Additionally, the vast majority of accounts also removed were US conservatives accounts, including Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell’s accounts.

However, Twitter was perfectly fine and happy to allow the disgusting phrase ‘Hang Mike Pence’ to remain on the trending page, culminating in over 14,000 tweets after Twitter purged a large majority of Conservative users on the site on Friday.The account of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei still remains active.

Twitter doesn’t care about users. If they did, accounts like Khamenei’s would have been terminated a long time ago and phrases like ‘Hang Mike Pence’ wouldn’t be allowed to trend.


Twitter’s selective use of their own Communist policies shows that they simply do not care, and by silencing the current leader of the free world, they wanted the rest of the world to know what kind of power they have–so let’s take it away by boycotting twitter–pass the word!
More patriotism of twitter:  Twitter Hires Chinese Communist Party-Linked AI Expert Who Wanted to Hide ‘Secret’ Weapons Contracts

Biden’s Media Transition Chief Wants to Gut the First Amendment to Prohibit “Hate Speech” — That Is, Speech Some Censor Hates

Biden transition team’s head of state-owned media sees ‘DESIGN FLAW’ in First Amendment, advocates law against ‘hate speech’

14 Nov, 2020 22:43 / Updated 20 hours agoGet short URL

Biden transition team's head of state-owned media sees ‘DESIGN FLAW’ in First Amendment, advocates law against ‘hate speech’

©  Reuters / Jim Urquhart

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Richard Stengel, the point man on state-owned media for Joe Biden’s transition team, has said protection of hateful speech that can provoke violence is a “design flaw” in the Constitution and should be fixed with “new guardrails.”

Stengel, a former MSNBC contributor, is transition team leader for the US Agency for Global Media, which includes broadcasters Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He’s likely to head the agency if Biden becomes president in January. Ironically, that means Washington’s foreign propaganda outlets, which traditionally have promoted America’s founding principles, would be overseen by a man with restrictive views on the most fundamental of those tenets – freedom of speech. Also on rt.com Under Biden, Big Tech’s censorship goons will make conservatives nostalgic for the days of relatively free speech in Obama era

“All speech is not equal,” Stengel wrote last year in an op-ed published by the Washington Post. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting thought that we hate, but not speech that incites hate.”

Stengel gave the example of “sophisticated Arab diplomats” who had questioned why constitutional rights would allow a US citizen to burn a copy of the Koran. “It’s a fair question,” he said. “Yes, the First Amendment protects the thought that we hate, but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.” Read more ‘Censorship Rubicon’? Big Tech burying Biden-Ukraine story either wakes up Republicans or drives nail in their political coffin

Another example that Stengel cited was alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Our foremost liberty protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society,” he wrote. “Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook – all protected by the First Amendment.”

Stengel added that it’s time to consider hate-speech laws, like those enacted by other countries to discourage incitement of racial and religious tensions after World War II. He argued that mass shooters Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen were consumers of hate speech, which created a climate that made their heinous crimes more likely.

Stengel, formerly editor of Time magazine, was a US State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama-Biden administration. He referred to his former State Department role as “chief propagandist.”

“I’m not against propaganda,” Stengel reportedly told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think that’s awful.”

That Biden would choose a media chief who calls for restrictions on free speech came as little surprise to Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe, who tweeted: “Of course he does.” Another Twitter commenter took issue with Stengel’s free-speech curtailments being based on the offended party’s propensity for violence: “They are 100 percent advocating differential speech protections based on decibel level of complaints.”

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RT

Take This Very Seriously: Agitation in US to Shortcircuit First Amendment

Take This Very Seriously: Agitation in US to Shortcircuit First Amendment
As Canada, Australia and most of Europe have become more repressive and unfriendly to free speech over the past two decades with “hate laws” and human rights law restrictions and even laws forbidding the questioning of certain accounts of history (France, for instance, has outlawed the questioning of the Hollywood version of World War II), I have repeatedly warned my American friends not to take the glorious protections of the First Amendment for granted. There are forces working around the clock seeking to shove American free thinkers into the same legal straitjacket imposed in other countries.
You will note in the article below by one smirking Thane Rosenbaum, the repeated use of the term “hateful speech” or “hate speech.” It’s delightfully fuzzy. It sounds bad and is delightfully vague and subjective. “Hate speech” is any comment or speech you or your group don’t like. The latest trick is to judge speech on the basis of how it makes some privileged group “feel”.  The Supreme Court of Canada, in Whatcott, was very big on the feelings of homosexuals who, arbitrarily and against all empiric evidence to the contrary, were deemed to be a “vulnerable minority.” No actual evidence of any harm done by Mr. Whatcott’s homo-critical pamphlets was introduced; it was enough that their feelings were alleged to have been hurt when exposed to “hateful” criticism.
Rosenbaum asserts “hateful speech can cause emotional harm.” This may be the way to try to kick open the door of speech suppression in the U.S. The architects of White replacement in North America and Europe and the prattling proponents of “diversity” know how fragile their Brave New Ruined World is. Dissent and discussion of the failures of this experiment, not “hate”, are the real targets of this planned assault on the First Amendment.
Paul Fromm
Director
Canadian Association for Free Expression

 

Photo by AFP/Getty

Thane Rosenbaum

 

 

 

01.30.14

Should Neo-Nazis Be Allowed Free Speech?

New studies show that unbridled hateful speech can cause emotional harm. Is it time for the United States to follow other democracies and impose limits on what Neo-Nazis and other haters say?

Over the past several weeks, free speech has gotten costlier—at least in France and Israel.

In France, Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, an anti-Semitic stand-up comic infamous for popularizing the quenelle, an inverted Nazi salute, was banned from performing in two cities. M’Bala M’Bala has been repeatedly fined for hate speech, and this was not the first time his act was perceived as a threat to public order.

Meanwhile, Israel’s parliament is soon to pass a bill outlawing the word Nazi for non-educational purposes. Indeed, any slur against another that invokes the Third Reich could land the speaker in jail for six months with a fine of $29,000. The Israelis are concerned about both the rise of anti-Semitism globally, and the trivialization of the Holocaust—even locally.

To Americans, these actions in France and Israel seem positively undemocratic. The First Amendment would never prohibit the quenelle, regardless of its symbolic meaning. And any lover of “Seinfeld” would regard banning the “Soup Nazi” episode as scandalously un-American. After all, in 1977 a federal court upheld the right of neo-Nazis to goose-step right through the town of Skokie, Illinois, which had a disproportionately large number of Holocaust survivors as residents. And more recently, the Supreme Court upheld the right of a church group opposed to gays serving in the military to picket the funeral of a dead marine with signs that read, “God Hates Fags.”

While what is happening in France and Israel is wholly foreign to Americans, perhaps it’s time to consider whether these and other countries may be right. Perhaps America’s fixation on free speech has gone too far.

Actually, the United States is an outlier among democracies in granting such generous free speech guarantees. Six European countries, along with Brazil, prohibit the use of Nazi symbols and flags. Many more countries have outlawed Holocaust denial. Indeed, even encouraging racial discrimination in France is a crime. In pluralistic nations like these with clashing cultures and historical tragedies not shared by all, mutual respect and civility helps keep the peace and avoids unnecessary mental trauma.

Why should speech be exempt from public welfare concerns when its social costs can be even more injurious?

Yet, even in the United States, free speech is not unlimited. Certain proscribed categories have always existed—libel, slander and defamation, obscenity, “fighting words,” and the “incitement of imminent lawlessness”—where the First Amendment does not protect the speaker, where the right to speak is curtailed for reasons of general welfare and public safety. There is no freedom to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Hate crime statutes exist in many jurisdictions where bias-motivated crimes are given more severe penalties. In 2003, the Supreme Court held that speech intended to intimidate, such as cross burning, might not receive First Amendment protection.

Yet, the confusion is that in placing limits on speech we privilege physical over emotional harm. Indeed, we have an entire legal system, and an attitude toward speech, that takes its cue from a nursery rhyme: “Stick and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me.”

All of us know, however, and despite what we tell our children, names do, indeed, hurt. And recent studies in universities such as Purdue, UCLA, Michigan, Toronto, Arizona, Maryland, and Macquarie University in New South Wales, show, among other things, through brain scans and controlled studies with participants who were subjected to both physical and emotional pain, that emotional harm is equal in intensity to that experienced by the body, and is even more long-lasting and traumatic. Physical pain subsides; emotional pain, when recalled, is relived.

Pain has a shared circuitry in the human brain, and it makes no distinction between being hit in the face and losing face (or having a broken heart) as a result of bereavement, betrayal, social exclusion and grave insult. Emotional distress can, in fact, make the body sick. Indeed, research has shown that pain relief medication can work equally well for both physical and emotional injury.

We impose speed limits on driving and regulate food and drugs because we know that the costs of not doing so can lead to accidents and harm. Why should speech be exempt from public welfare concerns when its social costs can be even more injurious?

In the marketplace of ideas, there is a difference between trying to persuade and trying to injure. One can object to gays in the military without ruining the one moment a father has to bury his son; neo-Nazis can long for the Third Reich without re-traumatizing Hitler’s victims; one can oppose Affirmative Action without burning a cross on an African-American’s lawn.

Of course, everything is a matter of degree. Juries are faced with similar ambiguities when it comes to physical injury. No one knows for certain whether the plaintiff wearing a neck brace can’t actually run the New York Marathon. We tolerate the fake slip and fall, but we feel absolutely helpless in evaluating whether words and gestures intended to harm actually do cause harm. Jurors are as capable of working through these uncertainties in the area of emotional harms as they are in the realm of physical injury.

Free speech should not stand in the way of common decency. No right should be so freely and recklessly exercised that it becomes an impediment to civil society, making it so that others are made to feel less free, their private space and peace invaded, their sensitivities cruelly trampled upon.