RUTHFULLY YOURS

Few on Capitol Hill didn’t have an opinion on Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical today, which urged people to preserve God’s creation instead of turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”

“It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with progress,” the pope wrote. “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.”

“…Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.”

This image provided by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles shows the design of a proposed Sons of Confederate Veterans license plate. The Supreme Court has upheld Texas’ refusal to issue a license plate bearing the Confederate battle flag, rejecting a free-speech challenge. The court said Thursday that Texas can limit the content of license plates because they are state property and not the equivalent of a bumper sticker. (AP photo and caption.)

The Supreme Court today accelerated the dangerous erosion of First Amendment protection, making way for government censorship of expression that does not conform to its preferences. In Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, the sharply divided Court ruled that the state of Texas could constitutionally engage in viewpoint discrimination by prohibiting a specialty license plate that depicted the Confederate flag.

You’re thinking, “What’s the harm?” After all, that flag is deemed by many – perhaps most (though I’ve done no research on the matter) – to be an offensive symbol of racism and slavery. Even if everyone doesn’t see it that way, enough do, and passionately so; thus, why should the state not ban the flag’s appearance on property that is issued by the government itself?

This, indeed, was the rationale of the five-justice majority — an interesting mix of the Court’s four consistent liberals (Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the opinion, and Justices Ruth Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) with one of its staunchest conservatives, Justice Clarence Thomas. Reasoning that license plates — specialty or not — are “government speech,” Justice Breyer concluded that the state has the power, unregulated by the First Amendment, to express its views on matters of policy.

But is it really “government speech”? In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy) pointed out that the state has licensed some 350 specialty plates, some of which cannot conceivably be statements of government policy (e.g., “Rather Be Golfing”; “NASCAR – 24 Jeff Gordon”; Young Lawyers”; “Get It Sold With Remax”; and “University of Oklahoma” – a major football rival of Texas schools – as well as several other out-of-state institutions). In fact, the dissent pointed out, the state has also authorized a plate honoring “Buffalo Soldiers,” African American soldiers originally of the Army’s post-Civil War 20th Cavalry Regiment. While that outfit would be broadly popular no doubt, the plate offends at least some Native Americans, who protested that they felt the same way about the cavalry as African Americans did about the Confederacy.

The point, of course, is that although the state is the issuer of the license plates (which it requires all automobiles registered in Texas to display), the speech expressed on the specialty plates is associated with the private parties who propose, select, and exhibit the plates. Therefore, it is not reasonably understood as government speech; it is private speech that the government is regulating – and government has no business using its regulatory authority to favor or disfavor competing points of view.

Thus, at least in the narrow context of license plates, the Court has given its imprimatur to a government power to discriminate, to promote expression it approves of and suppress expression it does not. This is alarmingly inconsistent with the Constitution’s protection of private opinion or expression from government intrusion, suppression, or editing.

The decision is obnoxious even if it is truly confined to license plates. Concededly, the license plate is not a traditional speech medium, but today it functions like millions of small, mobile billboards. The disturbing thing, however, is that the consequences of this ruling could be far-reaching over time. It could come to stand for the proposition that essentially private speech morphs into government speech if the government is involved, however tangentially, in the funding or regulation of the format in which the speech is conveyed.

A recent NOAA article is just what Doctor Doom ordered. It claims the 18-year “hiatus” in rising planetary temperatures isn’t really happening. (The “pause” followed a 20-year modest temperature increase, which followed a prolonged cooling period.) The article states:

“Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century. These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”

Published in Science magazine to ensure extensive news coverage before critics could expose its flaws, the report was indeed featured prominently in the national print, television, radio and electronic media.

An African-American millionaire can buy a home in any expensive suburb. Color is no longer a barrier. Despite this progress, President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is accusing expensive towns of racism, simply because most minorities can’t afford to live there.

Westchester County, N.Y., has struggled since 2009 under a plan by a federal monitor to compel the county to comply with HUD’s demands for multiunit affordable housing in expensive areas. Hillary Clinton claims to be a warrior against inequality.

But her adopted hometown of Chappaqua, an upscale Westchester village that one resident describes as “a little piece of heaven,” is battling HUD’s demands. The legal war in Hillary’s backyard is a preview.

GOP candidates clearly recognize the growing threat to the nation, in marked contrast with Hillary Clinton.
The high moments were few in Hillary Clinton’s kickoff campaign speech Saturday, though her tirade describing Republicans as the forces of “yesterday,” singing the same old song, was indisputably a crowd-pleaser. It was also conspicuous in its familiarity, as was Mrs. Clinton’s accompanying litany of accusations, each in its old-song way the quintessence of Obama-age social wisdom.

“I’ll fight back,” she declared, “against Republican efforts to disempower and disenfranchise young people, poor people, people with disabilities and people of color.” There was more of the kind about the oppression of women and gay people who love each other, and transgender people and their families—her encyclopedia of the victimized is long—and dark references to “CEOs and hedge-fund managers” and “billionaires and corporations.”

Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin bucks his party by shepherding 28 Democrats into the free-trade camp.
If America soon steps back up as a leader on global trade, credit will go in large part to a very courageous Wisconsin congressman—and not the one you’re thinking of.

Yes, Rep. Paul Ryan deserves a medal for his work to put fast-track trade legislation on President Obama’s desk. House Republicans delivered on that promise again Thursday, repassing a Trade Promotion Authority bill that would allow Mr. Obama to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade pact with 11 Pacific nations.

Yet Republicans on their own could deliver bupkis. GOP leaders in the House always knew they would need close to 30 Democrats to get a deal done. So they turned to Mr. Ryan’s Badger State brother, Democratic Rep. Ron Kind.

Fr. Sirico is president of the Acton Institute.
Let’s cut to the chase: Much of what is in Pope Francis’ encyclical on environmental stewardship, Laudato Si’, poses a major challenge for free-market advocates, those of us who believe that capitalism is a powerful force for caring for the earth and lifting people out of poverty. But one of the most welcome lines is a call for honest, respectful discussion.

Francis warns against both extremes: on one end, “those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.” And on the other end those who view men and women “as no more than a threat, jeopardizing the global ecosystem, and consequently the presence of human beings on the planet should be reduced.”

There is an undeniable majesty to the papacy, one that is politically useful to the Left from time to time. The same Western liberals who abominate the Catholic Church as an atavistic relic of more superstitious times, who regard its teachings on abortion and contraception as inhumane and its teachings on sexuality as a hate crime today are celebrating Pope Francis’s global-warming encyclical, Laudato Si’, as a moral mandate for their cause. So much for that seamless garment.

It may be that the carbon tax, like Paris, is worth a Mass.

The main argument of the encyclical will be no surprise to those familiar with Pope Francis’s characteristic line of thought, which combines an admirable and proper concern for the condition of the world’s poor with a crude and backward understanding of economics and politics both. Any number of straw men go up in flames in this rhetorical auto-da-fé, as the pope frames his concern in tendentious economic terms: “By itself, the market cannot guarantee integral human development and social inclusion.” We are familiar with no free-market thinker, even the most extreme, who believes that “by itself, the market can guarantee integral human development.” There are any number of other players in social life — the family, civil society, the large and durable institution of which the pope is the chief executive — that contribute to human flourishing. The pope is here taking a side in a conflict that, so far as we can tell, does not exist.

Hopes that the pope’s encyclical will narrow the climate-change divide are likely to be dashed.

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” Pope Francis tells us in his encyclical Laudato si’. The encyclical had climate alarmists in a swoon for the pope’s deep dive into climate policy and taking a swing at skeptics for denial and obstructionism. But the encyclical has the merit of honesty in not maintaining any pretense of objectivity and balance. “Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity” — the pope writes in an allusion to the disinterested quest for scientific knowledge — “but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”

According to the organization Iran Human Rights, the Iranian regime has executed a prisoner every two hours this month.

“So far in 2015, more than 560 have been executed, and we are just in the first half of the year… What we are witnessing today is not so much different from what ISIS is doing. The difference is that the Iranian authorities do it in a more controlled manner, and represent a country which is a full member of the international community with good diplomatic relations with the West.” — Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesman for Iran Human Rights.

And now the West, with the possibility of a nuclear deal, stands to increase Iran’s diplomatic standing.

As negotiations between the P5+1 countries and Iran continue, human rights concerns under the Iranian regime remain on the periphery.