Month: September 2022

From a two-Justice opinion in the Indiana Supreme Court case Payne-Elliott v. Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Inc., written by Justice Geoffrey Slaughter and joined by Justice Mark Massa. Justices Christopher Goff and Derek Molter concurred in the judgment (without a separate opinion), and Chief Justice Loretta Rush didn’t participate, so Justice Slaughter’s opinion is not a majority, but it’s likely to prove influential:

Joshua Payne-Elliott sued the Roman Catholic Archdiocese … for intentional interference with his contract and employment with Cathedral High School, a Catholic school in Indianapolis….

More specifically, he alleges as follows. Cathedral, founded in 1918, was initially owned by the archdiocese, which later turned over care of Cathedral to the Brothers of Holy Cross. Cathedral was incorporated in 1972 “for the sole purpose of maintaining and operating a Roman Catholic secondary school.” In substance, Cathedral’s bylaws state as follows: “the essential Holy Cross character of Cathedral as a Catholic high school shall be at all times maintained and [ ] a mission priority is to be an educator in the faith.” The archdiocese exercises “significant control” over Cathedral, including “its recognition of Cathedral as a Catholic school.”

From 2006 until June 2019, Cathedral employed Payne-Elliott as a world-language and social-studies teacher under a contract that was renewed annually. Payne-Elliott, “a homosexual male,” married his same-sex spouse in 2017; his spouse teaches at Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School, also in Indianapolis. Cathedral continued renewing Payne-Elliott’s teacher contract through May 2019 for the 2019–2020 school year. The archdiocese knew about Payne-Elliott’s contract with Cathedral.

In June 2019, Brebeuf announced that despite pressure from the archdiocese, it would not fire Payne-Elliott’s spouse. Brebeuf explained it declined the archdiocese’s directive that Brebeuf dismiss the spouse “due to the teacher being a spouse within a civilly-recognized same-sex marriage.” The next day, Archbishop Charles C. Thompson issued a decree stating that, after extensive dialogue between the archdiocese and Brebeuf, the archdiocese no longer recognizes Brebeuf as a Catholic institution. The decree states that, in accord with Canon 803 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, Brebeuf, “by its own selection, can no longer use the name Catholic and will no longer be identified or recognized as a Catholic institution by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis nor included in the listing of The Official Catholic Directory.” The decree explains that the archbishop accepted and respected a school’s right and responsibility to make decisions, but that it is his “canonical responsibility to oversee faith and morals as related to Catholic identity within the Archdiocese of Indianapolis” and that Brebeuf “ha[d] chosen not to implement changes in accord with the doctrine and pastoral practice of the Catholic Church[.]”

The complaint alleges further that the archdiocese gave Cathedral the same directive it gave Brebeuf. Cathedral chose differently. On June 23, 2019, Cathedral’s president informed Payne-Elliott that, according to this directive, Cathedral was terminating his employment. The president stated that the sole reason for his firing was that “the Archbishop directed that we [Cathedral] can’t have someone with a public same-sex marriage here and remain Catholic.”

Cathedral then posted a letter addressed to the “Cathedral Family” on its website. The letter stated, in part, that “after 22 months of earnest discussion and extensive dialogue” between Cathedral and the archdiocese, “Archbishop Thompson made it clear that Cathedral’s continued employment of a teacher in a public, same-sex marriage would result in our forfeiting our Catholic identity due to our employment of an individual living in contradiction to Catholic teaching on marriage.”

It continued: “Cathedral has been a Catholic school for the past 100 years and our Catholic faith is at the core of who we are and what we teach at Cathedral. We are committed to educating our students in the tenets of the Catholic faith[.]” It stated further that “to remain a Catholic Holy Cross School, Cathedral must follow the direct guidance given to us by Archbishop Thompson and separate from the teacher.” During oral argument, Payne-Elliott’s counsel told us that his client “threatened” to sue Cathedral for breach of contract, and Cathedral settled….

[U]nder the church-autonomy doctrine a civil court may not (1) penalize via tort law (2) a communication or coordination among church officials or members (3) on a matter of internal church policy or administration that (4) does not culminate in a criminal act. Here, based on the complaint’s allegations, the church-autonomy doctrine bars the case. First, the complaint alleges tort claims, i.e., intentional interference with contract and employment.

Second, the complaint rests on communications between church officials and members, here the archbishop and Cathedral. It alleges that the archdiocese “directed” Cathedral to fire Payne-Elliott in accordance with the archbishop’s “directive”; that the archbishop “directed” Cathedral that it could not have Payne-Elliott on staff and remain Catholic; that the archbishop “made it clear” that if Cathedral were to continue to employ Payne-Elliott, it would forfeit its status as a Catholic school; and that Cathedral must “follow the direct guidance given to us by [the] Archbishop.”

Third, the archdiocese’s decision whether a school maintains its Catholic identity is an internal matter that concerns both church policy and administration. The gist of Payne-Elliott’s claims is communication between the archbishop and Cathedral, a Catholic school, over a matter involving church discipline and doctrine: whether and when the archdiocese would continue to recognize Cathedral as Catholic is at the heart of the communication (i.e., the “directive” to Cathedral). The complaint and attachments show the directive was, like the one to Brebeuf, a choice the archdiocese gave Cathedral. It could either retain its recognition as a Catholic school by following the archdiocese’s instruction on what was required to be recognized as a Catholic school or forfeit continued recognition. This choice reflects the archdiocese’s authority to declare which schools are Catholic, consistent with Dwenger.

Fourth, the complaint does not allege the archdiocese’s tortious conduct ended in a criminal act. {[C]riminal conduct is not protected by the church-autonomy doctrine—even if carried out using communications about church doctrine or policy. [The court cited for this proposition a precedent that noted that “the Free Exercise Clause would [not] prevent prosecution for an agreement with another person to commit a felony, even if that other person is another church member or official and the agreement implicates ecclesiastical issues, if the state also proves an overt act in furtherance of that agreement in accordance with Indiana’s conspiracy statute. For example, a defendant charged with conspiracy to commit murder via terroristic attacks could not insulate himself from liability merely by claiming that the agreement element of the crime occurred within a protected discussion of church doctrine or policy. -EV]} Thus, Payne-Elliott’s complaint establishes the church-autonomy defense and requires dismissal ….

Congratulations to John S. (Jay) Mercer and Paul J. Carroll of Wooton Hoy, LLC, and Luke W. Goodrich, Daniel H. Blomberg, and Joseph C. Davis of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The post First Amendment Protects Catholic Archidocese's Pressuring Catholic School to Fire Same-Sex-Married Teacher appeared first on Reason.com.

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If the inevitable tradeoffs are ignored, most people would be in favor of getting a free lunch.

Unfortunately, there ain’t no such thing.

A new poll shows that President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for many individuals who borrowed money from the federal government to pay for college (and $20,000 for those with need-based Pell Grants) is broadly popular—as long as people don’t think about the scheme’s knock-on effects. Once the potential consequences—including higher inflation and rising college tuition costs, are taken into account—support for student debt forgiveness craters, even among self-identified Democrats.

“Support for cancelling federal student loan debt plummets when Americans consider its trade-offs,” writes Emily Ekins, director of polling for the libertarian Cato Institute, which published polling data on student debt forgiveness Thursday. The Cato/YouGov survey includes more than 2,300 Americans and was conducted over six days in mid-August, just prior to the White House’s August 24 announcement of the student loan forgiveness plan.

The results are striking. While 64 percent of respondents (and 88 percent of Democrats) back student loan forgiveness of $10,000 for individuals earning up to $150,000 annually, those totals fall significantly once potential consequences are introduced.

If student loan forgiveness means colleges will raise their prices, for example, support for the policy plummets to 25 percent overall (and 31 percent from Democrats).

But that’s probably the most obvious and inevitable consequence of forgiving student debt—and, more accurately, of Biden’s decision to change how student loan repayment plans will work in the future.

The new loan-repayment structure caps payments as a percentage of a borrower’s income, meaning that the amount borrowed above the cap becomes effectively meaningless. Colleges will be able to raise tuition to astronomical levels while telling students not to worry about the amount because what they owe in repayment will be capped.

As Reason‘s Robby Soave explained earlier this week, the White House has succeeded only in creating even stronger incentives for everyone involved in higher education to fleece students and taxpayers. Even lefty policy wonks like Matt Bruenig have quickly identified the flaws in this idea, which will likely force further government interventions in the near future.

What if student loan forgiveness also caused more employers to require a college degree, even for jobs that someone could do without spending four years studying various unrelated topics? When presented with that possibility, only 29 percent of respondents (and 36 percent of Democrats) in the Cato/YouGov poll say they would support Biden’s policy. Too bad, because that’s a likely outcome, too.

And what if most of the benefits of student debt forgiveness accrued to wealthier Americans? Then support for the policy falls to 32 percent overall and 44 percent among Democrats.

That’s inevitable too because the White House decided to make student loan forgiveness available to individuals earning up to $125,000 and couples earning up to $250,000.

Because the final version of Biden’s plan included larger amounts of debt cancellation for Pell Grant holders and the ongoing repayment caps, the distribution of benefits is not quite as skewed as it was when the Penn Wharton Budget Model analyzed the initial version of the proposal. Even so, a revised analysis shows that 62 percent of the benefits will flow to people in the upper 60 percent of incomes (those earning over $50,100 this year). Rather than being a leg up for the working class, this policy remains mostly a giveaway to upwardly mobile middle- and upper-middle-class Americans with college degrees.

The popularity, or lack thereof, of a policy is not indicative of its worthiness, of course. But it is hard to imagine the Biden administration pursuing a policy this legally and economically fraught if not for student debt relief’s popularity among the Democratic base.

That popularity, however, might be something of a mirage. “These data show that Americans don’t like the costs that many experts believe are associated with federal student loan forgiveness,” says Ekins.

None of this is surprising. More than three years ago, Quinnipiac identified a similar trend in a poll about student debt relief. In that survey, a majority supported the idea of giving $50,000 in debt relief to individuals from households making less than $250,000 annually, but a majority opposed the idea when told that higher taxes would be necessary to pay for it.

It’s not clear that there will be a direct tax increase necessary to pay for Biden’s student debt relief. Instead, the government will simply not collect some of the future revenue it expected to, which will add to the long-term budget deficit.

Even so, there’s no such thing as a free lunch for American student loan borrowers. Democrats might find that there’s no such thing as a free lunch at the polls, either.

The post Most Americans Support Student Debt Forgiveness Until They Think About It appeared first on Reason.com.

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This new article of mine will be coming out next year in the Journal of Law and Religion, and I thought I’d serialize it here; there’s still plenty of time for editing, so I’d love to hear people’s feedback. I posted several excerpts last week (you can read them in the PDF, if you’d like), and want to finish it up this week; here’s the last substantive part, IV.B, and the Conclusion.

[* * *]

Providing pseudonymity or anonymity here affects not just the other community members’ religious interests, but also their political interests: their rights to monitor what is happening in their communities, to better understand not just their coreligionists’ actions but also government processes.

Consider, for instance, pseudonymity in litigation. The right to public access to information in government records is generally framed as a right to “oversee and monitor the workings of the Judicial Branch.”[1] Indeed, as noted above, the right of access to court records[2]—and, in the view of many courts, the right of access to parties’ names—is a “clear and strong First Amendment interest.”[3]

Indeed, if a community member is suing a community leader or a community institution,[4] other members might especially want to monitor the judicial system to make sure the defendant is being treated fairly. “Public confidence” in the judiciary, courts say, “cannot long be maintained where important judicial decisions are made behind closed doors and then announced in conclusive terms to the public, with the record supporting the court’s decision sealed from public view.”[5] That may be especially true for minority religious communities’ confidence in the secular judiciary, since many minority religions and denominations might have special reasons to distrust the majority’s legal system.[6]

To be sure, the plaintiff might understandably worry that those coreligionists will resent him for suing, and may shun him or refuse to do business with him. But that is a commonplace concern for many plaintiffs, even outside religious communities, and is generally seen as insufficient to justify pseudonymity and the concomitant interference with the First Amendment interest in public supervision of the courts.[7]

Indeed, when pseudonymity is available for plaintiffs who are suing fellow community members (which is only a subset of the litigation I describe, though a nontrivial subset), the pseudonymity can sharply damage the community, even beyond the damage caused by the underlying allegations of misconduct. A trusted institution or individual is sued, by name. Community members hear about the allegations, and are naturally troubled.

But because the accuser is unnamed, community members have an especially hard time figuring out how credible the allegations are. Perhaps eventually the civil justice system will reach a result, but that will likely be years in the future. The result may not fully dispose of the allegations, for instance if the claim is dismissed on procedural grounds, or if it settles. Plus the community might not trust the civil justice system’s results in any event.

And this effect on the religious community would be especially serious if the court accompanies its pseudonymity order with an express or implied gag order on the opposing party, for instance requiring that a religious institution or a religious leader being sued by the plaintiff “shall not publicly identify Plaintiff,” not just “in court filings” but also “otherwise.”[8] The institution or leader would be barred from communicating with fellow members of the religious community, and responding to the allegations that had publicly been made.

Even in a case that doesn’t involve an intracommunity dispute, the right of access to court records includes people’s right to know what’s going on in various government facilities, such as the courts or the public licensing systems, and the “who” is a big part of the “what”: “[L]awsuits are public events and the public has a legitimate interest in knowing the facts involved in them. Among the facts is the identity of the parties.”[9] “The people have a right to know who is using their courts.”[10] “[A]nonymous litigation runs contrary to the rights of the public to have open judicial proceedings and to know who is using court facilities and procedures funded by public taxes.”[11] “The Court is a public institution and the public has a right to look over our shoulders and see who is seeking relief in public court.”[12] That is why any individual has standing to intervene to assert a right of access to court records (by opposing sealing or pseudonymity),[13] though in some situations courts do recognize exceptions to this right of access.

Thus, for instance, if a civil lawsuit is filed by someone who claims he was wrongly or pretextually fired or arrested for drunkenness, members of the public can generally get access to the filings and to the plaintiff’s name. A local reporter can write a story in the local newspaper, which would be especially likely if the plaintiff is someone of some standing in the community—a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, or the like. Fellow community members could decide whether this information should lead them to trust the plaintiff less. Likewise, if a litigant sues a respected community institution, community members can take that into account in their personal judgment of the litigant’s character.

Say, though, that a court allows the plaintiff to sue pseudonymously because he belongs to a religious community that condemns alcohol consumption, or because he’s suing a respected religious institution and the religious community might condemn such airing of its dirty laundry before outsiders. A reporter for a newspaper within that community then wouldn’t be able to write the same sort of story, because the plaintiff won’t be identified. (Reporters for other newspapers wouldn’t be, either, but they may well be less interested in cases within that community.) Community members wouldn’t be able to use the information about the lawsuit to update their judgments about the plaintiff. And the legal system would be opaque to them, in a way that it is not when people from other religious communities are the litigants.

What’s more, depriving the religious community members of that information would be a big part of the purpose of maintaining pseudonymity: The theory, after all, is that the plaintiff should be able to litigate without facing stigma within that community, presumably because the legal system thinks that stigma would be excessive or otherwise unfair. But, again, by doing that the secular legal system will be taking sides in favor of the plaintiff and against his coreligionists.

And similar effects will be present in the other anonymity scenarios I mention. Where a reporter for a community newspaper might normally be able to write a fairly informative story about a new liquor license application, or about the donations to a local political campaign, allowing pseudonymity to people who fear religious community opprobrium would block that: A reporter for a religious community newspaper might be denied access to the details of who owns the new bar or liquor store, or who has been financing a local campaign that’s of importance to the religious community.

All this suggests that providing pseudonymity to members of particular religious groups might violate the principle of the Texas Monthly v. Bullock lead opinion, which struck down a sales tax exemption for religious works on Establishment Clause grounds. That three-Justice opinion (written by Justice Brennan and joined by Justices Marshall and Stevens) stressed that the tax exemption was not a permissible accommodation of religion, because it “burdens nonbeneficiaries markedly”[14] “by increasing their tax bills by whatever amount is needed to offset the benefit bestowed on subscribers to religious publications.”[15]

Here too the exemption burdens third parties, in the ways described above: It denies third parties, especially the litigant’s fellow community members, information that they would otherwise possess, and that can be important to their community’s religious and political life. Indeed, given that some courts view the public’s right to access the information about litigant identities as a First Amendment right,[16] the exemption thus reduces third parties’ constitutional rights.

To be sure, the analogy to Texas Monthly is imperfect; and the Texas Monthly concurrences are even more distant, because they stressed that tax exemption’s “preferential support for the communication of religious messages”[17]—an element that is missing here. Still, the core point remains, either as an Establishment Clause argument or at least as a policy argument: The benefits to some religious observers (or at least to some people who have family members within religious communities) come to the expense of the information access rights of other religious observers.

Conclusion

What then is the answer? When someone seeks to remain anonymous, whether in litigation, license applications, or public records requests, should courts consider the possible stigma this would create within the person’s religious community, as a factor in favor of anonymity?

My inclination is to say no, for some of the reasons given above. Protecting the person from stigma within the religious community may itself unfairly stigmatize the community. And it may sometimes involve secular institutions taking sides between dissenters and the orthodox within the community.

Even if a community’s stigmatizing rape victims simply because they were victimized is seen as so contemptible—and so detrimental to the enforcement of rape laws—that courts do end up considering such stigma, I doubt that courts should extend that judgment to situations where the community is disapproving not of a person’s involuntary victimization but of a person’s voluntary actions (premarital sex, extramarital sex, contraceptive use, suing a fellow community member, using alcohol, gambling, and the like). That the secular legal system doesn’t disapprove of the actions, or disapproves of them only mildly, shouldn’t justify its taking steps to deny religious communities information that would normally be made public.

But whether or not readers agree with me on this, I hope that the brief analysis above can help courts and scholars analyze these questions more fully, and recognize the interests at stake here, not just for the litigants but for the religious community. And I hope this sheds light on broader discussions of whether and when the secular legal system should protect religious group members from the reactions of their fellow group members.

[1] Doe v. Public Citizen, 749 F.3d 246, 263 (4th Cir. 2014).

[2] See, e.g., Maloney v. Murphy, 984 F.3d 50, 64 (D.C. Cir. 2020).

[3] Doe v. Stegall, 653 F.2d 180, 185 (5th Cir. 1981); see also Public Citizen, 749 F.3d at 273.

[4] See, e.g., note 13 and accompanying text.

[5] Public Citizen, 749 F.3d at 263 (quoting United States v. Cianfrani, 573 F.2d 835, 851 (3d Cir. 1978)); see also Doe v. Del Rio, 241 F.R.D. 154, 156–57 (S.D.N.Y. 2006) (endorsing this view specifically as to pseudonymity); Boggs v. United States, 143 Fed. Cl. 508, 518 (2019) (likewise); T.S.R. v. J.C., 288 N.J. Super. 48, 60 (App. Div. 1996).

[6] I say “and denominations” to make clear that this applies to minority Christian subgroups, and not just to Jews, Muslims, and other outright minority religions.

[7] See, e.g., Volokh, supra note 1, at 1420–23.

[8] Doe v. Dordt Univ., 5:19-cv-04082-CJW-KEM, at 2 (N.D. Iowa Mar. 3, 2020).

[9] Doe v. U.S. Dep’t of Just., 93 F.R.D. 483, 484 (D. Colo. 1982); Doe v. Deschamps, 64 F.R.D. 652, 653 (D. Mont. 1974); A.B.C. v. XYZ Corp., 282 N.J. Super. 494, 502 (App. Div. 1995); Doe v. Frank, 951 F.2d 320, 322 (11th Cir. 1992); United States v. Microsoft Corp., 56 F.3d 1448, 1463 (D.C. Cir. 1995); In re Sealed Case, 971 F.3d 324, 326 (D.C. Cir. 2020).

[10] Doe v. Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wis., 112 F.3d 869, 872 (7th Cir. 1997); United States v. Pilcher, 950 F.3d 39 (2d Cir. 2020) (quoting Blue Cross favorably); Doe v. Megless, 654 F.3d 404, 408 (3d Cir. 2011) (same); United States v. Stoterau, 524 F.3d 988, 1013 (9th Cir. 2008) (same); In re Sealed Case, 971 F.3d 324 (D.C. Cir. 2020) (same).

[11] Doe v. Village of Deerfield, 819 F.3d 372, 377 (7th Cir. 2016).

[12] Gibson v. Pfizer, Inc., No. 3:20-cv-03870 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 28, 2020).

[13] See, e.g., Doe v. Public Citizen, 749 F.3d 246, 259, 261 (4th Cir. 2014).

[14] 489 U.S. 1, 15 (1989) (lead opin.).

[15] Id. at 18 n.8.

[16] See supra note 7.

[17] Id. at 28 (Blackmun, J., joined by O’Connor, J., concurring in the judgment); see also id. at 25–26 (White, J., concurring in the judgment).

The post Protecting People from Their Own Religious Communities: Other Community Members' Political Interests appeared first on Reason.com.

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As of yesterday, “gun-free zone” signs now adorn roughly 36 blocks of Midtown Manhattan, from 40th St. to 53rd St., between 6th and 9th Avenues, in what has rather expansively been deemed Times Square.

Though many New Yorkers have perhaps fantasized about shooting the vendors who hawk Lion King tickets, or taking aim at tourists in cargo shorts who seem too enthusiastic about the M&M store, Times Square was not up until this point a place rife with crime stemming from lawful gun owners. As such, this move should probably not be viewed as New York politicians using a data-based approach to solve an actual problem, but rather as a reaction to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which in June overturned a New York law requiring that those seeking concealed carry handgun licenses demonstrate to authorities that they have “proper cause” to do so.

The decision in Bruen, while largely affirming Second Amendment rights, does allow for public carry to be limited in places deemed “sensitive,” reminds South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman over at The Volokh Conspiracy (which is hosted by Reason). As even Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited….nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” But it’s unclear, at present, how narrow a “sensitive place” designation would have to be to hold up in court. What is clear is that New York politicians have hurried to signal, via signs installed yesterday, that vast swaths of Manhattan remain hostile to gun owners, even those attempting to follow every law currently on the books.

New York state passed a law in the immediate wake of the Bruen decision that designated certain spaces—subways, parks, playgrounds, public libraries, government buildings, churches, temples, and the like—where people would not be allowed to carry guns. Since much of that law goes into effect this week, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and city council have rushed to publicize the areas in which gun owners are barred from carrying. But there are still many carveouts, notes The New York Times:

The police will allow residents licensed to carry guns to do so, if they are headed from their homes to an area outside the boundaries, or vice versa. They will also allow those who are permitted to carry handguns on business premises—such as security guards—to do so. And people with licenses will be allowed to have guns while passing through Times Square in vehicles, provided they do not stop and that the weapons are unloaded and carried in locked containers.

Still, declaring 36 blocks of Manhattan off-limits for those who wish to carry presents all kinds of hurdles for lawful gun owners. It also arguably goes against what the justices writing for the majority in Bruen already said on the matter: “Put simply,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, “there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a ‘sensitive place’ simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.” Though 36 blocks is a far cry from the whole island of Manhattan, it’ll be interesting to see if such a broad designation holds up in court, especially as “Times Square” has traditionally been defined much more narrowly, as roughly a five-block cluster between 42nd and 47th St.

“New York has an incentive to define the concept as broadly as possible,” Blackman tells Reason. “Entire parts of Manhattan island will be no-carry zones. And I think reasonable people, in good faith, will make mistakes when carrying. One block will be okay, one block will not be okay.”

Thus, Blackman says, these rules will be “vulnerable to challenges,” though he’s “not optimistic that the lower courts will halt these rules.” Though such laws may eventually land before the Supreme Court, it would likely take years for this to happen; in the meantime, gun-carrying New Yorkers will be forced to acquiesce.

Legality aside, “gun-free zone” signs look an awful lot like pointless signaling on the part of New York state legislators and their city council lackeys who have hurried to implement these policies. It’s worth noting that “gun-free zones” are rarely truly free of guns; they just strip private law-abiding citizens of their rights, instead extending gun rights solely to cops and other agents of the state, as well as the private security guards that rich people hire to protect themselves. (How many Hollywood actors, for example, advocate for strict gun control in the wake of mass shootings yet would balk at the demand that they fire their own private security?)

It is true that New York City, like basically all other large American cities, has a gun violence problem, despite its highly restrictive policies that infringe on the rights of lawful gun owners; the homicide rate rose by roughly 47 percent in 2020, rising an additional 4 percent in 2021, reports Bloomberg. Though the homicide rate has been a little better so far in 2022, other categories of crime like robberies and burglaries are up. An April subway shooting in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park left 29 people injured, 10 by gunfire. And, high-profile shootings aside, each summer weekend brings Monday morning news reports of shooting deaths, typically in far-flung, poorer parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. It would be great if the authorities would crack down on prosecuting those crimes, and improving clearance rates, versus the “crime” of an otherwise-lawful gun owner who has accidentally carried her holstered firearm without incident through the wrong block of Midtown.

The post New York Legislators Seem To Think Posting 'Gun-Free Zone' Signs in Times Square Will Minimize Crime appeared first on Reason.com.

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Few figures have been as relentlessly vilified by the Republican Party as Anthony Fauci. In 2021, a group of House Republicans introduced a piece of legislation, called the Fire Fauci Act, to eliminate the top health official’s salary. More recently, when the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced his plan to retire, House Republicans vowed to pursue investigations into Fauci after he left public service, though it’s unclear what form this would take. 

And then there is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, perhaps the GOP’s most vocal Fauci opponent, selling t-shirts and drink koozies emblazoned with slogans like “Don’t Fauci my Florida,” and flip-flops with the words “Fauci can pound sand.” DeSantis gave the public health official a characteristically crass send-off, saying, “someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.” 

As the DeSantis koozie slogan suggests, many of these objections are as much to what one might call Fauciism as to Fauci himself. These Republicans, and the voters to whom they are attempting to appeal, object not just to the man but to the bureaucratic public health ethos he represents. 

One needn’t endorse DeSantis’ crude remarks to find fault with the way America’s public health establishment has comported itself during the last two years and change, from botched testing to divisive school closures to confusing and contradictory masking recommendations to dithering on vaccine approvals.

At best, the nation’s public health apparatus has communicated its guidance poorly and slowly, relying on euphemisms and distortions born out of a sense that the public cannot be trusted with plain, direct language. At worst, it has acted imperiously, pushing highly politicized policies backed by scant evidence while claiming the authority of science, and refusing to acknowledge the considerable human and economic costs of its pandemic-response policies. 

Moreover, there is reason to be concerned that the public health community has not learned any lessons from COVID: Many of the same errors are being committed again, in response to monkeypox. 

All of which is to say that America’s public health agencies represent a legitimate target for both criticism and reform. Although the Republican Party has delivered plenty of the former, it has produced almost no plan for the latter. Republicans have spent the past two years berating the public health establishment for its failings, but they have no apparent plan to reform the agencies. With a handful of exceptions, they are stuck at the level of schoolyard insults and koozie catchphrases.

It’s not that public health agency dysfunction has gone undiagnosed. In his book Uncontrolled Spread, former Trump administration Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Director Scott Gottlieb paints a damning portrait of the bureaucratic blunders made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) not only during the COVID-19 pandemic but also in the years leading up to it. 

It’s been widely reported, for example, that the agency botched the test kit rollout during COVID, releasing a faulty, contaminated test as COVID first spread.

But what’s less widely known is that the agency also struggled with test kits during the Zika outbreak years earlier. As the Government Accountability Office reported all the way back in 2017, the agency’s process for authorizing diagnostic tests was plagued by poor communication and manufacturing challenges. Both CDC and FDA did not follow “some of their guidance in communicating with users of diagnostic tests, including providing clear information that would have enabled users to more easily compare performance across different tests,” the GAO report concluded.

Gottlieb also recounts how the CDC resisted early calls for widespread testing during COVID, in part because that would have meant relying on private labs, relinquishing its gatekeeper status in the process. Gottlieb also documents how the agency promoted arbitrary physical distancing rules that had little basis in science well into 2021, even though those rules contributed to school closures. 

So the agency has both mundane bureaucratic process problems and more deeply rooted internal culture problems that interested critics could tackle through reform. 

Most Republicans, however, have offered little beyond sneers and slogans to advance their criticisms. One exception is Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R–Utah) plan to create a separate public health data agency aimed at responding more quickly during outbreaks. This might have some benefits at the margins, but it would hardly amount to the extensive cultural reform the public health bureaucracy needs. 

If anything, the CDC seems more likely to reform itself than most of its loudest GOP critics seem likely to reform the agency: officials recently announced an internal overhaul focused on faster data analysis and clearer public communications, though the agency has not yet spelled out its reform plan in detail.

Sadly, bureaucratic inertia is a powerful force, and the CDC’s centralized processes and gatekeeper mentality won’t be fixed by more capable communications. At heart, the agency’s problem, as Reason‘s Ron Bailey recently argued, is that it has strayed from its core mission of fighting infectious disease, becoming a broader “public health” agency concerned with social issues like obesity and gun violence when what’s needed is a narrower and more discrete focus on viral pathogens. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should focus on, well, diseases. 

For now, critics will have to hope that the CDC’s internal reforms make some productive headway because there is scant evidence that public health’s political critics have any plans to fix the problems they complain about so incessantly. 

The post Where Is the Republican Plan To Reform Public Health? appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Spanish actor Javier Bardem has scored some of his biggest commercial successes playing psychos in movies like the Bond film Skyfall and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (for which he won an Oscar with his portrayal of the dead-eyed hitman Anton Chigurh).

But as the scion of a venerable Spanish theatrical family, Bardem has broader expressive resources to draw from as well, among them a winning touch with comedy, which he demonstrated as the love-struck pickup artist in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Now, in one of his subtlest performances, in one of his best films, he is wonderfully funny puncturing the low-hanging balloons of upper-class moral pretensions. The Good Boss isn’t a belly-laugh comedy, but its humor is sharply on-target, and its story builds beautifully to a classically gratifying conclusion.

Scripted by its celebrated director, Fernando León de Aranoa, the picture is an assemblage of near-perfectly balanced comedic components. This in itself is rather clever, given that the story’s protagonist, an elaborately patronizing industrialist named Blanco (Bardem), is the owner of a company that manufactures scales—machines used to weigh everything from cattle to pretty interns (who smile politely at this sort of old-guy gag).

As we join him on a big day at his bustling factory, we find Blanco pep-talking his employees in preparation for a visit by a group of government bureaucrats charged with bestowing an annual award for “Excellence” on deserving businesses. Blanco already has several such plaques crowding a wall of his living room at home, and as a casually corrupt collector of important official connections, he’s assuming he’ll soon be adding another one. He’s a man who feels himself to be sitting pretty and has no idea how perilously shaky his perch really is.

As Blanco nervously awaits the award-givers’ arrival—the precise timing of which is unknown—everything around him starts falling apart. A longtime employee named Jose (Óscar de la Fuente), whom he laid off in a measure of corporate streamlining, has mounted a noisy protest, accompanied by his two small, photogenic children, across the street from the factory gates, where he loudly berates Blanco through a bullhorn as a heartless boss. Blanco calls the police about this inconveniently timed situation—in the interest of the children, of course—but is told the man is protesting on public property: “It’s as much his as yours,” one cop says. “Ah,” Blanco sighs, “a socialist police officer.” (Despite its antipathy toward the upper crust, the movie isn’t just an exercise in capitalist pot-shotting—among the now-jobless employee’s complaints is the fact that “I have two homes to maintain.”)

One of Blanco’s managers, a friend from childhood named Miralles (Manolo Solo), is also causing trouble. Miralles’ job performance has been seriously degraded by the shameless behavior of his wife (Mara Guil), who has been boffing the company’s hunky Moroccan production chief (Tarik Rmili). Blanco, who loudly trumpets the notion that his employees are like his family, attempts to intercede in this domestic mess, but only makes things much worse. So does his string-pulling on behalf of another worker’s delinquent son, which goes wildly wrong.

Although he doesn’t know it yet, the most ominous threat to Blanco’s existential equilibrium is his own marriage, to the slyly inscrutable Adela (Sonia Almarcha). Blanco has had no compunctions about cheating on Adela, but when his eye is drawn to a gazelle-like new intern named Liliana (Almudena Amor), he doesn’t realize he’ll soon be rafting down a river of no return. The unimprovably droll Bardem plays Blanco, with his self-aggrandizing charm and deeply internalized reserves of self-pity, as a perfect victim, richly deserving of whatever he gets. Especially the willowy Liliana, whose youthful amusement in the face of his weary geezer come-ons would be much more disconcerting if he realized what was actually happening. “This situation turns me on,” she tells him.

(The Good Boss is in Spanish, with English subtitles.)

The post Review: <em>The Good Boss</em> appeared first on Reason.com.

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