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The New Jersey legislature has approved a bill allowing police officers to view their bodycam video before they write their reports, except in cases where somebody has died. The bill now goes to Gov. Phil Murphy. Murphy vetoed a similar bill in November.
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The New Jersey legislature has approved a bill allowing police officers to view their bodycam video before they write their reports, except in cases where somebody has died. The bill now goes to Gov. Phil Murphy. Murphy vetoed a similar bill in November.
The post Brickbat: That's My Story appeared first on Reason.com.
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Daily Mail (UK) (Chris Hastings) reports:
[S]taff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
The advice [was] revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday….
[I]t is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’….
I think if individual faculty members want to warn students about particular books this way, they should be free to do so. And I actually support warning students generally about this—preferably in orientation, but perhaps even at the start of a class syllabus—precisely to remind them that studying the human experience at a university necessarily involves confronting the dark sides of humanity.
But I personally think it’s a mistake to offer such book-by-book advice, precisely because it reinforces the presupposition that students in university literature, history, anthropology, law, etc. classes should by default expect nothing offensive, upsetting, or explicit, and are thus entitled to be warned as to departures from this norm. The history of humanity has been in large part the history of tyranny, mass murder, slavery, rape, racism, sexist oppression, and much more. (Thankfully, it hasn’t been only that, but many serious accounts, real or fictional, will include the evil as well as the good.)
Adults who study humanity should recognize that this is so. They should be prepared to deal with it at all times in their studies. Indeed, the more they want to fight such evils, the more they should be ready to deal with it without the need for trigger warnings or other supposed protections. And the institutions tasked with educating such adults ought to seek to inculcate such a perspective, as part of their educational function.
Empirical evidence apparently also suggests that trigger warnings are largely ineffective for preventing student upset, see Mevagh Sanson et al., Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance, 7 Clinical Psychol. Sci. 778 (2019), and may indeed be counterproductive: They may “cause small adverse side effects,” Payton J. Jones et al., Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories, 8 Clinical Psychol. Sci. 905 (2020), such as by increasing “risk for developing PTSD in the event of trauma, and disability-related stigma around trauma survivors,” and “increas[ing] immediate anxiety response for a subset of individuals whose beliefs predispose them to such a response.” Benjamin W. Bellet et al., Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead, 61 J. Behav. Therapy & Experimental Psychiatry 134, 140 (2018). But to the extent the empirical debate on that subject is unsettled, I think they are generally unsound in universities, at least when it comes to work-by-work or class-session-by-class-session warnings.
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Daily Mail (UK) (Chris Hastings) reports:
[S]taff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
The advice [was] revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday….
[I]t is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’….
I think if individual faculty members want to warn students about particular books this way, they should be free to do so. And I actually support warning students generally about this—preferably in orientation, but perhaps even at the start of a class syllabus—precisely to remind them that studying the human experience at a university necessarily involves confronting the dark sides of humanity.
But I personally think it’s a mistake to offer such book-by-book advice, precisely because it reinforces the presupposition that students in university literature, history, anthropology, law, etc. classes should by default expect nothing offensive, upsetting, or explicit, and are thus entitled to be warned as to departures from this norm. The history of humanity has been in large part the history of tyranny, mass murder, slavery, rape, racism, sexist oppression, and much more. (Thankfully, it hasn’t been only that, but many serious accounts, real or fictional, will include the evil as well as the good.)
Adults who study humanity should recognize that this is so. They should be prepared to deal with it at all times in their studies. Indeed, the more they want to fight such evils, the more they should be ready to deal with it without the need for trigger warnings or other supposed protections. And the institutions tasked with educating such adults ought to seek to inculcate such a perspective, as part of their educational function.
Empirical evidence apparently also suggests that trigger warnings are largely ineffective for preventing student upset, see Mevagh Sanson et al., Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance, 7 Clinical Psychol. Sci. 778 (2019), and may indeed be counterproductive: They may “cause small adverse side effects,” Payton J. Jones et al., Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories, 8 Clinical Psychol. Sci. 905 (2020), such as by increasing “risk for developing PTSD in the event of trauma, and disability-related stigma around trauma survivors,” and “increas[ing] immediate anxiety response for a subset of individuals whose beliefs predispose them to such a response.” Benjamin W. Bellet et al., Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead, 61 J. Behav. Therapy & Experimental Psychiatry 134, 140 (2018). But to the extent the empirical debate on that subject is unsettled, I think they are generally unsound in universities, at least when it comes to work-by-work or class-session-by-class-session warnings.
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1/23/1915: Justice Potter Stewart born.
The post Today in Supreme Court History: January 23, 1915 appeared first on Reason.com.
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1/23/1915: Justice Potter Stewart born.
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The Monterey pine tree of California’s Central Coast has developed an ingenious method for propagating the species in a state bedeviled by irregular wildfire: The evergreen’s distinctive pine cones, sealed shut by a protective resin, open to release their seeds only in response to extreme heat. Competing brush having been newly cleared by fire, the serotinous sentinels are then better positioned to produce new growth.
Elections operate on a more regular schedule than California conflagrations, and those November Tuesdays don’t always rise to the level of catastrophe for an entire political party. But the surprise 2021 victory of GOP outsider Glenn Youngkin over heavily favored Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, along with a handful of other shock victories for Republicans and shock defeats for pet progressive causes, was greeted by many left-leaners in the political class as a potentially terrain-changing calamity.
“Democrats need to go back to school,” wrote Washington Post columnist James Hohmann. New York Times editorial board business and economics writer Binyamin Appelbaum produced a damning post-election video pointing out that “it is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding, and economic inequality is increasing most quickly.”
Irascible Democratic strategist James Carville was even more blunt, telling PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness.” Carville elaborated: “Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this defund-the-police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools…people see that, and it…just really [has] a suppressive effect all across the country [for] Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something. They’re expressing language that people just don’t use, and there’s a backlash and a frustration at that.”
The parties of first-term presidents tend to take a drubbing at the ballot box in non-presidential-election years. Since World War II, only one rookie president has seen his party gain congressional seats in his first midterm elections: George W. Bush in 2002, at the height of post-9/11, pre–Iraq War fever, and his GOP gained just eight seats in the House of Representatives. The other 11 first-term presidents watched their parties lose an average of 29 House seats. Three of the last four presidents incurred three of the top four losses: Barack Obama’s 63 in 2010, Bill Clinton’s 52 in 1994, and Donald Trump’s 40 in 2018.
It makes intuitive sense that elections ostensibly having nothing to do with the White House are increasingly becoming referenda on the country’s chief executive. The federal government has metastasized so quickly that the size of the federal deficit alone in fiscal year 2021 ($2.77 trillion) is larger than the entire amount of federal spending every year in the country’s history through 1997, adjusted for inflation.
The commander in chief now has unchecked power to drone U.S. citizens to death or detain them indefinitely without criminal charge. His surveillance state routinely vacuums up information about the communications activities of all of us, warrant or no. The administrative state he oversees has become a free-floating enforcer of presidential whims, such as the national eviction moratorium that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintained for 12 months and the vaccine mandate that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration imposed on private businesses in November.
As power in the capital has swollen, civic and journalistic activity in the hinterlands has withered, so political energy and attention during our apprehensive times inevitably fixate on the personality at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s no wonder that midterm swings have gotten larger, or that state and local politicians try to make their campaigns about the sitting (or even former) president.
But it’s a mistake to treat these developments as a fixed law of nature, grinding along irrespective of individual free will. For elections to swing from one party to another, you need swing voters. And as much as they are routinely maligned by those who make their living in politics, these swing voters have a name: the independents.
Even the narrowest definition of this bloc—people who vote for third-party and independent candidates—reveals an outsized influence on elections. For example, nontraditional presidential voters shrank by 3.9 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, from 5.7 percent (including 3.3 percent for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson) to 1.8 percent of the electorate. The Democratic nominee’s share of the popular vote, meanwhile, climbed by 3.1 percentage points; Trump gained 0.8 percentage points. Exit polls in 2020 showed that 59 percent of major-party returnees voted for Biden.
This trend was reflected not just in 2020 pre-election and exit polls of 2016 third-party/independent voters but also in the attitudes of more broadly defined “independents.” Gallup, Pew, and several other public opinion organizations ask people to describe their political affiliations (Democratic, Republican, or independent), and that question produces a number considerably larger than 5.7 percent. In the case of Gallup, which has been asking the question since 1988, “independent” has been the No. 1 answer in every survey since 2013, reaching an all-time high of 50 percent in February 2021.
Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton among self-described independents in 2016, 43 percent to 42 percent, according to Pew. But throughout his tumultuous presidency, this bloc never once gave him a job approval rating higher than 47 percent, even as nine out of 10 Republicans routinely gave their standard-bearer a thumbs-up.
Biden started his term with an approval rate among independents that Trump could only dream of: 61 percent. But from there it plummeted, all the way down to 34 percent as of October 2021. In our negatively polarized times, when party members stand by their man in opposition to the other team, overall approval hinges on the attitudes of independents. The 46th president has had the worst first-year approval ratings, in the low 40s, of any modern president—except Donald Trump.
One reason some political commentators are forever writing articles headlined “The Myth of the Independent Voter” is that the bloc does not necessarily have a coherent and predictable set of ideological or political-consumer preferences. Furthermore, the group contains internal clumps that usually vote for the same party across elections. Both critiques are true. But they miss an important point.
Government overreach—in overall size, in meddling with private transactions, in regulating our intimate decisions, in punishing disfavored groups—can be likened to a forest fire: Eventually, it will burn high and hot enough for even the apolitical to feel the flames. We will be discovering and arguing over exactly what unsealed the rosin among the independent voters who seeded Democratic defeats in November 2021. But political professionals of all species need to relearn one clear lesson: If you make the government feel too dangerous, a corrective bloc of voters will pour cold water on your face. At a time of bipartisan big-government populism, such small victories may be the only thing that keeps us going.
The post The Independents Strike Back appeared first on Reason.com.
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The Monterey pine tree of California’s Central Coast has developed an ingenious method for propagating the species in a state bedeviled by irregular wildfire: The evergreen’s distinctive pine cones, sealed shut by a protective resin, open to release their seeds only in response to extreme heat. Competing brush having been newly cleared by fire, the serotinous sentinels are then better positioned to produce new growth.
Elections operate on a more regular schedule than California conflagrations, and those November Tuesdays don’t always rise to the level of catastrophe for an entire political party. But the surprise 2021 victory of GOP outsider Glenn Youngkin over heavily favored Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, along with a handful of other shock victories for Republicans and shock defeats for pet progressive causes, was greeted by many left-leaners in the political class as a potentially terrain-changing calamity.
“Democrats need to go back to school,” wrote Washington Post columnist James Hohmann. New York Times editorial board business and economics writer Binyamin Appelbaum produced a damning post-election video pointing out that “it is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding, and economic inequality is increasing most quickly.”
Irascible Democratic strategist James Carville was even more blunt, telling PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness.” Carville elaborated: “Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this defund-the-police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools…people see that, and it…just really [has] a suppressive effect all across the country [for] Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something. They’re expressing language that people just don’t use, and there’s a backlash and a frustration at that.”
The parties of first-term presidents tend to take a drubbing at the ballot box in non-presidential-election years. Since World War II, only one rookie president has seen his party gain congressional seats in his first midterm elections: George W. Bush in 2002, at the height of post-9/11, pre–Iraq War fever, and his GOP gained just eight seats in the House of Representatives. The other 11 first-term presidents watched their parties lose an average of 29 House seats. Three of the last four presidents incurred three of the top four losses: Barack Obama’s 63 in 2010, Bill Clinton’s 52 in 1994, and Donald Trump’s 40 in 2018.
It makes intuitive sense that elections ostensibly having nothing to do with the White House are increasingly becoming referenda on the country’s chief executive. The federal government has metastasized so quickly that the size of the federal deficit alone in fiscal year 2021 ($2.77 trillion) is larger than the entire amount of federal spending every year in the country’s history through 1997, adjusted for inflation.
The commander in chief now has unchecked power to drone U.S. citizens to death or detain them indefinitely without criminal charge. His surveillance state routinely vacuums up information about the communications activities of all of us, warrant or no. The administrative state he oversees has become a free-floating enforcer of presidential whims, such as the national eviction moratorium that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintained for 12 months and the vaccine mandate that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration imposed on private businesses in November.
As power in the capital has swollen, civic and journalistic activity in the hinterlands has withered, so political energy and attention during our apprehensive times inevitably fixate on the personality at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s no wonder that midterm swings have gotten larger, or that state and local politicians try to make their campaigns about the sitting (or even former) president.
But it’s a mistake to treat these developments as a fixed law of nature, grinding along irrespective of individual free will. For elections to swing from one party to another, you need swing voters. And as much as they are routinely maligned by those who make their living in politics, these swing voters have a name: the independents.
Even the narrowest definition of this bloc—people who vote for third-party and independent candidates—reveals an outsized influence on elections. For example, nontraditional presidential voters shrank by 3.9 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, from 5.7 percent (including 3.3 percent for Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson) to 1.8 percent of the electorate. The Democratic nominee’s share of the popular vote, meanwhile, climbed by 3.1 percentage points; Trump gained 0.8 percentage points. Exit polls in 2020 showed that 59 percent of major-party returnees voted for Biden.
This trend was reflected not just in 2020 pre-election and exit polls of 2016 third-party/independent voters but also in the attitudes of more broadly defined “independents.” Gallup, Pew, and several other public opinion organizations ask people to describe their political affiliations (Democratic, Republican, or independent), and that question produces a number considerably larger than 5.7 percent. In the case of Gallup, which has been asking the question since 1988, “independent” has been the No. 1 answer in every survey since 2013, reaching an all-time high of 50 percent in February 2021.
Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton among self-described independents in 2016, 43 percent to 42 percent, according to Pew. But throughout his tumultuous presidency, this bloc never once gave him a job approval rating higher than 47 percent, even as nine out of 10 Republicans routinely gave their standard-bearer a thumbs-up.
Biden started his term with an approval rate among independents that Trump could only dream of: 61 percent. But from there it plummeted, all the way down to 34 percent as of October 2021. In our negatively polarized times, when party members stand by their man in opposition to the other team, overall approval hinges on the attitudes of independents. The 46th president has had the worst first-year approval ratings, in the low 40s, of any modern president—except Donald Trump.
One reason some political commentators are forever writing articles headlined “The Myth of the Independent Voter” is that the bloc does not necessarily have a coherent and predictable set of ideological or political-consumer preferences. Furthermore, the group contains internal clumps that usually vote for the same party across elections. Both critiques are true. But they miss an important point.
Government overreach—in overall size, in meddling with private transactions, in regulating our intimate decisions, in punishing disfavored groups—can be likened to a forest fire: Eventually, it will burn high and hot enough for even the apolitical to feel the flames. We will be discovering and arguing over exactly what unsealed the rosin among the independent voters who seeded Democratic defeats in November 2021. But political professionals of all species need to relearn one clear lesson: If you make the government feel too dangerous, a corrective bloc of voters will pour cold water on your face. At a time of bipartisan big-government populism, such small victories may be the only thing that keeps us going.
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From Bixler v. Superior Court, decided Wednesday by the California Court of Appeal (Justices Laurence Rubin, Carl Moor, and Lamar Baker):
Petitioners … are former members of the Church of Scientology who reported to the police that another Church member [Daniel Masterson] had raped them. They allege that, in retaliation for their reports, the Church encouraged its members to engage in a vicious campaign of harassment against them. {[T]hey state no cause of action against Masterson for sexual assault. Instead, they allege causes of action against all defendants for stalking, physical invasion of privacy, constructive invasion of privacy, [and] intentional infliction of emotional distress ….}
After petitioners brought suit in superior court against the Church and related entities and persons, some of those defendants moved to compel arbitration, relying on agreements that provided all disputes with the Church would be resolved according to the Church’s own “Ethics, Justice and Binding Religious Arbitration system.” That system was created to decide matters “in accordance with Scientology principles of justice and fairness.” …
The contract on its face apparently applied to all litigation against the Church:
My freely given consent to be bound exclusively by the discipline, faith, internal organization, and ecclesiastical rule, custom, and law of the Scientology religion … in all my dealings of any nature with the Church, and in all my dealings of any nature with any other Scientology church or organization which espouses, presents, propagates or practices the Scientology religion means that I am forever abandoning, surrendering, waiving, and relinquishing my right to sue, or otherwise seek legal recourse with respect to any dispute, claim or controversy against the Church, all other Scientology churches, all other organizations which espouse, present, propagate or practice the Scientology religion, and all persons employed by any such entity both in their personal and any official or representational capacities, regardless of the nature of the dispute, claim or controversy.
But the court concluded that, as a matter of California law, the arbitration agreement couldn’t be enforced after the parties left the Church:
Individuals have a First Amendment right to leave a religion. We hold that once petitioners had terminated their affiliation with the Church, they were not bound to its dispute resolution procedures to resolve the claims at issue here, which are based on alleged tortious conduct occurring after their separation from the Church and do not implicate resolution of ecclesiastical issues….
According to plaintiffs, Scientology forbids members from contacting police to report a crime committed by a member. It instructs members that reporting such incidents is considered a “high crime” and subjects the reporting member to punishment. Scientology utilizes so-called “Fair Game” tactics to “attack, harass, embarrass, humiliate, destroy, and/or injure individuals who Defendants declare to be an enemy of Scientology, known in Scientology as a ‘Suppressive Person’ ….” Masterson is a television actor; Scientology granted him special treatment when he achieved “celebrity status.” To that end, Scientology worked to prevent plaintiffs from reporting Masterson’s crimes and, once they did, declared plaintiffs Suppressive Persons. Scientology then mobilized an aggressive Fair Game campaign against them.
While the Fair Game campaigns against each plaintiff differed, collectively plaintiffs allege Scientology’s agents committed the following acts against them: surveilled them, hacked their security systems, filmed them, chased them, hacked their email, killed (and attempted to kill) their pets, tapped their phones, incited others to harass them, threatened to kill them, broke their locks, broke into their cars, ran them off the road, posted fake ads purporting to be from them soliciting anal sex from strangers, broke their windows, set the outside of their home on fire, went through their trash, and poisoned trees in their yards. This conduct was alleged to be pursuant to Scientology’s policies and procedures.
According to plaintiffs’ complaint, Scientology’s directives are that Suppressive Persons are to be silenced by whatever means necessary. Scientology instructs members “to damage the person’s professional reputation, file frivolous lawsuits, and harass and surveil ‘the enemy.'” Scientology’s “policies and procedures encourage and/or instruct followers to ‘ruin [the individual] utterly.'” …
In addition to events occurring while still a Scientology member, each petitioner alleged an invasive Fair Game campaign occurring entirely after she had left the church. Bixler alleged that she formally terminated her relationship with the Church in October 2016, then reported Masterson to the police. It was only after her report that she was declared a Suppressive Person and she and her husband were subjected to the Fair Game campaign.
Jane Doe #1 learned in June 2005 that she had been declared a Suppressive Person and was no longer permitted to engage in religious services at the Church. More than a decade later (after she asked the LAPD to reopen its investigation into Masterson), the Church commenced its Fair Game campaign against her. Jane Doe #2 ceased practicing Scientology entirely in 2004. In 2017, she reported Masterson’s assault to the LAPD, at which point the Fair Game harassment began….
This case involves both petitioners’ First Amendment rights to leave a faith and Scientology’s right to resolve disputes with its members without court intervention. When applied to a dispute that arose after petitioners left the faith, and which can be resolved on neutral principles of tort law, we find petitioners’ right to leave the faith must control….
An individual possesses an “inalienable First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, which includes her right to change her religious beliefs ….” “The constitutional freedom to question, to doubt, and to change one’s convictions, protected by the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, is important for very pragmatic reasons. For most people, religious development is a lifelong dynamic process even when they continue to adhere to the same religion, denomination, or sect.”
California precedent counsels against enforcing agreements that would violate an individual’s right to change religions. The issue arose in In re Marriage of Weiss (Cal. Ct. App. 1996). There, prior to marrying her Jewish husband, a woman converted to Judaism and executed a written “Declaration of Faith,” in which she pledged to rear all their children “‘in loyalty to the Jewish faith and its practices.'” After the couple divorced, the woman returned to Christianity. She was attending church and had enrolled the couple’s child in Sunday school. The child also attended a weekly club meeting at the church and had attended church summer camp. The father “acknowledged [the mother] had the right to expose the minor to her religion, but objected to the minor’s being indoctrinated in the Christian faith or being enrolled in any activity ‘that would be contrary to his Jewish faith.'”
The trial court refused to restrain the mother’s religious activity with the child. The father appealed, arguing the court erred in not enjoining the mother from engaging the child in Christian religious activity. The Court of Appeal affirmed, recognizing the rule in California that a parent cannot enjoin the other parent from involving their child in religious activities in the absence of a showing of harm to the child.
The father argued that the written antenuptial agreement should be enforced as an exception to that rule and that the mother should be bound by her promise. … [T]he Weiss court disagreed. The court concluded the agreement was legally unenforceable for two reasons: enforcement would result in improper judicial entanglement in religious matters and would violate the mother’s First Amendment right to change her religion.
As Presiding Justice Klein wrote, “Further, in view of [the mother’s] inalienable First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, which includes the right to change her religious beliefs and to share those beliefs with her offspring, her antenuptial commitment to raise her children in [the father’s] faith is not legally enforceable for that reason as well.” While a parent’s religious freedom may yield to other competing interests, “‘it may not be bargained away.’ [Citation.]” …
Just like written antenuptial agreements to raise children in a particular faith are not enforceable against a parent who has left the faith, Scientology’s written arbitration agreements are not enforceable against members who have left the faith, with respect to claims for subsequent non-religious, tortious acts. To hold otherwise would bind members irrevocably to a faith they have the constitutional right to leave….
Scientology argues that petitioners simply agreed to be bound by Scientology dispute resolution procedures no matter what. As Scientology puts it, “An ‘irrevocable‘ agreement to ‘forever‘ waive civil proceedings and submit to Scientology Ethics and Justice Codes in ‘any dispute’ with Churches of Scientology is a condition for participation in the religion.” It argues that this agreement should be enforced like any other agreement.
Enforcing this provision without regard to petitioners’ First Amendment rights would mean that if the Church or a Church member committed any intentional or negligent tort against a former member of the Church, that former member would be bound by Scientology dispute resolution procedures regardless of the fact that the member had left the Church years, even decades, before the tort. In effect, Scientology suggests that one of the prices of joining its religion (or obtaining a single religious service) is eternal submission to a religious forum—a sub silencio waiver of petitioners’ constitutional right to extricate themselves from the faith. The Constitution forbids a price that high….
The Church of Scientology also argued that having this rule would discriminate against religious arbitration agreements, in favor of secular arbitration agreements. No, said the court, suggesting that a similar rule might apply to secular arbitration agreement as well:
[The Church] has provided no authority upholding an arbitration agreement ad infinitum, and the California case on which Scientology relies for this proposition is distinguishable. In Buckhorn v. St. Jude Heritage Medical Group (Cal. Ct. App. 2004), … [t]he Fourth District Court of Appeal [upheld an arbitration agreement provision in a contract], on the basis that his tort claims “stem[med] from the contractual relationship between the parties,” and were therefore within the scope of the arbitration agreement. Here, petitioners’ claims against Scientology do not stem from the contractual relationship; they stem from the alleged “Fair Game” campaign Scientology engaged in as retribution for reporting Masterson to police after they left the Church. This harassment allegedly arose because of petitioners’ relationship with Masterson and their reporting his conduct to police, not because of their prior affiliation with Scientology. Indeed, plaintiff Riales alleged a similar Fair Game campaign of harassment, and it is undisputed she was never a member….
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From Bixler v. Superior Court, decided Wednesday by the California Court of Appeal (Justices Laurence Rubin, Carl Moor, and Lamar Baker):
Petitioners … are former members of the Church of Scientology who reported to the police that another Church member [Daniel Masterson] had raped them. They allege that, in retaliation for their reports, the Church encouraged its members to engage in a vicious campaign of harassment against them. {[T]hey state no cause of action against Masterson for sexual assault. Instead, they allege causes of action against all defendants for stalking, physical invasion of privacy, constructive invasion of privacy, [and] intentional infliction of emotional distress ….}
After petitioners brought suit in superior court against the Church and related entities and persons, some of those defendants moved to compel arbitration, relying on agreements that provided all disputes with the Church would be resolved according to the Church’s own “Ethics, Justice and Binding Religious Arbitration system.” That system was created to decide matters “in accordance with Scientology principles of justice and fairness.” …
The contract on its face apparently applied to all litigation against the Church:
My freely given consent to be bound exclusively by the discipline, faith, internal organization, and ecclesiastical rule, custom, and law of the Scientology religion … in all my dealings of any nature with the Church, and in all my dealings of any nature with any other Scientology church or organization which espouses, presents, propagates or practices the Scientology religion means that I am forever abandoning, surrendering, waiving, and relinquishing my right to sue, or otherwise seek legal recourse with respect to any dispute, claim or controversy against the Church, all other Scientology churches, all other organizations which espouse, present, propagate or practice the Scientology religion, and all persons employed by any such entity both in their personal and any official or representational capacities, regardless of the nature of the dispute, claim or controversy.
But the court concluded that, as a matter of California law, the arbitration agreement couldn’t be enforced after the parties left the Church:
Individuals have a First Amendment right to leave a religion. We hold that once petitioners had terminated their affiliation with the Church, they were not bound to its dispute resolution procedures to resolve the claims at issue here, which are based on alleged tortious conduct occurring after their separation from the Church and do not implicate resolution of ecclesiastical issues….
According to plaintiffs, Scientology forbids members from contacting police to report a crime committed by a member. It instructs members that reporting such incidents is considered a “high crime” and subjects the reporting member to punishment. Scientology utilizes so-called “Fair Game” tactics to “attack, harass, embarrass, humiliate, destroy, and/or injure individuals who Defendants declare to be an enemy of Scientology, known in Scientology as a ‘Suppressive Person’ ….” Masterson is a television actor; Scientology granted him special treatment when he achieved “celebrity status.” To that end, Scientology worked to prevent plaintiffs from reporting Masterson’s crimes and, once they did, declared plaintiffs Suppressive Persons. Scientology then mobilized an aggressive Fair Game campaign against them.
While the Fair Game campaigns against each plaintiff differed, collectively plaintiffs allege Scientology’s agents committed the following acts against them: surveilled them, hacked their security systems, filmed them, chased them, hacked their email, killed (and attempted to kill) their pets, tapped their phones, incited others to harass them, threatened to kill them, broke their locks, broke into their cars, ran them off the road, posted fake ads purporting to be from them soliciting anal sex from strangers, broke their windows, set the outside of their home on fire, went through their trash, and poisoned trees in their yards. This conduct was alleged to be pursuant to Scientology’s policies and procedures.
According to plaintiffs’ complaint, Scientology’s directives are that Suppressive Persons are to be silenced by whatever means necessary. Scientology instructs members “to damage the person’s professional reputation, file frivolous lawsuits, and harass and surveil ‘the enemy.'” Scientology’s “policies and procedures encourage and/or instruct followers to ‘ruin [the individual] utterly.'” …
In addition to events occurring while still a Scientology member, each petitioner alleged an invasive Fair Game campaign occurring entirely after she had left the church. Bixler alleged that she formally terminated her relationship with the Church in October 2016, then reported Masterson to the police. It was only after her report that she was declared a Suppressive Person and she and her husband were subjected to the Fair Game campaign.
Jane Doe #1 learned in June 2005 that she had been declared a Suppressive Person and was no longer permitted to engage in religious services at the Church. More than a decade later (after she asked the LAPD to reopen its investigation into Masterson), the Church commenced its Fair Game campaign against her. Jane Doe #2 ceased practicing Scientology entirely in 2004. In 2017, she reported Masterson’s assault to the LAPD, at which point the Fair Game harassment began….
This case involves both petitioners’ First Amendment rights to leave a faith and Scientology’s right to resolve disputes with its members without court intervention. When applied to a dispute that arose after petitioners left the faith, and which can be resolved on neutral principles of tort law, we find petitioners’ right to leave the faith must control….
An individual possesses an “inalienable First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, which includes her right to change her religious beliefs ….” “The constitutional freedom to question, to doubt, and to change one’s convictions, protected by the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, is important for very pragmatic reasons. For most people, religious development is a lifelong dynamic process even when they continue to adhere to the same religion, denomination, or sect.”
California precedent counsels against enforcing agreements that would violate an individual’s right to change religions. The issue arose in In re Marriage of Weiss (Cal. Ct. App. 1996). There, prior to marrying her Jewish husband, a woman converted to Judaism and executed a written “Declaration of Faith,” in which she pledged to rear all their children “‘in loyalty to the Jewish faith and its practices.'” After the couple divorced, the woman returned to Christianity. She was attending church and had enrolled the couple’s child in Sunday school. The child also attended a weekly club meeting at the church and had attended church summer camp. The father “acknowledged [the mother] had the right to expose the minor to her religion, but objected to the minor’s being indoctrinated in the Christian faith or being enrolled in any activity ‘that would be contrary to his Jewish faith.'”
The trial court refused to restrain the mother’s religious activity with the child. The father appealed, arguing the court erred in not enjoining the mother from engaging the child in Christian religious activity. The Court of Appeal affirmed, recognizing the rule in California that a parent cannot enjoin the other parent from involving their child in religious activities in the absence of a showing of harm to the child.
The father argued that the written antenuptial agreement should be enforced as an exception to that rule and that the mother should be bound by her promise. … [T]he Weiss court disagreed. The court concluded the agreement was legally unenforceable for two reasons: enforcement would result in improper judicial entanglement in religious matters and would violate the mother’s First Amendment right to change her religion.
As Presiding Justice Klein wrote, “Further, in view of [the mother’s] inalienable First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, which includes the right to change her religious beliefs and to share those beliefs with her offspring, her antenuptial commitment to raise her children in [the father’s] faith is not legally enforceable for that reason as well.” While a parent’s religious freedom may yield to other competing interests, “‘it may not be bargained away.’ [Citation.]” …
Just like written antenuptial agreements to raise children in a particular faith are not enforceable against a parent who has left the faith, Scientology’s written arbitration agreements are not enforceable against members who have left the faith, with respect to claims for subsequent non-religious, tortious acts. To hold otherwise would bind members irrevocably to a faith they have the constitutional right to leave….
Scientology argues that petitioners simply agreed to be bound by Scientology dispute resolution procedures no matter what. As Scientology puts it, “An ‘irrevocable‘ agreement to ‘forever‘ waive civil proceedings and submit to Scientology Ethics and Justice Codes in ‘any dispute’ with Churches of Scientology is a condition for participation in the religion.” It argues that this agreement should be enforced like any other agreement.
Enforcing this provision without regard to petitioners’ First Amendment rights would mean that if the Church or a Church member committed any intentional or negligent tort against a former member of the Church, that former member would be bound by Scientology dispute resolution procedures regardless of the fact that the member had left the Church years, even decades, before the tort. In effect, Scientology suggests that one of the prices of joining its religion (or obtaining a single religious service) is eternal submission to a religious forum—a sub silencio waiver of petitioners’ constitutional right to extricate themselves from the faith. The Constitution forbids a price that high….
The Church of Scientology also argued that having this rule would discriminate against religious arbitration agreements, in favor of secular arbitration agreements. No, said the court, suggesting that a similar rule might apply to secular arbitration agreement as well:
[The Church] has provided no authority upholding an arbitration agreement ad infinitum, and the California case on which Scientology relies for this proposition is distinguishable. In Buckhorn v. St. Jude Heritage Medical Group (Cal. Ct. App. 2004), … [t]he Fourth District Court of Appeal [upheld an arbitration agreement provision in a contract], on the basis that his tort claims “stem[med] from the contractual relationship between the parties,” and were therefore within the scope of the arbitration agreement. Here, petitioners’ claims against Scientology do not stem from the contractual relationship; they stem from the alleged “Fair Game” campaign Scientology engaged in as retribution for reporting Masterson to police after they left the Church. This harassment allegedly arose because of petitioners’ relationship with Masterson and their reporting his conduct to police, not because of their prior affiliation with Scientology. Indeed, plaintiff Riales alleged a similar Fair Game campaign of harassment, and it is undisputed she was never a member….
The post No Arbitration of Claims Against Scientology After Plaintiffs Had Left the Church appeared first on Reason.com.
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