Category: reason

In London, the Tower Hamlets council has given developers the go ahead for a project that will include offices and luxury apartments but only if it also includes a gay bar. The bar must stay open at least 12 years, and officials say the government must be involved in the decision about who gets to rent the space and will send an inspector to make sure it is gay enough. Council members say they are concerned LGBT clubs across the city are closing and this particular site once housed a gay pub.

• Breaking News: President Trump was ad-libbing when he warned North Korea of “fire and fury” like the world had never seen before.
• Trump disagrees with Mitch McConnell, saying expecting Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare after seven years of campaigning on it was not excessive.
• The FBI raided the home of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort as part of the Russia investigation.
• The president of Kenya has a strong lead in the presidential vote tally, but the opposition claims the results were hacked.
• Franklin wll be the first hurricane of the season; it’s expected to make landfall in Mexico tonight.
• Major League Baseball is allowing players to wear custom nickname jerseys the last weekend of August.
• A Bigfoot sighting in western North Carolina.

Since the beginning of 2014, when Colorado became the first state to let marijuana merchants serve recreational consumers, those customers have faced the challenge of finding a place where they can legally enjoy the cannabis products they can now legally buy. That problem is especially acute in Nevada, one of the four states where voters approved legalization last November and the first to see recreational sales, which started on July 1 as retailers who once catered exclusively to state-registered patients opened their doors to anyone 21 or older. Las Vegas now has about two dozen businesses selling recreational marijuana but not a single one—not a bar, not a restaurant, not a hotel, not a club—where you can use it.

That is a serious problem for a city that each year sees more than 40 million tourists, who account for most of the newly legal marijuana buyers. Armen Yemenidjian, who owns Essence Cannabis Dispensary, a pot shop on The Strip, told CBS News “70 to 80 percent” of his customers are tourists. Presumably the percentage is lower at stores further from the city’s most popular attractions. But the Nevada marijuana market is expected to become one of the country’s largest on the strength of its tourist business, and it is hard to believe there is no plan to accommodate all of those visiting cannabis consumers.

Question 2, Nevada’s legalization initiative, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $600 fine, to consume marijuana in a store that sells it or in any “public place,” defined as “an area to which the public is invited or in which the public is permitted regardless of age.” You might think (as I did) that the phrase “regardless of age” suggests marijuana consumption would be legal in a business that does not sell cannabis but excludes anyone younger than 21, the minimum age for legal purchase and possession. But according to Morgan Fox, communications manager at the Marijuana Policy Project, which backed Question 2, the language was intended to mean “regardless of age restrictions.” In other words, “regardless of age” was supposed to modify “the public” rather than “invited” and “permitted,” meaning that even a business that is open only to people 21 or older would qualify as a “public place.”

That is certainly the way the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) reads the law. “Marijuana consumption is only allowed at private residences,” says Jennifer Davies, an LVMPD public information officer. “It can never be consumed inside a business.” Private clubs seem like a possible loophole, since they are not open to the general public. But as frustrated entrepreneurs in Denver have discovered, police tend to apply a strict definition of private clubs, the result of which is that any cannabis lounge accessible enough to attract tourists probably would not qualify.

One other possibility would be parked limousines or buses. Question 2 bans marijuana use “in a moving vehicle” but says nothing about stationary ones. The vehicle would have to be privately booked to avoid being deemed a public place, and even then police probably would take a dim view of it.

Question 2 does authorize the state legislature to “amend provisions of this act to provide for the conditions in which a locality may permit consumption of marijuana in a retail marijuana store.” State Sen. Tick Segerblom (D-Las Vegas), a prominent Question 2 supporter, tried to do that last spring with S.B. 236, which would have allowed local governments to license businesses, including cannabis retailers, where marijuana could be legally consumed. The bill, which also would have allowed one-time licenses for special cannabis-friendly events, passed the Senate but never got a floor vote in the Assembly.

The resuit, as CBS News puts it, is that “the law here essentially says what tourists buy in Vegas, they can’t use in Vegas.” Nor can they legally take it home to consume there. As Yemenidjian, the marijuana merchant, observes, there’s “no other industry in the world” where “you can you buy a product and then not use it anywhere.”

Why did Question 2’s backers decide to kick the can down the road of this issue? “It became clear early on that the initiative could not win if it included public consumption,” MPP’s Fox says, “and it was decided that the better course would be to try to improve the system after the initiative passed. Apparently it is a pretty common sticking point. None of the adult-use initiatives have included public consumption in any form, though they left the path open for this to change through regulation or legislation. It might be one of those things where even though it is the right way to go, the average voter just isn’t there yet, possibly because there are very few examples in the U.S. to point to (and those exist in a gray area). When people see various forms of marijuana businesses in practice elsewhere and being regulated effectively, they become much more comfortable with them.”

It’s still not clear how or even really if the military’s transgender ban will proceed, but two legal organizations are nevertheless suing to try to stop it.

President Donald Trump infamously declared on Twitter in July that he was going to reverse the policies started under President Barack Obama to accommodate transgender troops. Trump indicated a complete reversal—no more transgender troops would be allowed to serve at all.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders announced today they’ve filed a federal civil complaint aiming to halt any rollback in policies allowing transgender people to serve openly in the military. They are representing five unnamed current transgender members of the armed forces.

Trump did not actually consult with Pentagon officials before his abrupt announcement. They were caught unprepared, to say the least, and there is at the moment no formal plan to implement what the president said they were going to do. As it stands, nothing has changed, and all we really have are tweets. One big news story today throws those tweets in a new light: On the same morning Trump suddenly tweeted out a change in transgender policy, the FBI was raiding the home of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

According the D.C.-based LGBT newspaper Washington Blade, the White House is hammering out a formal process to change the rules, but it’s not yet public:

Though the policy—called “A Guidance Policy for Open Transgender Service Phase Out”—has not yet been made public, sources familiar with the planning said it would encourage early retirement, usher out any enlisted personnel after their contract is up, and would fire trans officers up for promotion. Basically, said a source, “the administration wants to get rid of transgender service members as fast as they can.”

No one yet knows what will happen to the service members currently fighting in combat. The new policy does allow trans service members to continue serving but apparently does not offer any protection from harassment or other efforts to get them to quit.

Be wary of what unnamed sources say when they’re documenting policy proposals still in the drafting process. It’s not necessarily that they’re intentionally being misleading, but as we saw when dealing with a possible LGBT-focused religious freedom executive order, what comes out may end up looking very different from what’s being worked on. It’s a slight downside to having such a leaky administration, though certainly getting information about policy changes before they’re fully formalized is useful in its own way.

Without an actual formal policy change to resist, it’s not clear how the courts might interpret this lawsuit or if the plaintiffs have actual standing to sue here. A spokesperson for NCLR didn’t respond to an emailed request from Reason asking if they have any information about what the actual policy will look like. The lawsuit indicates they believe the White House has formalized a plan to be transmitted to the Department of Defense, but it has no factual details of what’s in the plan.

The lawsuit says the as-yet-unseen policy change violates due process and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. It also explains that the plaintiffs disclosed their transgender status to the military with the understanding that doing so would no longer threaten their careers, and therefore they’re asking the federal courts to block a reversal of that promise.

Read the lawsuit here. The American Civil Liberties Union has said it too would participate in a legal challenge to a trans ban, once one is introduced. It has sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking the Pentagon to maintain any documents related to any policy changes.

Religious believers in the United States and Canada trust atheists just about as much as they do rapists, according to a 2011 study. Now one of that researchers behind that study, University of Kentucky psychologist Will Gervais, has published a new study bolstering his earlier findings. Gervais and his team’s new report, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, looks beyond North America to survey more than 3,000 people in 13 countries, ranging from secular strongholds like the Netherlands and Finland to such deeply religious places as the United Arab Emirates and India.

To probe the salience of anti-atheist prejudice, the researchers took advantage of people’s propensity to fall for the conjunction fallacy—the erroneous assumption that more specific conditions are more probable than general ones. In this particular study, the researchers told a gruesome story in which a man who used to torture animals when he was a boy grew up to kill five homeless people whose dismembered bodies are now buried in his basement. Half of the respondents were asked: Which is more probable? (1) The man is a teacher. (2) The man is a teacher and does not believe in any gods. The other half were asked: Which is more probable? (1) The man is a teacher. (2) The man is a teacher and a religious believer.

“We used this psychopathic serial killer because we thought that, even if people didn’t trust atheists enough to let them babysit their children, they wouldn’t necessarily assume them to be serial killers,” Gervais told the New York Times. But they did. As the Times reports:

About 60 percent of the people who had the option to flag the teacher as an atheist did so; just 30 percent of those who had the option to flag the teacher as a religious believer did so. Self-identified nonbelievers were less biased than the average, but not by much, the study found.

When given the teacher/atheist conjunction, 52 percent of atheists selected it. Asked about the teacher/believer option, only 27 percent of atheists picked it. The only country that did not show any greater prejudice against atheists than believers was Finland.

Why do so many people believe that atheists are more likely to be immoral? The researchers suggest that “anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion’s putatively necessary role in morality.” Evidently, many people believe that moral behavior requires a belief that something like a sky-god is watching and enforcing good behavior. The researchers note that “highly secular societies are among the most stable and cooperative on Earth. Nonetheless, our findings reveal widespread suspicion that morality requires belief in a god.”

Interestingly, Public Religion Research Institute’s 2013 American Values Survey reported that “fewer than 6-in-10 (58%) libertarians believe that God is a person with whom one can have a relationship, one-quarter (25%) believe God is an impersonal force in the universe, and 16% report that they do not believe in God.”

So what to do? A Pew Research poll earlier this year reported that Americans who don’t personally know any atheists feel colder toward them. There may be more of us than is generally thought. In January, Gervais and his colleagues estimated that 26 percent of Americans qualify as atheists. Coming out of the nonbelief closet is one way to begin to overcome anti-atheist prejudice.

Disclosure: I have been out as an atheist since I was a teenager, and as far as I can tell I have not personally experienced any anti-atheist prejudice. I am an atheist in the same way that I am a-unicornist.

In her new book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the third volume in a trilogy, McCloskey argues that our vast accumulation of wealth over the past two hundred years— which she’s dubbed “The Great Enrichment”—was the result of “massively better ideas in technology and institutions.” Where did they arise from?tag=reasonmagazineA”A new liberty and dignity for commoners,” she argues, “expressed as the ideology of European liberalism.”

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President Donald Trump needs authorization from Congress to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea. That much is clear in the Constitution, but it’s not always so clear in Washington itself.

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan—who represents Alaska, one of the U.S. locations the North Korean regime sometimes threatens with missile strikes—has stressed this.

“If one of the military options that the administration is looking at is a preemptive war on the Korean peninsula launched by the United States, that would require the authorization of Congress,” Sullivan said yesterday on Fox News. “Article I of the U.S. Constitution is very clear about that.”

The Constitution is only as useful as it’s applied, and there are few indications the Congress will reassert its role here. Efforts up to now to enforce the Constitution’s strictures in this area have all failed.

Trump yesterday warned that further North Korean threats may be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Pyongyang promptly responded by floating the idea it would strike Guam, a U.S. territory with a number of military installations.

The governor of Guam says there was currently “no threat” to his island. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also sought to tamp down fears, telling reporters “I do not believe that there is any imminent threat” and “I have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days.”

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, tried to put the rhetorical crossfire in perspective as well.

“Strictly speaking, this is how representatives of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have reacted to all previous UN Security Council resolutions. We will judge by their actions,” Lavrov told reporters at the end of the ASEAN summit in Manila. “We are confident that there is no alternative to the resumption of the political process, in particular the six-party talks” between North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States.

The War Powers Act permits the president to commit military forces for 60 days before congressional authorization is necessary, and it requires him to notify Congress of a military action within 48 hours.

The Congress has not authorized a military action since the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) concerning Iraq and its alleged WMD threat. The executive branch has justified most of the military operations falling under the umbrella of the war on terror with the 2001 AUMF aimed at the perpetrators of the September 11 terror attacks and “associated forces.”

Originally intended for the war in Afghanistan, the 2001 AUMF has been used to cover for military action across the Muslim world. There have been other military actions lacking explicit congressional authorization too—Barack Obama pointed to resolutions from the U.N. Security Council and the Arab League to justify the 2011 intervention in Libya. Congress declined both to authorize the intervention and to defund it.

Trump launched a strike earlier this year against an airfield in Syria allegedly used to transport chemical weapons. A handful of members of Congress—including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and the lone vote against the 2001 AUMF, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—insisted the president needed congressional authorization, but no effort to get Congress to reassert its role got anywhere.

Trump took to Twitter this morning to claim the U.S.’s nuclear weapons arsenal was “far stronger and ever more powerful than before” because of an order he made in January for a Nuclear Posture Review.

“Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!” the president tweeted.

It took almost no time at all for President Donald Trump to go straight to “Let’s lock people up” when speaking about the opioid overdose crisis Tuesday.

Somewhat lost in the wake of the president’s threatening comments about North Korea, Trump spoke at a briefing at the Trump National Golf Club in Bridgewater, New Jersey, about fighting opioid addiction. America, he insisted, can arrest its way out the problem. He wants more federal prosecutions, and he blames President Barack Obama for scaling back both arrests and sentences:

Meanwhile, federal drug prosecutions have gone down in recent years. We’re going to be bringing them up and bringing them up rapidly. At the end of 2016, there were 23 percent fewer than in 2011. So they looked at this scourge and they let it go by, and we’re not letting it go by. The average sentence length for a convicted federal drug offender decreased 20 percent from 2009 to 2016.

With those early comments, Trump is more in line with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ attitude toward ramping up the drug war and much less with the very commission whose preliminary report on the opioid crisis prompted this meeting in the first place.

The report wasn’t focused on putting Americans in prison so much as it was on trying to get Trump to declare opioids a “national emergency,” the aim being more government spending to fight addiction and more federal regulation of drug treatment and prescriptions.

Trump has resisted declaring a national emergency thus far. Do not mistake this for resisting a panic-based response. It’s very clear from his comments that Trump (like Sessions) is stuck in the 1980s-1990s mindset that drug addiction is caused by creepy urban thugs on street corners luring children into trying some pills. So naturally, he’s going to conclude that bad people need to be punished.

Here’s how stuck in the past he is:

The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place. If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem. If they do start, it’s awfully tough to get off. So we can keep them from going on, and maybe by talking to youth and telling them, “No good; really bad for you” in every way. But if they don’t start, it will never be a problem.

Just say no, kids! That quote above got plenty of mockery due to the pure paucity of actual thinking taking place. But that’s because Trump is already sure he has all the answers. He needs a border wall. He needs more money for Department of Homeland Security and police. He wants the drug war to be even meaner. He wants police to be even meaner. His solution to the drug crisis is to punish people until they stop taking drugs. So he’s not going to be terribly engaged in any subtleties of addiction management or what role the government should or should not be playing. He thinks the drug problem is because of bad people.

Ralph Northam is running for governor of Virginia as a Democrat, but sometimes he sounds like a libertarian.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

If you thought Cliff Hyra was the only libertarian running for governor of Virginia this year, think again. There might be a second: Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.

Up to now Northam has stuck about as close to the middle of the road as you can get without turning into a double stripe of yellow paint. Nominally a Democrat, he voted for George W. Bush twice—and at one point there was some talk that he might join the GOP (Northam says such rumors were false). Still, he holds the party line on issues such as Medicaid expansion, gun control, and abortion—areas where he and his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, differ.

Gillespie has said he would like to see abortion banned in most cases, and recently admitted he would sign legislation defunding Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood promptly endorsed Northam, and its political action committee plans to spend $3 million supporting his campaign.

Northam has been milking the endorsement. “As I always say,” he insisted on Friday, “there is no room for a bunch of legislators, most of whom are men, to tell women what they should and shouldn’t do with their own bodies.” He repeated the point in a tweet: “There’s no excuse for legislators to tell women what they can do with their bodies.”

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Ismael Lopez awoke to a commotion outside his front door on July 23rd, shortly before midnight. Moments later, he was dead.

A police officer shot Lopez after he allegedly refused to put down the gun he was holding when he answered the door. Police were looking to serve an arrest warrant for an assault that had occurred earlier that day. Only after Lopez had died did they realize their mistake: they had gone to the wrong house.

Lopez was not the man they were looking for, nor was he wanted by police for any outstanding warrants. His death was entirely preventable—another casualty in the long list of victims of excessive force on the part of law enforcement.

It should go without saying that the above statement is not an indictment of all police officers, but it is nothing short of dishonest to attribute these sorts of incidents to just a few bad apples as people have often done in the past. The rot is much more severe than many Americans are willing to admit. As police departments across the country have become more militarized, incidents like these are far from unheard of, and it’s impossible not to conclude that law-enforcement culture and norms play a role.

It’s been over two weeks since Lopez was shot, and the names of the Southaven Police Department officers involved have yet to be released. While many police departments do release the names of those in “officer involved shootings,” it’s not a uniform practice across the country. Police union rules often govern when names are released to the public, if at all. According to a Washington Post report from 2016, around 20 percent of officers involved in fatal shootings do not have their names disclosed.

This practice undermines public trust in the police and prevents bad cops from being held accountable for their actions. Police officers do deserve some privacy protections, as all citizens do, but they are also given powers to take away a person’s freedom and in some cases their life. Powers like those demand increased accountability to protect against abuse.

There have been protests outside the Southaven Police Department in the weeks following the shooting, with locals demanding an explanation for Lopez’s death and greater transparency from the authorities. “We want the truth to come out. We want justice to be served for Mr. Lopez,” said Pastor Rolando Rostro, the organizer of the protests, adding that “there’s a lot of stuff that should’ve been released by now and those officers names should’ve; they serve the public.”

When a local news channel asked the police department if the officer who fired shots was still patrolling the streets, the department responded, “We don’t discuss personnel issues.”

By refusing to disclose the names of the officers involved, there’s no way of knowing if these individuals have been involved in similar incidents in the past. As Reason’s Ed Krayewski has covered extensively before, there’s no database or registry for police with histories of abuse of power and excessive force. It’s about time we had one.

In Lopez’s case, the initial police report appears to have been sloppily compiled, listing Lopez, who is Hispanic, as “caucasian” and labeling him as an “offender.” The family’s attorneys are calling for the resignation of the police chief and several other city officials for their handling of the case. They claim that the official story of investigators is not accurate, using pictures of the crime scene as evidence that Lopez was not pointing a gun out the door at officers as had been claimed previously.

“You can track the trace of the bullets. Three bullets went into that door and the door was shut when those bullets went into the door. My investigative team has concluded it was direct line. There were three bullets. There is no way the door was cracked open and someone was there,” said Murray Wells, one of the family’s attorneys.

The recently released death certificate would seem to partially confirm these claims.

In any case, Lopez would have been perfectly justified in grabbing his gun given the circumstances. Plenty of people wouldn’t hesitate to grab a firearm if they heard banging at their door in the middle of the night. And given that he wasn’t actually an “offender,” Lopez would have had no reason to think it was the police on his porch.

It remains to be seen if charges will be placed against the officer who fired the fatal shot, but there’s a good chance this case may turn out like the others before it. Saying “I feared for my life” will mean a lot coming from the officer involved. It may even get him/her out of criminal charges.

But Ismael Lopez probably feared for his life too. It’s a shame he’s not alive to say it.