gehringer_2

I only mentioned it because as noted, some of the media still act like the Tigers are a fall back for Correa and I don't that is true at all. I can't see any way the Tigers are interested in mirroring the Rangers.

and here I always thought it was just because the Spanish built their ships from Mahogany and the British out of oak.

fair point. though on the LGBQT issues while it is true inner city churches are often conservative, the don't generate much political power since theirs is the minority view within the democratic party to which they mostly belong. Same lack of political relevance as moderate Republicans suffer today!

and it is, or should be, ironic that it is Evangelical America which seems to have the most anti-communitarian outlook right now. I guess they missed that 'common religion' somewhere? There is definitely an aspect where it isn't just religiosity pre se but the nature of the particular strains in vogue.

actually Buddha, not so far as you may think. When I hop on my bike for a 20 mile ride, I'm deep into red america at the far end. The lines that divide red and blue MI are very sharp and run right through Western Washtenaw county.

What would you expect - he may have a back story but Biden is the guy elected by the 'secularist' party who elders in his Church would love to excommunicate if they could. Go out to rural or southern evangelical America more to better appreciate the undercurrent on the other side. If you are gay in American one would wonder what universe you have been living on with that level of sanguinuity about the influence of religion on US law.

I can't imagine the Tiger offer is still on the table.

we know how closely ESPN follows the Detroit sports scene.....

could be a long day for Stroud, assuming half of Utah's D doesn't also opt out!

all governmental bodies are political. What the founders tried to do was have them operate at different time scales, the House short, the Senate longer, the Federal Courts the longest. This more or less accomplished a similar goal as the hot issues of one decade usually (though obviously not always) cool with the passage of time. I'm not really sure there is any better way to accomplish political distance than time. I would actually go the other way, The real issue is each party trying to put progressively younger and less experienced people on the court. I'd make the minimum age for nomination 60. Eliminates super long tenures and means everyone who comes up will at least have a real life record to look at.

You coudl start from the 'catagorical imperative.' Kant claimed you could derive it before assuming God because he tried (it is generally concluded unsuccessfully) to prove the existence of God starting from it. Basically it would transpose something like - "Pass no law you would not want applied to you." Of course given Congress' penchant for excluding itself that might require repeal of half the US code at this point.

May you never find your slopes to be slippery.

Be that as it may, as a practical matter the driving political force against Roe is a religious doctrine about the nature of human life. If/when a new rationale emerges regarding the regulation of abortion I'd prefer it be based on reasoning detached from any particular religious dogma. I don't think that is too much to ask. Curiously, I happened across some biographical information on Rousseau the other day. It noted that in pre-Revolutionary France it was apparently quite common for the results of unwanted pregnancies to be abandoned at the Paris Foundling Hospital, where apparently nearly all of them died. Not much new under the Sun.

If you can't make an argument that doesn't depend on some kind of mystically revealed 'truth', you shouldn't be given authority over the local dog pound let alone a superior court in a polyglot nation. I don't care what any judge believes when they have their robes off, I just don't want to be able to figure it out from their decisions. That's what the oath to the Constitution should promise to every American, the majority of whom are neither Catholic nor Evangelical, Muslim, Jewish or anything else. And for that matter it's also simple politics, the nation claims to be majority deist by survey, but no organized church or doctrine is supported by more than a minority. It's a historical habit of mind of Catholics and more recently Evangelicals to forget that many people believe in God but come to vastly different answers to many questions than they do.

No, you don't have to be an atheist, but you should always argue as if it's an atheist that you have to persuade of the soundness of your reasoning.

The topic of the article was whether ACB was going to follow the advice she was once happy to dispense to others that judges facing decisions where existing law and personal religious belief conflict should recuse. Barrett's topic at the time was the death penalty and here the writer (S. Sherry) re-framed the question wrt Abortion. However, the question of judges who profess fealty to higher standards of impartiality but then abandon them when facing the chance to advance their own political/religious agenda is certainly broader than just abortion. You can certainly criticize a Douglas for text as mushy as 'emanations of penumbras' but even mushy secular arguments are less dangerous to the republic than those whose real premises are religious.

Lol. You are the one fixated on abortion. All I want is exactly what I stated, which is judges willing to subordinate whatever they may believe as religious teaching to the supremacy of a system of secularly derived law.

And of course you know well that no jurist on any GOP short list would make a statement like Kennedy’s today as they would instantly be off that short list.

Lol. Scalia made it clear enough over the years In his public statements that he didn’t take that oath seriously when it came to religion

I've already stated clearly the criteria I prefer - it's allegiance to law as promulgated by a constitutional process over received religious doctrine. If a Muslim won't swear allegiance to the Constitution over the Koran honestly he should be excluded just as much as any Catholic or Evangelical or Hindu or Sikh or Bahia or Buddhist or anything else that doesn't take the oath honestly. If you recall, John Kennedy did actually make a promise to the public during his election campaign in that regard. have any of our current examples ever made a statement like this?

you have a choice to make as to where you look for "supreme law". It's institutional Catholicism which creates the issue with threats to deny sacraments to or excommunicate those in political power if they don't toe the doctrinal line, so don't act like this isn't an issue of their own making.

If they will not recognize the supremacy of secular democratic authority over that of the their church, I would have no problem with baring anyone on that grounds. They take an oath to support the Constitution which includes the 1st amendment and there are at least 3 of them on a given day that that are more than happy to violate it. It defies logic to me that they construe constraining the authority of the state to preserve life through public health actions as an example of free exercise. When you are willing to constrain the democratic action of the state for the benefit all in the interest of some religion, you are establishing that religion. That is prohibited. I doubt seriously that they would be so solicitous if the petitioners were not of their same sectarian bent.

quick stop on the way back east to visit some folks in Vancouver.

Anyone religious enough not to recognize the supremacy of secular law in a republic that guarantees freedom of and from religion should be all rights be barred from judicial service and if they were intellectually honest they would not seek the role. Religious zealots like like Scalia and Barrett are a scourge on the 1st amendment.

Just a light flurry going here so far.