65--I bet there are not too many college professors who score in this range!

 Whew.  I am glad to hear that vote fraud is not confined to Cook County--we wouldn't want to discriminate against the rest of the country!

The Department of Education has an Office of Civil Rights that investigates complaints about schools that are alleged not to have complied with anti-discrimination/harassment legislation as it pertains to students.

An OCR investigation can take many months and hundreds of man hours of documentation to complete.

Schools have to show that they have all the rules posted and have a process in place to report violations etc. Usually there will be a "Coordinator" who is supposed to oversee these things.

Good question.  I am not clear on this point--I can't figure out how the First Amendment can be narrowed in that way (i.e. to apply only to ministers).

The jurisprudence on the First Amendment is I think hopelessly confused at this point.  It is confused because we are trying to combine religious liberty in the Founders sense with modern liberalism.

Hi King Prawn,

I am no authority on con law, but it is my understanding that Tabor just clarifies/provides a liberal construction of what a "minister" is for the purpose of the "ministerial exception."

I don't believe the decision will provide any relief to non-religious private associations.

There are legal constraints now.  Federal law and regulations prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and gender.  Contract law mandates that students receive the education and relevant protections found in documents like catalogs and handbooks.

I don't know if further legislation would result from the passage of this bill--it is certainly a possibility.  It seems to me that this act would effectively prohibit private schools (and teachers at these schools) from maintaining that homosexual activity is wrong for instance.

I am certainly happy about Hillsdale's decision to avoid government funding!

I didn't say discrimination was moral.  But it seems to me that banning it is about morality; the state is saying that the practice of discrimination is immoral and hence prohibited.

Why allow religious denominations to discriminate if it is immoral?

For practical purposes I am happy about this decision.  Of course there is no coherent logic behind it.  If discrimination is wrong and prohibited by law, why should religious organizations be exempt from those provisions?

The underlying problem is government interference in the governance of private associations.  Now organizations that employ "ministers" enjoy a freedom denied to most other private associations.

But in our day we must all too often be content with small, logically incoherent victories!

Thanks for your thoughtful response.  What you say above is entirely correct. Christians were oppressed in Iraq and were a tiny oppressed minority in Afghanistan.

We have not built democracy in the proper sense in either place. Democracy that is not in principle based on the equal rights of all will tend towards despotism. I wonder if our massive investment in blood and treasure in nation-building in either regime was worth it.  I think it was not.

It is not obvious to me that things would have been the same or worse for Christians in the region without a US presence. Large numbers of Iraqi Christians were not fleeing the country under the Hussein regime; this is remarkable, as Hussein was a horrible tyrant.

But why are things worse in spite of the US presence? And why did we help establish Islamic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

This certainly says something about President Bush's goal of transforming the region politically.

Yes, see Tom West's article on the liberal assault on free speech for more on current restrictions on free speech in America.

Yes, I am describing how I think things should be. So what?  Of course you are doing the same thing, but that is fine--we are talking about how things should be, right?

Laws limiting sex to marriage used to be commonplace.  Even now some sexual activity is prohibited (polygamy, incest, pedophilia).

The message is that sex should be confined to marriage, and marriage should be ordered to procreation and the education of children.

I don't understand what you mean by "cite it somewhere in the law." Historically, American law has prohibited various forms of illicit sexual behavior (homosexual relations, incest, polygamy, adultery).

Ok.

I assume you believe the state should intervene in the case of say kidnapping, right? For example, if Romulus cannot find himself a spouse, he should not be allowed to go down the road, grab the first woman (or man) that catches his eye, and then make him/her his spouse, even if the local religious leader is willing to sanction the marriage, correct?

So the state should recognize a marriage between a 38 year-old parent and his/her 18 year old child?

I am not sure what you mean by religious.  I haven't said anything in religious terms yet. The message society should oppose is that sex has nothing to do with procreation, and that the family is whatever one wants it to be.