The Independent (U.K.) reports on the cancellation of Russia's first planned gay pride parade; the city government refused to allow the parade, and the Independent cites outraged reactions from religious leaders as a major reason. The Russian Orthodox religious leaders are quoted as harshly condemning homosexuality, but the chief Muslim mufti goes further:

Earlier this week Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin warned that Russia's Muslims would stage violent protests if the march went ahead. "If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that -- Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike ... [The protests] might be even more intense than protests abroad against those controversial cartoons."

As Andrew Sullivan points out, this isn't just some minor extremist -- Tadzhuddin is part of the Russian Muslim leadership. (Despite the Chief Mufti title, I'm not sure I can label him the chief Muslim cleric in Russia, since a quick newspaper search suggests that there are three different Muslim organizations in play there, and Tadzhuddin is the chief mufti of one; but it seems pretty clear that he's quite prominent.) Oh, and he seems like a moderate by the standards of some Muslim leaders: RTR Russia TV reported (thanks to BBC Monitoring, Feb. 10, for the pointer) that he criticized riots over the Mohammed cartoons, saying that "various ultimatums and threats are absolutely inappropriate. This is unacceptable from the point of view of Islam, the very ideology of the Koran, and even international rules, because harming innocent people is banditry." But flogging homosexuals is just fine.

Another source (Novye Izvestia -- in English, "New News" -- as reported by What The Papers Say) reports that "According to Tadzhuddin, the Prophet Muhammad taught that homosexuals should be killed, since their activities lead to the extinction of the human race." "Umar Idrisov, head of the Muslim Religious Directorate in the Nizhniy Novgorod region," is also reported to have said, "Homosexuals ought to be stoned," and not in the Bob Dylan sense, I think.

Fortunately, "Nafigulla Ashirov, co-chairman of the Mufti Council of Russia [and one of Tadzhuddin's adversaries], provided a symmetric response (recalling Tadzhuddin's unusual opinion about the cartoons) in an interview with Echo of Moscow Radio: 'I don't think we have the right to beat up or kill anyone. Such actions are unacceptable for us, since doing so would be illegal.'" Pleased to hear that you're in favor of following the law, Mr. Co-Chairman; might there also be some other reason, though, why you shouldn't beat up or kill people?

I should stress that, as best I can tell, Russian society is quite hostile to gays; the Independent article reports that "An opinion poll last year showed 43 per cent of Russians believed gay men should be incarcerated." (By comparison, a 1998 Time poll of Americans -- the most recent I could find -- reports that,when asked, "Do you think that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal or illegal?," 33% of respondents said "illegal," and even that is a less punitive position than calling for outright incarceration.) The nastiness can't be laid entirely at the feet of parts of the Russian Muslim community. But it can't be laid entirely at someone else's feet, either.

• [Describe] Zionism as "a racist ideology and political movement that appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century" and inform[] readers that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were "a group of confidential resolutions adopted by the [Basel Zionist] Congress ... the goal of which is world domination."

• [P]rovide Middle Esat maps with no] mention of Israel.

• [Give] students this assignment: "Let us research and write [an essay] about one of the Palestinian martyr leaders [suicide bombers]."

The answer, Michael Krauss and Peter Pham report, is the United Nations, specifically the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. In response to some follow-up questions from me, Michael Krauss further reports:

The schools are operated directly by UNRWA — it is a huge operation, involving over 600 primary, elementary, and secondary schools with over 16,000 teachers ... and nearly half a million students.

The passages cited in are articles are all from textbooks currently in use. Incidentally, the UNRWA's official dodge when confronted with this is "The curriculum in the Agency’s schools is determined by the education authorities in the locations where it operates. For historical reasons UNRWA schools followed the Jordanian curriculum in the West Bank and the Egyptian curriculum in the Gaza Strip and this practice continued under the Israeli control of those areas between 1967 and 1994. Since 1994 the Palestinian Authority has progressively been replacing the old Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks as new PA-produced textbooks become available."

That is to say, UNRWA doesn't control content, it just buys anything the PA sells — how reassuring.... If that's a "standard," with Hamas now elected, by this time next year we'll be wishing for the current Fatah textbooks.

I wrote an article on this for a Stanford Law Review symposium on Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'Connor. The issue is whether the government may limit a subsidy to groups that don't discriminate based on various criteria, given that the groups may have a constitutional right to so discriminate (in the wake of Boy Scouts v. Dale). Somewhat to my surprise, I've tentatively concluded that the answer is yes, notwithstanding Dale and Rosenberger v. Rector. I'm not a big fan of the antidiscrimination rules involved, but it seems to me they are indeed constitutional, even when applied to ideological groups that have ideological reasons to discriminate based on religion, sexual orientation, sex, race, ethnicity, and the like.

If you're up on the Court's First Amendment jurisprudence that touches on this subject -- and, better yet, its jurisprudence on refusals to subsidize abortion, private schooling, and other constitutional rights, a jurisprudence that I rely on heavily in my piece -- I'd love to hear your views. I have until March 3 to provide Stanford with my next draft, after which the editing process will get fast and furious. I should say (realizing that beggars can't be choosers) that while there are lots of interesting broad philosophical issues that my topic touches on, I would prefer to get comments from people who have read (or at least skimmed) the paper, and who are up on the somewhat technical legal doctrines that the paper relies on.

An Arizona State Senate committee recommended on Wednesday that the Senate pass the following bill (paragraph break added):

Each university under the jurisdiction of the Arizona board of regents and each community college under the jurisdiction of a community college district shall adopt procedures by which students who object to any course, coursework, learning material or activity on the basis that it is personally offensive shall be provided without financial or academic penalty an alternative course, alternative coursework, alternative learning materials or alternative activity.

Objection to a course, coursework, learning material or activity on the basis that it is personally offensive includes objections that the course, coursework, learning material or activity conflicts with the student's beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion.

That's right: If you're a student at an Arizona public college or university, you would be able to get out of any requirement by simplying showing that you find it morally offensive. Do you find it offensive to write a brief defending abortion rights in your first-year legal writing class? The professor would have to create a completely different assignment, and then undertake to fairly grade your answer to that assignment in comparison to everyone else's answer to the other assignment. Do you find it offensive to answer any questions about evolution (not just to proclaim a personal belief in evolution, but to discuss evolution altogether)? The school would have to give you a biology degree even without ever testing your knowledge of this important subject.

Do you find it offensive to read a book that uses the name of God in vain, or that depicts immodest pictures? The school would have to provide you with an expurgated version of the book. Do you find that a required class is offensive to you because it conveys an improper view of morality, and thus conflicts with your "beliefs . . . in morality"? You get the requirement waived.

Remember that the bill doesn't require reasonable accommodation, or limit itself to specific objections (e.g., objections to performing vivisection or abortions). Whenever a student sincerely asserts that an activity conflicts with his "beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion" (what's a "belief or practice in sex," by the way), he's given a categorical entitlement to be provided with an alternative -- presumably an alternative that doesn't leave him at any disadvantage in the grading or diploma-granting process. Not a sound way to run a system of higher education, it seems to me.

Many thanks to commenter Kipli for letting me know about this bill.

A lunchtime conversation I had reminded me of something I noted a couple of years ago: Aren't you glad that your parents didn't explain sex to you by really telling you about the birds and the bees? "Now, daughter, think of yourself as a bee. There's a 99.99% chance that you'll never get any, and instead of developing an extensive reproductive system, you'll get to have a stinger and a venom pouch. But there's a tiny chance that you'll be a queen bee, which means you'll be really huge, and all these male bees will have sex with you."

"Son, you have to find the queen, the one all the other boys want to mate with. Then you'll have sex with her, and your penis will fall off and stay in her body. Then you'll die. Oh, before you have sex with her, make sure you take the other guy's penis out of her first."

"No wait, daughter, actually, think of yourself as a bird. That means you've got a single cloaca, through which your urine, feces, and eggs go out, and the male's semen comes in. Just remember that, and you'll be OK."

Good thing I learned about sex through the "S" volume of the encyclopedia instead.

Mark Steyn writes, with his customary verve, about birth rates, Japan, Australia, Europe, and the Muslim world. Some key paragraphs:

Will Japan's economy return to the heady days of the 1980s when US businesses cowered in terror? Answer: No. Japan is exactly the same as it was in its heyday except for one fact: it stopped breeding and its population aged. Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it gets rich.

Check back with me in a century and we'll see who's right on that one. But here's one we know the answer to: Why is this newspaper published in the language of a tiny island on the other side of the earth? Why does Australia have an English Queen, English common law, English institutions? Because England was the first nation to conquer infant mortality.

By 1820 medical progress had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of 15. Britain had the manpower to take, hold, settle and administer huge chunks of real estate around the planet. Had, say, China or Russia been first to overcome childhood mortality, the modern world would be very different.

What country today has half of its population under the age of 15? Italy has 14 per cent, the UK 18 per cent, Australia 20 per cent -- and Saudi Arabia has 39 per cent, Pakistan 40 per cent and Yemen 47 per cent. Little Yemen, like little Britain 200 years ago, will send its surplus youth around the world -- one way or another.

I'm not sure how right Steyn is, either on the general matter or on his specific concerns about abortion. My sense is that later marriages and later onset of childbirth in marriages may be a more important economic factor here; and of course decreased childbirth may in many situations create economic benefits (as women, and to some extent men, spend more time working) as well as economic costs. Nonetheless, his argument seems quite intriguing (and, as usual, very readable), and the topic is certainly tremendously important and in my experience underdiscussed.

The Colorado State University Collegian reports on what happened when Professor James Lindsey showed three of the Mohammed cartoons -- "includ[ing] a satirical sketch of the prophet wearing a bomb on top of his head and another that depicted him wielding a sword, surrounded by women" -- to his about 125-student Islamic history class. They originated from a Danish newspaper.

Zaki Safar, vice president of the Muslim Student Association, said the cartoons make the holy figure out to be a terrorist and a "sex maniac" who oppresses women.

"The one with the bomb on his head was the worst," the Saudi Arabia native said, still teary-eyed just after 2 p.m., when class let out. "I cried with tears in the middle of the class."

Other students chuckled at the cartoons or were puzzled at the reaction, he said.

The professor, James Lindsay, said he presented the cartoons in response to student inquiries; several students told him they did not understand the logic behind the anger over the cartoons.

Normally, he said, he stays away from addressing current events in the history course, but this time he decided to take the opportunity to offer students some context....

He showed the Danish-drawn cartoons lampooning Muslims and Muslim-drawn cartoons satirizing Europeans and Jews, along with historical and modern Islamic texts and art....

What's worse is that these and other cartoons widen the gap between Islamic and Western cultures, Safar said, and that's exactly what his student group is trying to combat.

He said freedom of speech should be used responsibly and not give such a powerful voice to the most ignorant in each culture....

Students interviewed on campus Thursday afternoon generally supported the professor's decision, so long as the presentation was tactful.... But Safar was firm in his belief that the blasphemy should simply not have been shown.

"(Lindsay) made a huge mistake by putting up the cartoons," Safar said. "Not only that, he's making the gap between the three religions bigger and bigger.... Making chaos between people -- I don't think that's the correct way of achieving peace." ...

"My job is not to bring people together," Lindsay said. "My job is to teach history. History is not pleasant in many cases, and I made it very clear in class that this is America and you all have the right to offend but you do not have the right to not be offended."

Vice President Cheney's hunting accident led me to wonder — how dangerous (to humans) is hunting, compared to other recreational activities? Here are some statistics from the 1999 edition of National Safety Council's Injury Facts:

Note that all the numbers (especially the injuries) probably involve some underreporting, so these are just rough cuts. The numbers also aren't normalized by the number of participants; for instance, hunting, swimming, and boating, for instance, are much more popular than parachuting, so parachuting may well have a higher fatality-per-participant (or fatality-per-episode) rate than those other activities.

I used the 1999 edition because that's the one on my shelf; I'll see if I can get some more recent numbers, and perhaps ones that cover more kinds of sports.

Here's 1996-98 data for Colorado alone; again, I point to it just because I could find it easily online — I suspect it's at least roughly representative of the country more generally, though of course it would have a higher skiing fatality count than most other areas would.

UPDATE: As I noted above, the numbers I gave aren't normalized by the number of participants; I was hoping people might fill that gap in some measure. (I also hope that it's obvious to our readers that without this denominator data, the numerators I give are useful only as a start to answering the question, or at best as a very rough estimate given your rough sense of the order of magnitude of popularity of each activity.)

In the meantime, I did a bit of searching to try to get this information myself; so far, all I've discovered is that in the late 1990s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported that about 15 million hunting licenses were sold each year. I'd love to hear what people who know more about hunting licenses can say about how overinclusive (do you often need to buy more than one hunting license to hunt more than one kind of game, or more than once?) or underinclusive (is there lots of hunting that doesn't require such a license?) these numbers might be.

FURTHER UPDATE: A reader who identifies himself as Talon Karrde pointed me (thanking Alphecca) to a Texas Parks & Wildlife Report that reports about 30 accidents per million hunting licenses per year in Texas over 2003-05, including under 3 fatal accidents per million hunting licenses. If this information is complete, and each hunter gets one hunting license per year, then we have a rate of 3 deaths per million per year. If every single American swam (obviously an overestimate), then the 1500 swimming fatalities per year would translate into 5 deaths per million per year; if every American boated (obviously even more of an overestimate), then the 800 swimming fatalities per year would translate into under 3 fatal accidents per million swimmers.

So, if my assumptions about completeness of the Texas records and the hunter-hunting license correspondents are correct, and if the Texas data is generalizable to the country as a whole, then hunting would be less dangerous on a per-participant basis than swimming and boating. We still don't know the relationship, though, on a per-hour-spent basis. If people have statistics on number of participants in swimming and boating, or more accurate information on housing, I'd love to hear them.

apropos the Georgia vibrator law post, from commenter Kieran Jadiker-Smith:

Fear the government that fears your dildo.

I just read a case striking down (on slightly complex grounds that I won't get into here) Georgia's law banning the distribution and advertising of "obscene material" — including "[a]ny device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs," as well as hard-core porn of the sort that the law describes as "obscenity" — and found this exception:

(e) It is an affirmative defense under this Code section that dissemination of the material was restricted to:

(1) A person associated with an institution of higher learning, either as a member of the faculty or a matriculated student, teaching or pursuing a course of study related to such material . . . .

I know that some people think that professors and students — and especially law professors and law students — are especially in need of sex aids, but it's nice to see that under Georgia law they actually get a special entitlement to them! I realize, of course, that this is limited to people who are "teaching or pursuing a course of study related to such material," but courses of study are not hard to set up, especially given the availability of independent study projects . . . .

Thanks to How Appealing for the pointer to the opinion.

From the Hamas Covenant (dated 18 August 1988) (some paragraph breaks added):

The enemies have realised the importance of [the Moslem woman's] role. They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up they way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle. That is why you find them giving these attempts constant attention through information campaigns, films, and the school curriculum, using for that purpose their lackeys who are infiltrated through Zionist organizations under various names and shapes, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others, which are all nothing more than cells of subversion and saboteurs. These organizations have ample resources that enable them to play their role in societies for the purpose of achieving the Zionist targets and to deepen the concepts that would serve the enemy. . . . .

For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream.

With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein.

They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it. . . .

World Zionism, together with imperialistic powers, try through a studied plan and an intelligent strategy to remove one Arab state after another from the circle of struggle against Zionism, in order to have it finally face the Palestinian people only. Egypt was, to a great extent, removed from the circle of the struggle, through the treacherous Camp David Agreement. They are trying to draw other Arab countries into similar agreements and to bring them outside the circle of struggle.

The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of this horrendous plan, to warn the people of the danger eminating from leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism. Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. . . .

This is from the Covenant of the new governing party of the Palestinian Authority. "Why do they hate us?," at least where the "us" is Jews? Could one reason be the stuff they're taught by authoritative voices in their countries? And how does one negotiate with people who have such a tenuous grasp of reality?

UPDATE: Whoops, at first forgot to include the Protocols of the Elders of Zion section; just remedied that.

UPDATE: Roger Alford (Opinion Juris) has more on the Hamas Party Charter.

One recurring argument that I've seen from Muslims who want the cartoons legally suppressed is that European laws prohibit other kinds of speech offensive to other groups — for instance, Holocaust denial, which is often restricted chiefly because it's seen as implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic — and that Muslims should get the same treatment. In practice, those laws don't get used that often, and European speech is actually more free than the laws would suggest. Nonetheless, the laws' presence does make possible the argument I describe; and I suspect it does make many Muslims feel even more aggrieved than they would be by the cartoons themselves, since they are also now aggrieved by what they see as discriminatorily enforced laws.

Consider, just as one example among many, Norwegian Penal Code secs. 135 & 135a (noted here; thanks to Rebecca Davidson for pointing to that article, and to Jill Fukunaga of the UCLA Law Library for finding the English text of the code sections):

§ 135. Any person who endangers the general peace by publicly insulting or provoking hatred of the Constitution or any public authority or by publicly stirring up one part of the population against another, or who is accessory thereto, shall be liable to fines or to detention or imprisonment for a term not exceeding one year.

§ 135 a. Any person shall be liable to fines or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years who by any utterance or other communication made publicly or otherwise disseminated among the public threatens, insults, or subjects to hatred, persecution or contempt any person or group of persons because of their creed, race, colour or national or ethnic origin. The same applies to any such offensive conduct towards a person or a group because of their homosexual bent, life-style, or inclination.

The same penalty shall apply to any person who incites or is otherwise accessory to any act mentioned in the first paragraph.

These belong to the family of restrictions on "hate speech" and "incitement to hostility" that Europeans (and some Americans) sometimes praise as a model "reasonable" alternative to America's speech protections. But look how broad they are: If you "endanger[] the general peace" by "publicly stirring up one part of the population against another," you can go to prison. If you disseminate a communication that "insult[s]" "any group of persons because of their creed," you can go to prison.

Of course publication of the cartoons would be covered. My providing a link to the cartoons (which I've done in many of my previous posts, since providing such a link is in my view necessary to helping people understand the controversy) would be a crime under Norwegian law: I would be an accessory to a communication that insults some Muslims because of their creed. And of course many Muslims would feel entitled to have this law enforced to protect their sensibilities.

Many Muslims are surely offended enough by the cartoons on their own; but at least in America we can tell them to join the club — American Christians have no legal protection from anti-Christian speech, American Jews have none from anti-Semitic speech, blacks have none from racist speech, Americans generally have none from anti-American speech. What can Norwegians tell them, other than (1) "Sorry, the laws don't protect you," (2) "OK, we'll enforce the laws to suppress this speech that insults you," or (3) "These are bad laws, we're glad that they've rarely been used, we're sorry they were ever enacted, and we are going to repeal them right away" (my preferred suggestion, though not one likely to be implemented, and one that would still be understandably offensive to many Muslims, since the laws' repeal would have been triggered by speech that's offensive to Muslims)?

from Felix Cohen's Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach, 35 Colum. L. Rev. 809 (1935). In a sense, Justice Holmes's "Think things, not words" captures it well and tersely, but sometimes the longer version has its value:

I. The Heaven of Legal Concepts

Some fifty years ago a great German jurist had a curious dream. He dreamed that he died and was taken to a special heaven reserved for the theoreticians of the law. In this heaven one met, face to face, the many concepts of jurisprudence in their absolute purity, freed from all entangling alliances with human life. Here were the disembodied spirits of good faith and bad faith, property, possession, laches, and rights in rem. Here were all the logical instruments needed to manipulate and transform these legal concepts and thus to create and to solve the most beautiful of legal problems.

Here one found a dialectic-hydraulic-interpretation press, which could press an indefinite number of meanings out of any text or statute, an apparatus for constructing fictions, and a hair-splitting machine that could divide a single hair into 999,999 equal parts and, when operated by the most expert jurists, could split each of these parts again into 999,999 equal parts. The boundless opportunities of this heaven of legal concepts were open to all properly qualified jurists, provided only they drank the Lethean draught which induced forgetfulness of terrestrial human affairs. But for the most accomplished jurists the Lethean draught was entirely superfluous. They had nothing to forget. . . .

From Joe's Dartblog:

Unlike affirmative action, there seems to be no shortage of supremely justiciable cases on abortion. The South Dakota state house decided to create some today when it voted for a near-outright ban on the procedure. It passed 47-22 after an hour of debate. If the bill is passed by the senate in coming days, it will become prime fodder for a high court review of Roe. If the Roberts courts reverses the core of that decision, the ninth circle of Hell will incarnate as a four-winged black demon, swallowing the very essence of human goodness into its fiery maw the matter will be decided upon by each state’s legislature.

Joshua Foer, writing in The New York Times, reports (among other interesting things):

All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting. Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale.

To this day, public kissing is still seen as indecent in many parts of the world. In 1990, the Beijing-based Workers' Daily advised its readers that "the invasive Europeans brought the kissing custom to China, but it is regarded as a vulgar practice which is all too suggestive of cannibalism." . . .

Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M, has traced the first recorded kiss back to India, somewhere around 1500 B.C., when early Vedic scriptures start to mention people "sniffing" with their mouths, and later texts describe lovers "setting mouth to mouth." From there, he hypothesizes, the kiss spread westward when Alexander the Great conquered the Punjab in 326 B.C.

The Romans were inveterate kissers, and along with Latin, the kiss became one of their chief exports. . . .

Thanks to David Tice for the pointer.

Just ran across a funny case from July 2005. Twenty-one-year-old Ohio residents Scott Christopher Wurgler and his twin brother Matthew Allen Wurgler, decided to change their names to Sacco Vandal and Vanzetti Vandal. No, said the magistrate, because "the name change would be contrary to public policy" (a general legal reason for why name change applications may be denied) -- the new name, he reasoned, was "synonymous with anarchism, wanton destruction and murder." (By the way, five years before, Ohio courts refused to let a man changed his name to "Santa Claus" because this "would mislead children and interfere with society's proprietary interest in the identity of a beloved icon.")

Scott Wurgler objected, for four reasons -- (1) "he wanted a name that he himself selected," (2) the name "would reflect his Italian heritage," (3) "the new name has a pleasant ring to it and he wished to use the name in his rock band and in other business ventures," and (4) "the new name will help him in his future bid for public office" (uh, really?).

The judge reviewing the magistrate's decision disagreed. "Few people are aware of the name 'Sacco' and its connection to the anarchist movement in 20th century America." "Even fewer would associate the name 'Vandal' with the Vandal hoards [sic] of Europe" -- "A check of a White Pages website reveals more than a dozen presumably law-abiding Ohioans with the surname of Vandal." "If the applicant is using the name change to make a statement to society . . . it is a subtle one. Most people won't 'get it' without a short history lesson and a long social commentary." Name change approved.

A Statement from the Publisher in the latest Daily Illini says:

A student task force has been formed by the Illini Media board of directors and the company's publisher to investigate the internal decision-making and communication surrounding the publishing of The Daily Illini Opinions Page of Thursday, Feb. 9.

The student staff in The Daily Illini newsroom has questioned in print and in meetings the manner in which Editor in Chief Acton Gorton and Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska produced the page. While the task force convenes for approximately two weeks, these two editors have been suspended, and Managing Editors Shira Weissman and Jason Koch will serve together as interim editor in chief.

The board and publisher reaffirm that final decisions about content in The Daily Illini rest with the editor in chief. But the board and publisher also recognize that journalistic norms regarding professional behavior dictate that it is the editor's obligation to engage other student editors and student staff members in rigorous discussion and debate of sensitive content.

Mary Cory
Publisher and General Manager
Illini Media Co.

I'm pretty sure there's no constitutional problem here; the board of directors of a nonprofit publication is entitled to ultimately control what the publication publishes, and to control who gets to make the daily decisions about such matters. That some of the board of directors members are faculty at a public university doesn't change the matter; I don't believe they're acting in their official capacity, and, even if they were speaking for the university so that the newspaper were a university-controlled organ, the university would generally be entitled to dictate what is published in the media that it controls. (A public university is not entitled to dictate what is published in privately owned student newspapers; but here either the newspaper is private and controlled by a board of directors acting in its private capacity, or [less likely] it would be seen as being controlled by faculty members acting as public officials, in which case it's no longer really quite private.)

Nonetheless, one can certainly question whether the board of directors decision is sound. The cartoons are extremely newsworthy; to understand the worldwide events of the last several weeks, people have to be able to see the cartoons. They are indeed easily available online, but it certainly makes sense that a paper publication would want to make them instantly available to its readers, rather than providing a link that they hope their readers will eventually plug into a browser.

The strongest defense I can see of the Board's decision is if indeed the editor's decision violated traditional consultative norms of the Daily Illini editorial process. If the Daily Illini had indeed generally been run on a principle that, before any "sensitive content" (e.g., potentially offensive criticism of Christianity, material that some readers might find vulgar, and so on) is published, the editor must "engage other student editors and student staff members in rigorous discussion and debate" of the subject, then an editor's departure from this norm might be seen as an undue arrogation of decisionmaking authority. I don't think that there are any general "journalistic norms" requiring such consultation — a dictatorial editorial model is perfectly within journalistic norms, it seems to me (with some possible exceptions that are not applicable here). But if there are such norms at the Daily Illini, the Board may reasonably insist that the norms continue to be followed, to protect a decisionmaking process that it finds valuable.

I'd love to know more about this procedural justification that the Board is giving. Do any readers know more details on what actually happened here, and what Daily Illini practice has been? Has the Board made more detailed statements on the subject? Are the Illini's own "journalistic standards" available somewhere? Here is what one of the suspended editors says (I quote from a Chicago Tribune article on the controversy):

Acton Gorton, 25, said he believes he made a sound journalistic decision in running six of the cartoons because the public has a right to judge their content. He said he consulted with top staff members and journalism instructors before making the decision to publish them in Thursday's newspaper.

[O]n Monday, the paper ran an editorial apologizing for Gorton's decision and called the move "a blatant abuse of power" by a "renegade editor who firmly believes that his will is also the will of the paper."

The task force will study whether Gorton made his decision in a vacuum that was improper according to the Illini's journalistic standards, written in 1947.

Thanks to reader Mark Deming for the pointer.

The OpinionJournal Federation of Web sites is up, and I'm pleased to say that we're part of it. (The current list of members is Council on Science and Health, City Journal, Claremont Institute, Commentary, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Dynamist, Eduwonk, First Things, InstaPundit, Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball, Overlawyered, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, RealClearPolitics, Reason Foundation, Property and Environment Research Center, The American Spectator, The Federalist Society, The Heritage Foundation, The New Criterion, and us.) Right now, the Federation page links to all the sites, plus a featured article from one of them; I'm not sure what more OpinionJournal plans for this, but I look forward to seeing.

Naturally, OpinionJournal exercises no editorial control over what we post here, though of course they're entitled to choose which, if any, of our posts they'll specially link to.

David Hardy reports:

My ex law partner was walking through the courthouse one day (this is a true story) and he saw an old client in the jury assembly area. They get to chatting, and he notices the guy has a copy of Mein Kampf under his arm. A version with the title in large letters on the cover. He asks what in the heck the guy is doing with it.

"Would you pick someone for a jury whom you saw reading Mein Kampf?"

"Hell, no!"

"Then why are you asking me why I'm reading it?"

I wanted to get the source for the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," so I tracked it down to Tom Wolfe's "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," republished in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). In the process, I found a more extended discussion that struck me as worth repeating. Here's the relevant excerpt, from pp. 115-17 of the hardcover edition; it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folsk waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .

Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.

"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn't you say! . . .

Correlation, we're correctly told, doesn't demonstrate causation. At best, it's a first step towards making causation more likely. But it's striking how some stories hint at causation without even showing correlation.

Here's an example, with thanks to reader Adam Sofen. Slate ran a piece last week on mining accidents, and included the following (emphasis added):

The real obstacle to safety reform is that miners no longer have a powerful union sticking up for them. History shows that when miners have: 1) been organized and angry; and 2) had the strong national leadership of the United Mine Workers of America backing them up, they've been able to push for the legislative changes necessary for lasting advances in safety conditions. Sadly, neither of those two factors exist today. In fact, mining in the United States is only safer today than it has ever been because organized mine workers pushed hard for reforms a generation ago—reforms that are still in effect. Whether those reforms are enough is now in question. The majority of mining deaths in the past few years have occurred in nonunion mines. Sago was not a unionized mine, and, according to public records, federal inspectors noted 46 alleged violations of federal mine health and safety rules at the Sago site during an 11-week review that ended in late December.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that this suggests that the stated fact -- "The majority of mining deaths in the past few years have occurred in nonunion mines" -- at least tends to indirectly show causation -- lack of unionization decreases safety.

But here's another fact, noted at the end of the sixth paragraph following the quoted ones:

Today, according to the union's own optimistic estimates, only about 30 percent of all mines are organized.

So the majority of mining deaths have occurred in the about 70% of all mines that are nonunionized -- how does this even show a correlation between lack of unionization and lack of safety? And given this, how is the assertion that "The majority of mining deaths in the past few years have occurred in nonunion mines" remotely probative of anything?

Of course, it's possible that the author could show correlation between danger and nonunion status. For instance, if "majority of mining deaths" was 90% of all mining deaths, that would tend to show correlation. If the 30% of all mines that are unionized (aan "optimistic estimate[]") contained 80% of all miners, that would tend to show correlation. But the story gives no such data; the only directly relevant data it gives are the statements that "The majority of mining deaths in the past few years have occurred in nonunion mines," and, six paragraphs later, "only about 30 percent of all mines are organized." (I tried to find such data -- many thanks to UCLA Law School research librarian Jill Fukunaga for her help -- but the closest I could get is that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2004 28.9% of coal mine employees were union-affiliated, which I realize may not indicate what fraction of miners were union-affiliated.)

So, an elaboration: Correlation doesn't prove causation. But a statement that "the majority of Xs occur at Ys" doesn't even show correlation. It's at best irrelevant, and at worst misleading. Yet I've seen this sort of "evidence" time and again; watch out for it.

I've pointed out before that there have been relatively few governmental restrictions on antiwar and anti-Administration speech over the past five years; and I still think this is so. Nonetheless, here's an incident that strikes me as quite troubling.

In September 2005, a nurse with the Department of Veterans Affairs wrote a letter to an Albuquerque alternative newspaper (the Weekly Alibi) that stridently denounced the Administration; I reproduce it below:

Dear Alibi,

I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government. The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes! Bush and his team partied and delayed while millions of people were displaced, hundreds of thousands were abandoned to a living hell. Thousands more died of drowning, dehydration, hunger and exposure; most bodies remain unburied and rotting in attics and floodwater. Is this America the beautiful?

The risk of hurricane disaster was clearly predicted, yet funds for repair work for the Gulf States barrier islands and levee system were unconscionably diverted to the Iraq War. Money and manpower and ethics have been diverted to fight a war based on absolute lies!

As a VA nurse working with returning OIF vets, I know the public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder; now we will have hundreds of thousands of our civilian citizens with PTSD as well as far too many young soldiers, maimed physically or psychologically -- or both -- spreading their pain, anger and isolation through family and communities for generations. And most of this natural disaster and war tragedy has been preventable ... how very, very sad!

In the meantime, our war-fueled federal deficit mushrooms -- and whither this debt now, as we care for the displaced and destroyed?

Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence. This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil.

Katrina itself was the size of New Mexico. Denials of global warming are ludicrous and patently irrational at this point. We can anticipate more wild, destructive weather to occur as a response stress of the planet. We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit. Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.

Now the nurse has seemingly gotten into trouble with the VA, apparently on the grounds that the VA suspects that the letter may have been composed on a work computer. According to the Alibi, "[Berg's lawyers] say that a few days after the letter was published, VA Information Security employees seized Berg's computer at the local VA hospital where she works. At the time, she was told this action occurred because of suspicions that she'd composed the letter to the Alibi on government time, on government premises, using government equipment. According to Bach and Kronen, on Sept. 19, 2005, Berg's American Federation of Government Employees Union representative, Thomas Driber, informed Berg that her letter to the Alibi had been sent through 'VA channels' to the FBI in Washington, D.C. The attorneys say this information was confirmed by one of the union's Washington lawyers during a conference call between Driber, Berg and the union lawyer. (Multiple phone messages left at Driber's office by the Alibi were not answered.)"

What most concerns me is the response of the Chief of the Human Resources Management Service at the VA; in relevant part, it says (emphasis added; I quote from a fax of the memo written by the Chief):

In your letter to the Editor of the Weekly Alibi, you declared yourself "as a VA nurse" and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have "tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence" and advocated, "act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit." The Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition. You are reminded that Government equipment is just that, and the Government may apprehend, investigate, use, or permit the use of such at its discretion and direction.

Sedition? As my dictionary puts it, "Conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state"? Here a citizen is condemning the government and calling for it to be tried, and this is somehow "inciting rebellion"? Please. Either this is a wild overreaction (perhaps based on an unreasonable misreading of "forcefully" as "forcibly," where in context it simply means "effectively">), or -- worse still -- this is a federal bureaucrat treating harsh criticism of the government as somehow criminal. As a First Amendment matter, the letter to the editor is likely protected even against the government acting as employer: It's on a matter of public concern, and I highly doubt that such a letter would so interfere with the effectiveness of the nurse's workplace that this interference would outweigh the First Amendment value of the letter to its writer and to its readers (that's the relevant First Amendment test when the government is acting as employer). Even if it was written on a work computer, which apparently may not be the case here, most government workplaces in practice tolerate light uses of work computers for personal conduct (e.g., sending a personal e-mail, or composing a personal letter). If that's so here, as seems very likely, then concern about supposed misuse of computer resources seems to be just a screen for government bureaucrats trying to suppress arguments that they find offensive.

What's more, talk of "sedition" helps show that the government official's true concern was about advocacy of views he dislikes, and not about control of government equipment -- "sedition" is the name of a crime against the government as sovereign, and not just a subspecies of misuse of government property by a government employee that's punishable by reprimand or firing. And the talk of "sedition" also shows that this particular official has forgotten James Madison's point that "If we advert to the nature of Republican Government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the Government, and not in the Government over the people."

Fortunately, it appears that the nurse has not lost her job, and has gotten her computer back. But I think the incident should make us wonder whether the Chief of the VA Human Resources Management Service is doing his job properly, and with the proper understanding of how the government is constitutionally bound to operate.

Thanks to reader J.D. Knoll for the pointer.

Recent instances of U.S. judges — most recently, the Supreme Court's moderate liberal wing, plus moderate conservatives Justices O'Connor and Kennedy — using international law in interpreting the U.S. Constitution has led many people to be concerned. I at first wasn't much troubled.

Then, though, I expressed some worry, when I saw an argument (by a prominent liberal U.S. international law scholar) that "If some constitutional norms are more appropriately set at the international level, that should justify a treaty power that, in some cases, overcomes even the Bill of Rights." This scholar endorsed such a result, under which (for instance) international norms supporting the suppression of allegedly bigoted speech could be used to trump First Amendment rules; but I find that a very troubling consequence. And I echoed this most recently as to the cartoon affair, given the calls by a U.N. official to investigate the publication of the cartoons as potentially criminally punishable.

It turns out, though, that there has indeed been a case in which the Supreme Court was asked to uphold a restriction on speech that offends supposed international law norms — a content-based restriction on political speech in a traditional public forum, the sort of restriction that is usually treated as most constitutionally suspect. In Boos v. Barry, a local ordinance banned (among other things) "display[ing] any . . . placard . . . designed . . . to . . . bring into public odium any foreign government . . . or . . . political, social, or economic acts, views, or purposes of any foreign government" within 500 feet of that country's embassy. The ordinance was challenged by anti-Communist picketers who wanted to protest in front of the Soviet and Nicaraguan embassies.

The government, and some judges, defended the ordinance on the grounds that it was necessary to comply with international norms. International law, the argument went, banned certain kinds of speech that insults foreign ambassadors. The First Amendment must be interpreted in light of this international law norm, so that otherwise constitutionally protected speech could be suppressed because of international law. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected this argument, though not without dissent.

Here are the questions:

(1) Which controversial court of appeals judge wrote the lower court opinion that upheld the restriction on speech that insults foreign ambassadors, on the grounds that "the first amendment" "must be accommodated" with "the United States' . . . obligations under the law of nations"?

(2) Which Supreme Court Justice wrote the opinion that endorsed this view?

(3) Which Supreme Court Justice wrote the opinion that disagreed, stressing that "no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the [Government] . . . which is free from the restraints of the Constitution," and suggesting that "the fact that an interest is recognized in international law does not automatically render that interest 'compelling' for purposes of First Amendment analysis" (though ultimately not reaching the issue because the Justice concluded that the international law interest could be adequately served without this speech restriction)?

(4) How did the other Supreme Court Justices vote on the matter?

Here's a cartoon the Akron Beacon-Journal apparently published a few days ago:

Here's the response:

Several Northeastern Ohio Muslims and community leaders met Friday to express their concerns about the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have ignited outrage and violence.

At issue are the caricatures published in the European press — work that many U.S. newspapers decided against publishing. The group also took issue with a cartoon inked by Beacon Journal editorial cartoonist Chip Bok.

Bok said he did not draw his cartoon with intentions of offending Muslims and has defended his right to free press.

But Muslims on Friday said Bok's cartoon was disrespectful and demeaning.

The level of hurt, they said, was deeper since it was in the local paper.

"It pained me to know that the Beacon Journal printed its own editorial cartoons that sought to challenge the beauty of our community by bringing hate into its pages," said Rabbi David Lipper, of Akron's Temple Israel. . . .

The editorial cartoon has prompted several letters in response. Also on Friday afternoon, there was a demonstration outside of the newspaper's East Exchange Street building.

At Friday's news conference at the Islamic Society of Akron & Kent in Cuyahoga Falls, the speakers were passionate.

A.R. Abdoulkarim, Amir of the Akron Masjid, applauded newspapers that decided against running the cartoons, but condemned those who did. The Beacon Journal, he said, was in a class of its own.

"They take the prize for being the most ill-intended, irresponsible property group," he said. "Allah curses and condemns them and every Muslim in this community should curse and condemn them."

Julia A. Shearson, director of Ohio's Council of American-Islamic Relations, said they want the Beacon Journal to apologize for running the "unethical" cartoon and want the paper to publish their letters to the editor.

After yesterday's press conference, Bok met with several leaders. The cartoonist said he drew the cartoon to take a shot at CNN for "distorting a distortion" and not at the prophet or Muslims. . . .

Still, Muslim leaders said Bok's cartoon was disrespectful because the prophet should not have been depicted in such a way. In fact, they said, there are no pictures or statues of Muhammad because he should not be confused with God. . . .

So I guess it's not just that we aren't supposed to draw pictures of Mohammed as terrorist, or of Mohammed at all; we aren't even supposed to draw pictures that are obviously not of Mohammed, and that are meant to mock the inability to draw pictures of Mohammed.

Well, I have to admit: The folks who are offended by this have a First Amendment right to be offended. They should feel entirely free to be offended.

The rest of us should feel entirely free, as a matter of civility as well as of law, to say: Your decision to be offended by this particular cartoon gives you no rights (again, as a matter of civility as well as of law) to tell us to stop printing it.

More on the underlying conceptual issue — the difficult but necessary distinction between (more or less) reasonable taking of offense and unreasonable taking of offense — later; I also hope then to talk in some measure about the distinction between this cartoon and others that I do think can reasonably be found to be offensive, and that probably shouldn't (as a matter of civility) have been published in the first instance, though it is proper to publish them now in order to explain the controversy. For now, it seems to me that this incident does plenty to illustrate the danger of the "it's wrong to publish any cartoons that offend people" attitude.

Many thanks to This Isn't Writing, It's Typing for the pointer.