Courts frequently engage in flagrantly inconsistent legal reasoning in order to first impose liability on employers and then maximize and collect damages in sexual harassment cases, and they often disregard the statutory requirements that harassment plaintiffs seeking compensatory damages show that they were harassed based on their sex, and subjected to intentional discrimination. 

I don’t like raunchy radio programs, but that doesn’t mean the government should ban listening to them, much less do so under the weak argument that they constitute sex discrimination.

The sputtering economy has caused an increase in prices of many staples including gasoline, rice, ice cream, even beer. Now some lawmakers in New Jersey are considering taking food taxes a step further and install a proverbial “sin” tax on fast food.

Yes, the idea of marking up your favorite fast food burger or pack of fries is actually being tossed around, and it’s not settling well with many residents.

“They’re taxing everything. Now you’re gonna tax fast food? That’s crazy,” said Newark resident Miriam Robertson.

This proposal shows how government naturally begets government.  Provide health care, so every unhealthy private action suddenly becomes a matter of public concern.  Money must be raised, creating an opportunity punish the irresponsible.  Taxation naturally becomes social engineering.

CPS workers have an incentive to seize children, since the federal government gives states incentives for seizing and adopting out children, and CPS workers are more likely to be fired for failing to prevent child abuse than for wrongly seizing children, even if the seizure itself causes the child devastating psychological harm.

I wrote earlier about how temporary seizures of infants based on erroneous accusations later found to be false can become permanent, when courts rule that the infant has become attached to her foster family and thus should not be returned even if the alleged abuse that led to the seizure did not actually occur.   I also discussed the violation of due process involved in the mass seizures of children in the strange FLDS religious sect, hundreds of whom were seized based on a single, anonymous, allegation of abuse by a caller pretending to be a teenager in the sect, and who continue to be held without any hearing on whether they individually are endangered (although the removal of some of the children might well be warranted if it occurred after a full judicial hearing).

Reports the Economist:

The problem with this, say Scott Adams and Chad Cotti, economists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is that smoking bans seem to have been followed by an increase in drunk-driving and in fatal accidents involving alcohol. In research published in the Journal of Public Economics, the authors find evidence that smokers are driving farther to places where smoking in bars is allowed.

The researchers analysed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the equivalent of 2.5 fatal accidents (equivalent to approximately six deaths). Furthermore, drunk-driving smokers have not changed their ways over time. In areas where the ban has been in place for longer than 18 months, the increased accident rate is 19%.

The findings, say the pair, are consistent with the suggestion that smokers are driving farther to alternative places to drink. This may be because they are driving to bars with outdoor seating, or to bars which are not enforcing the smoking ban.

Another explanation is that some smokers are “jurisdiction shopping” to places where they may puff. Accident rates can be especially high where border-hopping to still-smoky bars is possible. Accidents in Delaware county in Pennsylvania increased by 26% after the next-door state of Delaware introduced a smoking ban in 2002. Similarly, when Boulder county banned smoking, fatal accidents in Jefferson county, between Boulder county and Denver, went up by 40%. How this weighs up against the long-term health effects of smoking bans is unclear. But it serves as a warning to well-meaning legislators.

Makes you wonder what government is going to do for an encore!
 

The ABA’s actions violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), which held in footnote 23 that racial quotas violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 (which bans both private and public discrimination) as well as the Fourteenth Amendment (which bans only governmental discrimination).  Moreover, the ABA and its accreditors are liable for pressuring GMU to engage in racial discrimination under 42 U.S.C. 1981, which allows not only employers and other institutions to be held liable for racial discrimination, but also individual discriminators.  And GMU and its president and law school dean, who were personally summoned to appear before the ABA in order for them to be pressured to maximize GMU’s racial quotas, have standing to sue over those quota mandates under Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v. FCC, 141 F.3d 344 (D.C. Cir. 1998), which held that the Lutheran Church had standing to sue the FCC to keep the FCC from pressuring it to take race into account in hiring employees for its religious radio stations in order to satisfy a ”diversity” mandate.  (Note that GMU is a state university).

The demand on people and institutions to abandon the principle of nondiscrimination has been particularly strong in academia.  Although the U.S. Supreme Court has limited the role of race in admissions, the American Bar Association is now pushing to institutionalize de facto quotas.  University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot writes about the plight of George Mason University law school, known for its more conservative political orientation:

If you have ever wondered why colleges and universities seem to march in lockstep on controversial issues like affirmative action, here is one reason: Overly politicized accrediting agencies often demand it.

Given that federal funding hinges on accreditation, schools are not in a position to argue. That is precisely why the U.S. Department of Education, which gives accreditors their authority, must sometimes take corrective action. George Mason University’s law school in northern Virginia is an example of why corrective action is needed now.

Taking an infant away from its mother can be very damaging to the infant.  (For example, my daughter, a very finicky eater, will not let anybody other than my wife or me feed her, and she usually only lets me feed her if it’s early in the morning.  We have to work diligently to get her to eat enough).  That’s especially true for nursing infants.

Being placed in foster care can be cause devastating psychological harm to a young child, as Judge Kleinfeld noted in Doe v. Lebbos.

Moreover, erroneous child abuse charges can have legally permanent, irrevocable consequences that devastate a family.  In Arlington County, Virginia, parents proved themselves innocent of a false, anonymous charge that they were starving their child (who was actually at her proper weight when CPS workers snatched her), but the judge later refused to return the child to them, permanently cutting off their parental rights based heavily on his conclusion that the child — seized as a newborn — had developed a bond with her foster parents as a result of being snatched.  (That ruling is on appeal).

Federal law provides financial incentives for CPS agencies to seize and adopt out children, which may lead to overzealous child-snatching.

You are lost as well? I had a long lunch in the sun with North Friday trying to unravel his important discovery. Basically, it is a mechanism by which a country’s civil service overrules its own politicians by sitting on international committees that passes down regulation to lower instance international committees, which then pass legislation by which the individual countries are bound. After our conversation, I have revisited the eminent British comedy Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, which is less fun after my conversation with North. His discovery has lead North to be somewhat dismayed about the future of freedom, and we should all try to understand this organism which threatens the fight for freedom:

Here is a comment from one of the regular readers of North’s eminent blog EU referendum.

“Richard,

I must congratulate you on this important discovery, which to my shame I must admit I missed when you presented it the first time. The find of this new species must be on par, at least, with the discovery of the okapi.

Apart from the fact that both the okapi and the diqule-comm (or just diqule for short) only were known to the natives of their respective habitats until the beginning of the 20th (the okapi) and the 21st (the diqule) centuries, both species appear so unbelievably strange that mere descriptions hardly suffice to convince any learned society of their existence.”

An important aspect of diqule is the ad hoc/standing committee’s which is standing committee’s by any measure I know. The ad hoc quality of them is that membership is transient, it consists of whichever civil servants are relevant for the issue on the agenda, but it is never listed whom these civil servants might be. The agenda is also not published anywhere. Diqule is sort of a black box where issues go in, magic happens, and regulation come out in the other end years and decades longer. The Permanent Secretary tells the Minister, “We have worked on this legislation for years, and we are bound by international agreements to pass it Minister!”

The Permanent Secretary did of course attend the international meetings where the agreements where made and the legislation was formulated, so in essence he sent the instructions to himself.

“These mechanisms where not created for mere mortals to understand and access,” says North.

And for those Americans that think this does not concern you as the U.S. is not a member of the EU, think again. The U.S. is a member of UNECE, which is one of the primary commitology mechanisms for our part of the world. The federal bureaucrats have discovered diqule and you should be afraid, very afraid!!!

It shows that if County social workers seize your baby, based on false allegations of neglect, and put your baby in foster care long enough, you might never get your child back, even if you prove yourself innocent, because the courts will say it’s in “the best interests of the child” that your baby stay with the foster parents he’s gotten used to living with.  (Taking that logic to its ultimate conclusion, a kidnapper who kidnapped a newborn from a hospital and then escaped prosecution on a technicality could keep the child, because the child would have bonded with the kidnapper by the time the kidnapper was apprehended).

That’s the gist of a recent Arlington, Virginia circuit court decision described in today’s Washington Examiner. County social workers took a baby away from her parents based largely on false, anonymous allegations that she was being starved, even though she was at her proper weight at the time they seized her from her parents.  And although those allegations were later ruled false by a CPS hearing officer, the judge permanently removed her from her parents anyway, claiming she had bonded with her new foster parents and thus might be traumatized if she were returned.  (He also cited evidence that her natural parents were not model parents, but that is not the test for terminating parental rights under the Supreme Court’s decision in Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982).  If it were, millions of healthy children could be removed from their families by social workers).  Parents Nancy Hey and Christopher Slitor spent a staggering $350,000 in legal bills in their losing fight for their child.

I personally am worried about this court decision, even though I and my family have never been accused of child neglect or abuse, because my wife, at the suggestion of our pediatrician, called Arlington County social workers because our baby is extremely difficult to feed, and they then visited our house earlier this year.  (Our baby Sarah is 70th percentile in height and skull size, but only 10th percentile in weight).  I thought nothing of this visit at the time, since our baby is lively and healthy and has never been neglected or abused, and my wife is a good mother (who conscientiously cared for many children as a nanny, and helped raise her own nephew).  

Although the circuit court decision is apparently justified by the so-called “best interest of the child,” its long run effect is to harm children by discouraging even fit, non-abusive parents from seeking advice or information from doctors or social workers when their children have behaviors or injuries that might sometimes be associated with parental abuse or neglect.  Good parents will now worry about talking to doctors (who are required by state laws to report any possibility of abuse or neglect to social workers) or social workers lest it lead to unwarranted (and unreversible) seizures of a child by social workers. 

Parents already have to worry that if they take their child to the doctor, and reasonably disagree with the doctor’s preferred treatment, overzealous social workers will temporarily seize their child.  That’s what happened to Corissa Mueller, who took her baby daughter Taige to the doctor because the baby had a high temperature, and then had social workers temporarily seize the child after she rejected the doctor’s preferred treatment (a spinal tap) in favor of a reasonable alternative she felt posed fewer health risks.  (The Center for Individual Rights, my former law firm, is representing Mueller in a constitutional lawsuit against Idaho state social worker April Auker for her role in the seizure in Mueller v. Idaho.  A federal judge in Idaho refused to dismiss the lawsuit, citing a 1999 ruling in favor of parental rights by the federal appeals court in that region, the Ninth Circuit.)  Since conditions in foster care are often bad, even temporary seizures of a child can cause devastating emotional and psychological harm.

The Arlington County court ruling, now on appeal, radically increases the risk to parents of taking an injured, ill, or behaviorally-disordered child to a doctor, by allowing an erroneous temporary seizure of a child based on suspicions of abuse to become permanent merely because of the passage of time, even if the child turns out never to have been neglected or abused.  Arlington County seems to be moving towards the situation in some foreign countries like England, where children are removed permanently from their parents based on the most meager suspicions of abuse, fueled in part by the bounties that social workers and local governments receive for seizing children from their parents and then adopting them out.