Ninth Circuit on Casino Rule: No Dice
In Nevada, pastors are struggling to fill their pews under the governor’s unfair COVID rules.
Thanks to coronavirus, collecting the offering is tough — but cashing in your chips isn’t! That’s the state of play in Nevada, where pastors are struggling to fill their pews under the governor’s unfair COVID rules. If you run a casino, you can pack it out. But if you want to worship God in a 1,000-seat sanctuary, you have to limit it to 50 people — or else.
Fortunately, some pastors in the state have had enough. Huddling with attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom, churches like Calvary Chapel Lone Mountain and Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley decided to sue. If people can gather to bet, they argued, then they should be able to gather to pray. And at oral arguments in the Ninth Circuit Court Tuesday, three judges seemed inclined to agree.
“[It’s] really insane to think that, at the outset, the casinos, when they reopened, [were doing so] at 50-percent capacity,” ADF’s Ryan Tucker said on “Washington Watch.” “So you could have hundreds, if not thousands of people in Las Vegas Strip and the MGM Grand or one of the other large casinos. But this church, Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley, which is in rural Dayton just outside of Carson City, [was] limited to 50 people. And, you know, it’s just nonsensical — and unconstitutional as well. And I really do think that the judges recognized that… during the discussion.”
For Governor Steve Sisolak (D), the outlook wasn’t exactly optimistic. The U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled discriminatory rules like his in New York City this month. And that decision was being used all over the country to beat back similar policies. “I think the Supreme Court has made it very clear,” Judge Mark Bennett said, “when you treat bike repair shops and liquor stores far more favorably than houses of worship, you are not meeting the applicable First Amendment test.” His colleague, Milan Smith, agreed.
Things got worse for the governor when his Deputy Solicitor General Craig Newby suggested that casinos are in a different category than churches because they’re regulated by the Nevada Gaming Commission. Nice try, Smith said. “I read that in your brief, and I couldn’t stop laughing,” he told Newby. “The reality is, when you have all these people in casinos, they’re not paying attention to any rules — I don’t care how well it’s regulated. So I don’t see how you justify treating religious [groups] worse than casinos.”
There’s no such thing as the freedom to gamble. There is, however, freedom of religion — and it’s spelled out right there in the Constitution. “You can’t be treating the church and its members in a second class capacity. You can’t place priority on liquor stores, on big box stores, on other retailers, and not at the very least of how the church is operating at those same restrictions. You can’t treat them less than these other secular competitors,” Tucker insisted. We’ll see if the three-judge panel agrees. If they do, it’ll affect churches across Nevada and all down the West Coast.
Originally published here.
Angles We Have Heard on Hyde
It’s usually Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-Conn.) purple hair that gets people’s attention. But lately, she’s being noticed for something else: her adamance that taxpayers fund abortion. DeLauro, who’s next in line to chair the House Appropriations Committee, made no bones about her priority at Tuesday’s hearing, declaring that the 44-year-old Hyde Amendment was as good as gone if Democrats get their way. Don’t bother stopping us, liberals warned, or everyone will know — pro-lifers are racist.
Deep down, Democrats know their position on taxpayer-funded abortion is wildly unpopular. In every poll, the Left-leaning Slate points out, Americans oppose it. So what do liberals do? They turn it into a race debate. If liberals can make it about prejudice, they think Republicans will be too scared to fight back. That’s why DeLauro and others spent so much time hammering that message home. “It’s a longstanding issue of racial injustice,” DeLauro claimed. By telling poor women that the government won’t pay for their abortions, she insisted, we’re denying “the humanity of people of color.”
Now wait just a second, Republicans fired back. The only people denying humanity are the abortion advocates. They’re the ones ignoring the value and personhood of the unborn. They’re the ones fattening their bank accounts on the backs of innocent children. And if you’re looking for racists, start with the groups targeting blacks and Hispanics for abortion — the Planned Parenthoods of the world, who’ve built 80 percent of their killings centers in low-income neighborhoods.
Frankly, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) pointed out, what’s hurting Americans isn’t the lack of taxpayer-funded abortion. It’s the Left’s insistence that children are a burden — and women have to take a life to improve theirs. Abortion on demand, she argued, is “a failure to help women in need. It capitulates to despair and says there is no hope for the mother or child.” Just think about what this conveys to our communities, she insisted. “When I look at some of the great black Americans who are radically changing this country for the better, many of [them] grew up in poverty. What if their parents had received and believed that message?” Supporters of abortion in this meeting, she pushed back, need to think long and hard about what they’re saying. They “should question whether the promotion of abortion itself is structurally racist… I don’t know how you can see that any other way.”
Regardless, Beutler argued, refusing to “pay for the destruction of someone’s child” isn’t hateful. If anything, it reinforces every person’s worth — regardless of their skin color or the balance of their bank account. But then, Dr. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said, nothing about the Democrats’ position makes sense. After five decades of legal abortion, they’re suddenly arguing that women won’t have abortion rights until every American is forced to pay for them. That’s ridiculous. The court’s decision in Roe v. Wade has been the prevailing policy of the land on abortion since 1973. If they’re so worried about the cost, Harris pointed out, “Maybe Planned Parenthood — with all of the money they made selling baby body parts” — could start chipping in. After all, he quipped, they’re a “501(c)(3) charity. So maybe they should be paying for abortions for women who can’t afford them, [instead of] asking taxpayers to do it.”
He’s right. If Planned Parenthood is so concerned about women of color, why aren’t they offering free abortions? Or taking the $40 million they spend on political campaigns and redirecting it to patients? Simple. Because their concern isn’t women — it’s their bottom line. At the end of the day, abortion is a business, and their goal is to make as much money as possible. “That’s what this is all about,” Harris told listeners of “Washington Watch.” “It’s about getting federal taxpayers to flood the coffers of Planned Parenthood.”
And unfortunately, that isn’t just their goal — but the goal of the Biden-Harris administration. With Obama’s vice president at the helm, Americans are staring down the most extreme, pro-abortion White House in the history of this country. How do we know? Because their party platform says so. That’s what makes the Georgia runoffs so important. Without the Senate, liberals like DeLauro will have a much harder time making their radicalism a reality. As plenty of people have pointed out, House Democrats will have their hands full as it is. Not only will they have to find a way to keep their shrunken majority together, but they’ll be contending with 18 new pro-life Republican women too! For the Hyde amendment’s sake, let’s hope that’s more than enough to keep them occupied.
To learn more about Henry Hyde’s most famous policy, read about the amendment here in FRC’s new issue brief by Connor Semelsberger.
Originally published here.
Conservative Shoppers: You Can Goya Your Own Way
Turns out, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) does a better job selling Goya than her radical agenda! According to the company’s CEO, her boycott of the brand was the gift no one saw coming. When the House socialist vowed to stop buying Goya because Robert Unanue visited the Trump White House, he said his sales increased 1,000-percent! It was such a boon to business, Unanue chuckled, that the company gave her an honorary “Employee of the Month” award. Take that cancel culture!
Of course, now that the joke is on her, AOC is trying to claim that she never led a boycott in the first place. Either way, her influence obviously isn’t as big as Democrats want to think is. As for Unanue, despite all of the media’s hounding, he’s never apologized for the work he did with the president or backed away from the positive comments he made about Trump. He had partnered with Barack Obama, he told reporters at the time, and never heard an unkind word. He had no intentions of letting anyone get under his skin for doing the same thing with his successor.
“You’re allowed to talk good or talk praise to one president but… you make a positive comment, all the sudden that’s not acceptable,” Unanue shook his head. “If you’re called by the president of the United States, you’re going to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, I’m busy, no thank you?’ I didn’t say that to the Obamas, and I didn’t say that to President Trump.”
The real winner of this standoff, though, isn’t just Goya Foods — it’s the American consumer. While Big Business is on its liberal high horse, embracing all kinds of social radicalism, the people of this country are sending a powerful message: their politics don’t sell. And if companies are foolish enough to keep pushing this extremism, shoppers will push back. As loud as they seem with their gang of Hollywood, Big Tech, the press, and Fortune 500, the far-Left is no match for millions of everyday Americans with conviction.
So if you think how you spend your money doesn’t matter, let this story assure you: it does. One can of this or that may not seem like much, but together, it can make a strong statement. I encourage you, especially now in the gift-buying season, to know where your money is going. Is it funding Planned Parenthood? Abortion? Slave labor in China? Transgender activism? The radical Southern Poverty Law Center? Black Lives Matter Marxists? Vote with your dollars. Support the CEOs who are standing up to the cancel culture when you can — and find alternatives to the ones who are using your money against you. If you want to be heard by the people trashing your values, it’s simple: let your money do the talking!
Visit our friends at 2nd Vote to see how.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
