Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, writing for the court in Lemon v. Kurtzman, said the law violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.Alton T. Lemon died on May 4th at the age of 84.
The ruling set out what came to be known as the Lemon test, which requires courts to consider whether the challenged government practice has a secular purpose, whether its primary effect is to advance or inhibit religion, and whether it fosters excessive government entanglement with religion....
The lawyers for the plaintiffs put Mr. Lemon’s name first in the caption of the case.
That was no accident, Professor Laycock said. The case was decided against the backdrop of resistance to the desegregation of public schools, and the choice of Mr. Lemon, who was black, underscored the point.
May 25, 2013
RIP, Alton T. Lemon — the Lemon of the Lemon test.
"Mr. Lemon’s lawsuit challenged a 1968 Pennsylvania law that reimbursed religious schools for some expenses, including teachers’ salaries and textbooks, so long as they related to instruction on secular subjects also taught in the public schools."
"Eleven people have been arrested around Britain for making 'racist or anti-religious' comments on Twitter following the brutal killing in Woolwich on Wednesday."
"A force spokesman said 'We have received a number of reports from local members of the public about tweets and Facebook comments that could potentially incite racial hatred and violence."
Superintendent Matt Goodridge said: 'Surrey Police will not tolerate language used in a public place, including on social media websites, which causes harassment, alarm or distress.'
"A man with a cow slurry fetish has admitted threatening..."
"... to kill a family who live at a farm where he has repeatedly rolled naked in animal muck."
"Slurry" is "A mixture of manure or farmyard waste and water; manure in fluid form," according to the OED, which provides these historical examples:
"Slurry" is "A mixture of manure or farmyard waste and water; manure in fluid form," according to the OED, which provides these historical examples:
1965 Punch 22 Dec. 932/2 In a modern fattening house..the manure from several hundred swine falls through slatted floors into tanks beneath the building where a daily dose of water soon turns it into a forbidding quantity of evil-smelling slurry.
1970 R. Jeffries Dead Man's Bluff i. 5 He went through from the dairy into the herringbone parlour and stared..at the two days' accumulation of slurry.
1971 Farmers Weekly 19 Mar. 48/4 It takes one man about six minutes a day to clear away the slurry and a bit longer to put out the hay.
"Sorry about the smell of cat piss. That's why we have to cover everything in plastic."
Says Patti Smith, leading the Guardian interviewer through her house, which "looks as if it's been squatted by a class of particularly manky art students" and is "dark and dingy and stinks of cat."
Excerpt from the interview, 3 reasons why she gave up music performance and recording in the late 70s:
Excerpt from the interview, 3 reasons why she gave up music performance and recording in the late 70s:
"The founder of Ashleymadison.com said new registrations surged a whopping 230% this week after millions watched..."
"... how a frustrated Marge Simpson stumbled onto an Ashley Madison-type website and then toyed with the idea of pursuing an extramarital affair on the eve of her wedding anniversary."
"When we see an anomalous spike we try and identify where it came from: was it marketing, media coverage or something else? We looked at what was on TV at that moment and it seemed to us to be very attributable to “The Simpsons,’” he said.
Thong Cape Scooter Man...
... is not doing anything wrong.
“The sergeant told the school staff Thong Cape Scooter Man was free to ride on,” [police spokesman Joel] DeSpain said.
"What is to be done about the low scholarly standards in the analysis of sex?"
"For all their putative leftism, gender theorists routinely mimic and flatter academic power with the unctuous obsequiousness of flunkies in the Vatican Curia," says Camille Paglia, reviewing 3 recent books about sadomasochism. As you might expect from Paglia, there's a lot in this piece about the limitations of post-structuralism, and how gender-studies folks need to learn more about biology, ancient cultures, and religion, but what got my attention was the detail about the sort of people that go in for these BDSM activities. Summon up a picture of the men and women who would be into this sort of thing. Then read this:
[Staci] Newmahr ["Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy"] captures how her subjects, even before they entered SM, viewed themselves as "outsiders" who lived "on the fringe of social acceptance." Most are overweight, but it's never remarked on. Several women are over six feet tall, generally a social disadvantage elsewhere.... Some men are small-statured or have vivid, angry memories of being bullied at school. Newmahr notes the "pervasive social awkwardness" in the scene, the "ill-fitting, outdated clothing" and the women's lack of makeup and jewelry. The men often have little interest in sports and own cars of middling quality.Is that what you pictured?
... Newmahr [notes the] "affinity for complicated techniques and well-made toys." ... Newmahr recognizes an operative aesthetic of "geekiness as cool."
"[T]he government is blurring the distinction between physical assaults and 'sexually themed' speech..."
"... in order to justify censoring and punishing the latter."
Most of academia’s leadership is too invertebrate and too soggy with political correctness to fight the OCR-DOJ mischief. But someone will. And it is so patently unconstitutional that it will be swiftly swatted down by the courts. Still, it is useful idiocy because, coming right now, it underscores today’s widespread government impulse for lawless coercion — the impulse that produced the Internal Revenue Service’s suppression of political speech that annoys the Obama administration.
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