Good grievance! The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is condemning as “a threat to freedom of expression and academic freedom” Muscatine Community College’s decision to cancel virtual production of a play reimagining the Peanuts comic strip characters as teenagers—and Charlie Brown as gay.
■ The college’s theater instructor calls the decision censorship …
‘Why do we protect such vile speech?’ First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams defends as the soul of our democracy Supreme Court rulings upholding freedom of speech for protesters such as those whose “signs scream out coarse epithets for homosexuals.”
■ Law professor David L. Hudson Jr. lists five areas in which the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found other interests trumped the First.
■ Mother Jones: “17 Republicans Just Voted Against a Resolution to Condemn QAnon. We Asked Them All Why.” Hint: Freedom of speech.
Like ‘forcing a kosher deli to serve ham products.’ The conservative Christian advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom is going to court against a new Virginia civil rights law—complaining its ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity threatens a church’s beliefs.
■ A photographer says the law compromises his constitutional right to free speech by compelling him to photograph same-sex weddings.
■ A photographer says the law compromises his constitutional right to free speech by compelling him to photograph same-sex weddings.
Sign fine. A Santa Fe, New Mexico, man is battling his homeowners association—and risking escalating penalties—for his right to display a front-yard presidential campaign sign.
■ A federal judge says the First Amendment doesn’t protect a man arrested—and deprived of his cellphone—after holding a sign warning motorists of the presence of “Cops Ahead.”
■ A federal appeals court has ruled that Nashville was justified in firing an emergency dispatcher who dispatched a racist slur in a Facebook post supporting Donald Trump’s 2016 election.
■ A U.S. Naval Academy midshipman is suing the academy to avert his expulsion for tweeting racist statements.
■ Hundreds of students and staff at the Columbia University School of Journalism have signed a letter demanding Polk County, Iowa, drop charges against a Columbia graduate arrested in May while covering a Black Lives Matter protest.
■ A federal judge in Minnesota has dismissed a First Amendment lawsuit challenging a gubernatorial order that face coverings be worn at the state’s polls on Election Day.
First and foreskin. Harvard University and its independent student newspaper, The Crimson, are asking a federal judge to dismiss a former university employee’s First Amendment suit against Harvard and the paper over coverage of and reaction to his performance criticizing Jewish people—of which he is one—and their practice of circumcision.
■ FIRE and the libertarian Cato Institute are urging the Supreme Court to reject a lower court ruling that concluded a public university can escape consequences for violating students’ First Amendment rights by changing the rules after a suit’s been filed.
■ The Pacific Legal Foundation: “Because the court ruled the case moot, the student and his attorney were unable to recover … fees.”
The First, inverted. The Atlantic shares journalism professor Stephen Bates’ profile of a scholar who saw the First Amendment as not just forbidding the government from interfering in free speech but also as encouraging the government to enhance free speech.
■ Happening Thursday, 3 p.m. Eastern time: An online Freedom Forum panel discussion centered around a new documentary, Raise Your Voice, about Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students navigating their school’s mass shooting as survivors and journalists.
