‘A full-blown assault on the First Amendment.’ Free Speech Center Director Ken Paulson says Florida’s new law punishing Disney for opposing the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law is far worse than the “feud,” “rift” or “battle” some news organizations have characterized it as.
■ Mike Masnick at Techdirt: “Florida’s Republican politicians are … bending over backwards to give Disney all the evidence they need to … get these legislative changes declared unconstitutional” …
■ … but the unique nature of Disney’s self-government at its Orlando complex complicates things.
■ Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature on the bill “makes a mockery of right-wing wailing about ‘free speech.’”
■ The Atlantic’s David French: “DeSantis Aims at Disney, Hits the First Amendment.”
■ … a case that pits the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses against one another.
■ The coach has lost repeatedly in lower courts …
■ … but Politico says the justices seemed sympathetic to him.
■ Loyola Law School professor Jessica Levinson predicts the court’s conservative wing will “make a mockery of the separation of church and state.”
■ Hear today’s arguments here.
■ Last week, justices upheld an Austin ordinance blocking the digitization of billboards—rejecting an argument that the rule violated the First Amendment.
■ Read that ruling here.
■ The court also refused to revive a Kansas ban on secret filming at slaughterhouses.
Twitter chitter. Earth’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, was reportedly close to acquiring Twitter …
■ … a deal that conservative Republicans, such as U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, see as “good for the First Amendment” …
■ … although Quartz’s Scott Nover suggests that “Musk’s interest in taking over Twitter has more to do with exerting control over his favorite playground than it does with promoting free speech.”
■ Cato Institute senior fellow Cathy Young discounts “panic” over Musk’s potential purchase: “Part of Twitter’s outsize importance is that it’s the playpen of choice for media and for political activists.”
■ Exemplifying the sort of policy Musk has deprecated, Twitter’s banning ads that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.
‘We often don’t know what principles govern those decisions.’ Barack Obama, who says he’s “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” nevertheless says Congress should hold social media platforms to a higher standard for what is or isn’t allowed on their platforms and how it appears—offering an analogy to meatpackers: “They don’t have to reveal to the world what that technique is. They do have to tell the meat inspector.”
‘I was asking people to come for a peaceful march, which is what everyone is entitled to do under the First Amendment.’ Testifying in a hearing to determine if she should be tossed off the ballot for her actions during the January 2021 insurrection, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene asserted, “My words never ever mean anything for violence.”
■ The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake: “It seems unlikely that anything established in the testimony would clear the legal bar of proving Greene incited the insurrection. … But we finally have something to review, from a congressional leader of the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement.”
■ George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley sees the effort to remove Greene and other inflammatory candidates from the ballot as “part of a new movement to defend democracy by denying it.”
‘An economic decision.’ Ohio’s Shawnee State University has abandoned its defense against a lawsuit filed by a professor disciplined for not addressing a transgender student by her preferred pronoun …
■ … and instead will pay the professor $400,000 in damages and attorney’s fees.
■ Oklahoma’s governor has signed a bill creating a “Free Speech Committee” to oversee and recommend improvements in public universities’ free-speech policies and training programs, and to review campus First Amendment complaints.
■ The National Coalition Against Censorship is calling on Palm Beach, Fla., public school libraries to put a couple of books featuring transgender characters back on the shelves.
