This op-ed in today's YDN first argues, rightly, that reasonable conservatives should be more concerned with recruiting skilled men and women to join the army than with casting them out for their sexual orientation, and then argues, wrongly, that reasonable liberals should see the JAG core's right to Yale Law-sponsored interviews, rather than the Law School's right to enforce it's non-discrimination policy, as a first ammendment issue. The factual error at the heart of the piece is in the suggestion that law students and military recruiters were - up until the Pentagon's $350 million blackmail scheme last year under the Solomon ammendment - being denied their right to association. JAG recruiters, like prospective students, Jews for Jesus, and leafletting undergrads, are free to associate with law students who want to meet with them on campus. What the Pentagon is threatening the termination of a third of a billion dollars worth of lifesaving research to demand is that the Law School sponsor those interviews through its on-campus interview program - and the Law School is right to resist the pressure. The suggestion that political protest is self-indulgent, and institutions can only be changed by the elect that's granted membership in them, belies the history of this University, let alone the US army.

Today the ACLU announced a major lawsuit against secret service limitations on protests at Bush appearances. I saw this in person with the PA ACLU when Bush came to town this summer. The most aggregious and obvious violation is the pattern of allowing pro-Bush activists closer to Bush than anti-Bush activists. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with imagery. At risk of sounding subversive, I have to wonder, kind reader, if you were trying to shoot the President, which crowd would you be trying to infiltrate?

From the Times: A federal appeals court has upheld Alaska's curbs on soft-money political donations to candidates for state office, holding that the State Legislature had a right to enact the restrictions in 1996 to restore the public's faith in government. The 3-to-0 ruling on Tuesday by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting in Seattle, overturned a federal district court that had found the curbs unconstitutional. The latest ruling comes as the United States Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on Sept. 8 on the McCain-Feingold law barring political parties from raising soft money for federal candidates. Glad to see this court reject the twisted conception of political bribery as protected speech. I once had a classmate suggest to me that a laissez-faire campaign finance system was democratic because the winner was the candidate who the most people wanted in office - this echoes Ari Fleischer's take on Bush's fundraising a few months back. Someone should remind the Bush administration that we already have - in theory - a system for figuring out whom the most people would like to see elected: the vote. And ideally, everyone gets the same number of those. There are some troubling provisions in McCain-Feingold regulating speech (i.e., not money) in the period before elections, deserving of critical review, but I'm yet to understand on what grounds my donating money to every viable candidate in understood exchange for largesse in office is protected symbolic speech but my paying money to a prostitute for sex or a dealer for drugs is not. That said, McCain-Feingold remains a largely ineffective (and sometimes - as in the case of the doubled individual contribution limit - dangerously counterproductive) stab at the problem. Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres suggest one alternative here.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania (one of the places I've been interning this summer) scored an important victory today when District Judge Robert Kelly ruled, in our favor, that forcing students - public and private school both - to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day or have their refusal reported to their parents is a stark violation of students' rights. The overruled sponsor's measure, State Rep. Allan Egolf, had a less than inspiring defense of his idea: "I thought there wouldn't be any problems with it," Egolf said. "We just wanted to make it so the kids had the opportunity to learn the pledge and what the flag means to our country and what it stands for. If you don't learn it in school, where are you going to learn it?" This argument, like many made in defense of school prayer, seems to demonstrate a willful disregard for the distinction between studying an idea and practicing it. It's about as convincing as the state's lawyer's argument in court: "The Pledge of Allegiance is only 70 or so words long anyway." Kelly, relatively conservative himself, was much more perceptive: This letter home, Kelly wrote, "would chill the speech of certain students who would involuntarily recite the speech or [national] anthem rather than have a notice sent to their parents." Kelly also wrote that Egolf's comments from the House debate had made it "obvious that he views refusal to recite the pledge or anthem as something negative for which disciplinary sanctions would be warranted." Justice Jackson, seventy years ago, said it best however: To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions. That it took a District Court ruling to stop the state of Pennsylvania from forcing all children to declare their allegiance to the flag or be told on to their parents (presumably because such subversion would demonstrate to the parents a failure in their conditioning of their progeny) doesn't make our institutions look too hot either - although that much better than if, as many expected, Judge Kelly had ruled the other way.