Tag: 1st amendment

Massachusetts parents lose foster license after refusing to sign gender affirming policy for kids

A devout Christian couple has been stripped of their foster license after refusing to sign a gender-affirming policy they say conflicts with their faith.

Lydia and Heath Marvin, from Woburn, Massachusetts, have looked after eight children under the age of four since 2020, including many infants and toddlers with serious medical needs.

But the couple say social workers pulled their license because they refused to sign a clause requiring foster parents to ‘support, respect, and affirm a foster child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.’

It put them in a position where they were essentially forced them to choose between their religion and the vulnerable children they had dedicated their lives to helping.

‘We were told you must sign the form as is or you will be delicensed,’ Lydia told WBZ. ‘We will absolutely love and support and care for any child in our home, but we simply can’t agree to go against our Christian faith in this area. 

‘Our Christian faith, it really drives us toward that,’ husband Heath explained. ‘[The Book of James] says that true, undefiled religion is to care for the fatherless.’

The Marvins say they were blindsided by the decision. Their last foster child, a baby with complex medical needs, lived with them for 15 months. 

‘Every night for 15 months, we were up at least three times,’ Lydia said. ‘We certainly thought we would have young children in our home for… we didn’t know how long, but we were not done.’

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Kentucky Man Jailed Over Halloween Decorations That Depicted Local Public Officials Being Hanged

A Kentucky man was arrested over the weekend after placing Halloween decorations in his front yard that depicted fake bodies labeled with titles of local government officials.

According to WKYT-TV, a 58-year-old Powell County man named Stephan Marcum was taken into custody Saturday after being accused of terroristic threatening.

People passing by the man’s home in the community of Stanton saw a Halloween display they found rather haunting.

Commonwealth Attorney Miranda King reported the scene to the Kentucky State Police.

The decorations included body bags marked with the titles of local officials, although no names were on the effigies.

According to an arrest citation, Marcum was taken into custody not long after.

“This is something you just don’t see every day,” Powell County Judge Executive Eddie Barnes, whose title was on one of the bags, told WKYT.

Even though Barnes was not named in the display, he said he was bothered.

“At first I didn’t know what to think about it because I actually drove by and [saw] it in his yard and I’m thinking, you know, ‘Wow, you know, that’s kinda harsh,’” Barnes said.

Barnes said he has known Marcum for decades.

The judge told WKYT he views Marcum as someone who can be “a good person,” and was confused by the Halloween display.

University of Kentucky Political Science Associate Professor Stephen Voss told WKYT that Marcum’s display was not protected by the First Amendment.

“If you’re actively threatening someone in a terrorizing way, that may not be covered by the general right to free expression,” Voss said.

“I think we’re seeing a little bit less tolerance for violent communication or violent imagery because there seems to be a greater risk people will enact it or carry it out,” he added.

WKYT reported that Marcum was held at the Powell County Detention Center on a $5,000 bond.

Police said the Halloween decorations were collected and taken to a nearby Kentucky State Police station.

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California “Hate Speech” Bill Would Crush Dissent

If enacted and it somehow clears legal challenges, California Senate Bill 771 will be the first online censorship law of its kind in America. It would also likely pave a path for other states run by people with no tolerance for dissent.    

On September 22, the California Legislature sent SB 771 to Governor Gavin Newsom. He has until October 13 to sign it. If he doesn’t veto or sign the proposal, it becomes law anyway.

Mainstream media outlets claim that SB 771 “targets social media platforms for the role they could play in aiding and abetting in hate crimes by pushing content that could lead to a hate crime.”

The bill allows people to sue social-media companies for up to $1 million per violation. If the litigant is a minor, the fine could double.

Tucker Carlson’s analysis of the bill is more accurate than the mainstream media’s. Carlson:

That’s a censorship law.… The state of California, under Gavin Newsom, is about to — we think — censor the opinions of Americans, not to protect anybody, but to shield themselves from criticism so they continue to do what they want to do in secret.

Coerced Censorship

The bill uses broad terms that make it easy to justify censorship. It reads:

California law prohibits all persons and entities, including corporations, from engaging in, aiding, abetting, or conspiring to commit acts of violence, intimidation, or coercion based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or other protected characteristics.

Merriam Webster defines “intimidated” as “to make timid or fearful.” Synonyms include “bully” and “frighten.” Fear and intimidation are subjective emotions that have significantly increased among America’s younger and more unstable generations. People are swimming in pools of victimhood and mental illness today. We constantly hear about a spike in anxiety. What happens when we create laws that allow litigation on the basis of largely subjective emotions?

But the more likely primary intent here is to coerce social-media companies into pre-censoring. The senior vice president of social-media company Parler, Elise Pierotti, said of the bill:

SB 771 isn’t about protecting civil rights, it’s California’s brazen attempt to export its one-party censorship regime to every corner of the internet. This bill hands Sacramento the power to bully platforms into preemptively scrubbing dissent on everything from border security to parental rights. We’ve seen Big Tech abuse vague “hate speech” rules to throttle conservatives for years, including shutting down our platform in 2021; now, lawmakers want to make it mandatory with teeth-shattering fines. This must be stopped before it buries the First Amendment.

Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at the R Street Institute, also suspects this is the drafter’s main agenda. She told the Daily Caller that “rather than risk liability for showing users content one could argue (even if it doesn’t actually) violate a law, platforms will over-moderate and remove posts in order to stay out of court.”

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Under Trump, Criticism Is Now Criminal

After the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump (9/10/25) escalated his war on free speech, calling for criminalizing criticism of himself:

It’s a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.

To spell it out: “Demonizing”—which is to say, criticizing—people with whom you disagree is “directly responsible” for Kirk’s death. Note that this is about criticizing people that you disagree with—”you” presumably being one of “those on the radical left”—as Trump has built a wildly lucrative political career out of demonizing those he disagrees with, and he’s not about to stop now. It’s the “wonderful Americans” like Kirk whom you aren’t supposed to criticize.

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What Democrats Will Support In Order To Oppose Donald Trump

The list is staggering, really. And one need not go back to January to compile a collection of the most anti-democratic behavior and positions possible, all to save muh democracy. I can fill out this column with stuff just since Friday. 

In June of this year, The United States Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in Mahmoud V. Taylor, in favor of parents objecting to sexually explicit LGBT material being used in school on religious exemption grounds. The case overturned the decision against both the rights of parents and the 1st Amendment’s freedom to practice religion by a district court judge nominated early in Joe Biden’s term. That judge’s name? Deborah Boardman. 

One might think that a leftist trial court judge getting spanked by the Supreme Court that hard would be the biggest black mark on her record. Wrong. On Friday, Judge Boardman ruled in the sentencing phase of the would-be assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Nicholas Roske. 

Roske, in case you don’t recall, left his home in Simi Valley, California after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe V. Wade and returned the abortion issue where it belonged – to each state’s citizenry to decide. This was too much for Roske, who flew across the country and eventually arrived outside Justice Kavanuagh’s Maryland home with a Glock-17 with ammunition, zip ties, a tactical knife, pepper spray, a hammer, a screwdriver, a nail punch, a crowbar, duct tape, a pistol light, and padded boots for stealth. This was not a spontaneous murder he was plotting. 

Roske was found guilty by a jury of his peers. Federal sentencing guidelines for a crime like this vary between 324-405 months. The Department of Justice asked for 30 years, or 360 months, right in the middle of the sentencing guidelines. Boardman came back with 8 years, or 96 months. Why? Because sometime recently, Nicholas decided he was now trans and wants to be called Sophie. Boardman essentially threw all legal jurisprudence out the window and came up with this for justification.

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Supreme Court to Decide If Colorado Ban on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Violates Free Speech

The Supreme Court is scheduled to consider on Oct. 7 a free speech case involving a Colorado law that bans therapists from providing so-called conversion therapy to minors experiencing same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.

A therapist challenging the law argues that it violates her First Amendment rights. On the other side of the debate, Colorado contends that it has the right to regulate mental health treatments for minors that it deems harmful and ineffective. It is among more than 20 states with such bans.

Colorado’s Prohibit Conversion Therapy for a Minor law, passed in 2019, prohibits licensed therapists from trying to “change an individual’s sexual orientation, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

Therapists who violate the law could be stripped of their licenses and face fines of up to $5,000.

Colorado has stated that its regulation was enacted in response to “overwhelming” scientific evidence that conversion therapy for minors is unsafe and not effective in the long term.

A practitioner of such therapy told The Epoch Times that the therapist’s work focuses on mending psychological wounds and is not coercive or harmful.

Opponents of conversion therapy, including the American Medical Association, point to practices such as electric shock and negative feedback methods such as smelling salts or chemically induced nausea to create a psychological aversion to the unwanted behaviors or attractions.

However, according to licensed counselor Christopher Doyle of the Institute for Healthy Families, modern therapists avoid these methods and instead favor exploring clients’ attitudes on sexuality, trauma, self-perception, and relationships.

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Whoops—Ohio Accidentally Excludes Most Major Porn Platforms From Anti-Porn Law

Remember when people used to say “Epic FAIL”? I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to describe Ohio’s new age verification law, which took effect on September 30.

A variation on a mandate that’s been sweeping U.S. statehouses, this law requires online platforms offering “material harmful to juveniles”—by which authorities mean porn—to check photo IDs or use “transactional data” (such as mortgage, education, and employment records) to verify that all visitors are adults.

But lawmakers have written the law in such a way that it excludes most major porn publishing platforms.

“This is why you don’t rush [age verification] bills into an omnibus,” commented the Free Speech Coalition’s Mike Stabile on Bluesky.

Ohio Republican lawmakers introduced a standalone age verification bill back in February, but it languished in a House committee. A similar bill introduced in 2024 also failed to advance out of committee.

The version that wound up passing this year did so as part of the state’s omnibus budget legislation (House Bill 96). This massive measure—more than 3,000 pages—includes a provision that any organization that “disseminates, provides, exhibits, or presents any material or performance that is obscene or harmful to juveniles on the internet” must verify that anyone attempting to view that material is at least 18 years old.

The bill also states that such organizations must “utilize a geofence system maintained and monitored by a licensed location-based technology provider to dynamically monitor the geolocation of persons.”

Existing Ohio law defines material harmful to juveniles as “any material or performance describing or representing nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse” that “appeals to the prurient interest of juveniles in sex,” is “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable for juveniles,” and “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value for juveniles.”

Under the new law, online distributors of “material harmful to juveniles” that don’t comply with the age check requirement could face civil actions initiated by Ohio’s attorney general.

Supporters of the law portrayed it as a way to stop young Ohioans from being able to access online porn entirely. But the biggest purveyors of online porn—including Pornhub and similar platforms, which allow users to upload as well as view content—seem to be exempt from the law.

Among the organizations exempted from age verification requirements are providers of “an interactive computer service,” which is defined by Ohio lawmakers as having the same meaning as it does under federal law.

The federal law that defines “interactive computer service”—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—says it “means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.”

That’s a bit of a mouthful, but we have decades of jurisprudence parsing that definition. And it basically means any platform where third parties can create accounts and can generate content, from social media sites to dating apps, message boards, classified ads, search engines, comment sections, and much more.

Platforms like Pornhub unambiguously fall within this category.

In fact, Pornhub is not blocking Ohio users as it has in most other states with age verification laws for online porn, because its parent company, Aylo, does not believe the law applies to it.

“As a provider of an ‘interactive computer service’ as defined under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it is our understanding that we are not subject to the obligations under section 1349.10 of the Ohio Revised Code regarding mandated age verification for the ‘interactive computer services’ we provide, such as Pornhub,” Aylo told Mashable.

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Muslims accused of vandalizing church in Texas argue First Amendment right, so far jurors disagree

Three Muslims charged in connection with vandalizing a church in Euless, Texas, last year argue doing so was their First Amendment right.

So far, jurors have disagreed, convicting one man, Raunaq Alam, of vandalism but not of a hate crime.

Alam was one of three charged in connection to the vandalization of a nondenominational church, Uncommon Church in Euless, in Tarrant County in March 2024. They are accused of spray-painting “expletive Israel” and affixing pro-Palestinian/Hamas stickers on the exterior of the church building, among other actions recorded on a church security camera.

District Attorney Phil Sorrells initially charged them with felony criminal mischief. The charges were later increased to a third-degree felony hate crime, which carries a sentence of two to 10 years in prison. It was increased to a hate crime because the perpetrators targeted a church because of religion, the prosecution argued. 

Judge Brian Bolton issued a sentence of five years probation. Alam was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and $1,700 in restitution to the church. His probation terms include serving 180 days in jail, conducting 180 hours of community service, undergoing regular drug and alcohol testing, wearing a GPS monitor and issuing an apology to the church.

Alam was next indicted on a charge of committing perjury, and he faces a drug possession charge. His attorney argues her client is being targeted.

Co-defendant Afsheen Khan was also charged with felony criminal mischief, and her trial is set to start soon. A third defendant, Julia Venzor, agreed to testify against Alam and Khan as part of a plea deal. She pleaded guilty in exchange for the deal and also received five years of probation, WFAA News reported.

The vandalism occurred after the church put up an Israeli flag to express solidarity with Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, Uncommon Church’s pastor, Brad Carignan, testified in court.

The case has been considered part of a pattern in Texas in which Christians, churches, Jews, synagogues and pro-Israel Americans have been targeted with unprovoked violence by Muslims.

In January 2022, a Pakistani Islamist held hostage Jewish parishioners at a Colleyville synagogue.

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New York Imposes Law Forcing Social Media to Justify Speech Policies to State Authorities

Social media companies operating in New York are now under fresh legal obligations as the state enforces the so-called “Stop Hiding Hate Act,” a new compelled speech law that forces platforms with annual revenues exceeding $100 million to hand over detailed reports on how they handle various forms of speech, including speech that is legally protected under the First Amendment.

The legislation went into effect on October 1 and has already triggered a constitutional showdown in court.

The law, officially Senate Bill S895B, demands biannual disclosures to the state Attorney General’s office.

These reports must outline how platforms define terms such as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” “harassment,” “disinformation,” and “extremism.”

Companies are also required to explain what moderation practices they apply to those categories and to provide specifics about actions taken against users and content.

Platforms that fail to comply face penalties of up to $15,000 per violation, per day. Injunctive action can also be taken against non-compliant entities.

Attorney General Letitia James declared that the law is about transparency and oversight.

“With violence and polarization on the rise, social media companies must ensure that their platforms don’t fuel hateful rhetoric and disinformation,” she said in a public statement, reinforcing her view that private companies should be accountable to the state for how they manage user expression.

“The Stop Hiding Hate Act requires social media companies to share their content moderation policies publicly and with my office to ensure that these companies are more transparent about how they are addressing harmful content on their platforms.”

Governor Kathy Hochul voiced similar sentiments, saying the legislation “builds on our efforts to improve safety online and marks an important step to increase transparency and accountability.”

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Ron Paul On ‘The Real’ Jan. 6th Coup

In my first column after the events of Jan. 6th, 2021, I criticized those who called the protest a “coup,” pointing out that, “Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real coups overseas. In their real coups, many thousands of civilians have died.”

The media at the time played up the violence committed by a relative few at the protest to stoke a national outcry and demands for “justice.” More than 1,500 Americans were charged over the incident and nearly 500 were imprisoned, including outrageous prison sentences for relatively minor crimes like entering the Capitol building through doors opened by the police, and filming the event.

While most Democrats and Republicans in Congress harshly denounced the January 6th “insurrectionists,” a few Members displayed the appropriate skepticism over accepted government narratives. Rep. Thomas Massie, for example, was relentless in his search for answers to a simple but critically important question: How many of the “insurrectionists” were actually undercover FBI agents and other law enforcement officers and what role might they have played in inciting the violence.

Massie grilled then-Attorney General Merrick Garland several times, but Garland would not budge. He refused to say whether there had been any undercover federal agents in the crowd, though of course he must have known.

Last week we learned a little more of the truth. With the release of the FBI’s long lost “after action” report, we now know that more than 250 undercover agents were in the crowd. According to the report, they were given roles including crowd control that they were not suited for. Some agents cited in the report complained of political biases in the Bureau against conservatives. What other tasks might have been given to a “politicized” FBI undercover team?

In addition to the undercover agents, there were more than two dozen paid informants in the Jan. 6th crowd. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chairs the subcommittee investigating the matter, asks an important question: “With that many paid informants being in the crowd, we want to know how many were in the crowd, how many were in the building, but I also want to know, were they paid to inform or instigate?”

Were they paid to inform, or to instigate? That is a good question. We do know that the event was used by the incoming Biden Administration to demonize and persecute the political opposition. There is no telling how many Americans would have liked to use their First Amendment guarantee of free speech to criticize the Biden Administration but were silenced by fear of persecution, or worse. It’s easy to conclude, seeing so many arrested and handed long sentences for non-violent “crimes,” that it’s better to keep quiet. At the time, the US was still in the grip of Covid tyranny, where speaking out against “the Science” could get you “cancelled” or worse. This was another way to silence people who were not “going along with the program.”

In the end, January 6th, 2021, was a coup of sorts. It was a coup against the First Amendment. The lesson for all of us is that if we do not regularly but peacefully exercise our First Amendment guarantees we will definitely lose them, regardless of who is in power.

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