Meet The Georgia Pastor Suing His School District For ‘Discrimination’ Against Christian After-School Program
'If we don't stand up for our freedoms at home, then when does it stop? If we just let it go, we'll never stay free.''If we don't stand up for our freedoms at home, then when does it stop? If we just let it go, we'll never stay free.'Ranked-choice voting’s losing streak gets longer
It has been a dismal year for ranked-choice voting.
RCV allows voters to rank candidates instead of choosing one. It then runs multiple rounds of counting, adjusts rankings, and discards “exhausted” ballots to determine a winner.
Lawmakers, courts, cities, and voters are increasingly rejecting a system that makes elections harder to understand and easier to distrust.
Two states have already banned it. One state’s pilot program was phased out. A statewide ballot proposal failed to qualify. Several city councils rejected it. A state supreme court struck down an expansion bill. And the year still has months to go.
The states that banned RCV this year were Indiana and Ohio. The Ohio legislature first introduced a ban in 2023. It passed the Senate but not the House. This year, lawmakers passed it through both chambers on the second attempt, with Sens. Theresa Gavarone (R) and Bill DeMora (D) leading the effort. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bipartisan bill into law in February.
Indiana acted even faster. Lawmakers introduced a similar ban and enacted it two months later. The legislation reflected growing concern that RCV makes elections less transparent and harder for voters to trust.
“It is important to ensure Indiana’s voting system is secure and accurate for Hoosier voters. Having to rank each candidate could end up being a vote against the voter’s intended candidate, creating confusion and frustration, which is why we need this law in place,” said state Sen. Blake Doriot (R), the bill’s sponsor.
RCV supporters also suffered a setback in Utah, where the pilot program ended this year. Before the program closed, more than 20 cities tried it, but supporters never moved the state toward broader adoption. Multiple cities dropped out before the program ended.
In Michigan, Rank MI Vote’s RCV ballot proposal fell 200,000 signatures short of qualifying. RCV donors can find one consolation: At least they will not have to spend millions on another failed ballot measure, as they did in six states in 2024.
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Albuquerque, New Mexico, also rejected RCV. The city council voted it down 6-3. The bill’s sponsor claimed switching from the current runoff system would save money, but the proposal failed because of concerns over system upgrades, staff training, and a long public education campaign. Similar proposals also failed in Vista, California, and Appleton, Wisconsin.
The District of Columbia offers another warning. Voters approved RCV, but the city has struggled to prepare for implementation. District residents will use the system for the first time in June, and a recent Opportunity D.C. survey found that 43% of voters remain unaware of the change. To address the confusion, the Board of Elections is spending $50,000 to educate voters.
D.C. Councilmember Wendell Felder introduced emergency legislation to delay implementation until 2027. The bill failed, so voters and election workers will have little time to prepare.
Finally, an effort to expand RCV in Maine was struck down in March when the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled the bill unconstitutional. Because the Maine Constitution requires a plurality for state elections, RCV remains limited to federal elections.
Every year, ranked-choice voting’s backers promise simplicity, fairness, and reform. This year showed the opposite. Lawmakers, courts, cities, and voters are increasingly rejecting a system that makes elections harder to understand and easier to distrust.
Thomas, Alito Blast SCOTUS For Ducking Case On Illegal-Alien Truck Drivers ‘Causing Fatal Accidents’
'This Court declines to even hear Florida’s claims, even though it has nowhere else to bring them,' Justice Thomas wrote.ACLU fights archangel Michael statue honoring cops — but court might not normalize 'heckler's veto'
A Massachusetts city in the Greater Boston area commissioned a pair of 10-foot-tall bronze statues heavy with cultural and historical significance to honor police and firefighters outside its new public safety headquarters.
Since the statues also carry religious significance — one depicts the winged archangel Michael stepping on the head of a demon, and the other depicts Florian, a third-century firefighting Roman Christian — the American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of secularizing activist groups joined local thin-skinned critics in suing to block the installation last May.
According to the ACLU, having the two statues as the sole adornments on the building's facade "would undermine religious pluralism in Quincy and violate the Massachusetts Constitution’s long-standing requirement that the government remain neutral in matters of religion."
'Let Quincy pay tribute to its firefighters and police.'
The ensuing legal battle has reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which heard oral arguments on Wednesday in the case Fitzmaurice v. City of Quincy.
The defendants' thesis, as outlined in their opening brief to the court, is that symbolism on government property should not become "illegal simply because some citizens perceive it to have religious meaning."
Some of the court's justices, Democrat-appointee Gabrielle Wolohojian in particular, did not appear to be entirely buying what the attorney for the city from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty was selling at the outset despite considering his arguments in a city already replete with public art evoking persons, symbols, and themes of religious significance, including multiple statues of Moses.
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The court proved particularly fixated on whether Florian and Michael's special recognition as saints by the Catholic Church was actually an issue in this case and raised as possibly relevant in a lower court's insinuation that the statues' primary champion, Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch, was untrustworthy and had worked clandestinely to get the statues funded and installed.
The court was not, however, overly receptive to the ACLU's arguments in favor of denying Quincy first responders their statues, which have been defended in recent months by a plethora of organizations, including the nation’s largest firefighter and police unions, various faith groups, and esteemed constitutional scholars.
One justice questioned whether:
- such legal concern-mongering constitutes a "heckler's veto" that is here at risk of being normalized;
- the plaintiffs were effectively asking the state's high court to "provide less protection than the Supreme Court on free exercise," or "allow more hostility to religion than the Supreme Court would tolerate"; and
- the statues endorsed a particular religion — an especially dubious claim given Florian's secular, historical significance and the archangel Michael's significance in multiple distinct faiths as well as in popular culture and literature.
Tom Bowes, president of Quincy's Firefighters Local 792, said in a statement, "For generations, Florian’s legacy has inspired the brave men and women who run toward danger when others need help. We hope the court allows Quincy to honor that tradition and the first responders who live it every day."
Joseph Davis, senior counsel at Becket and an attorney for the city, said, "In this country, public art doesn't become off-limits just because it may make some people think about religion. We’re confident the justices will apply that commonsense rule here and let Quincy pay tribute to its firefighters and police."
Eric Rassbach, another attorney at Becket, said in the wake of the hearing on Wednesday that the ACLU's argument largely "relied on the supposedly dead legal standard known as the Lemon test, which SCOTUS abrogated."
"For decades, the unusuable Lemon test produced confusion and split decisions in cases involving religious symbols," continued Rassbach. "That changed in 2019, when SCOTUS ruled 7-2 in [American Legion v. American Humanist Association] that the First Amendment does not require removing a WWI memorial cross and made clear that Lemon no longer applies."
While the Supreme Court rejected the relevance of the test articulated by SCOTUS in its 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman ruling as a way of guiding the court in identifying Establishment Clause violations, Norfolk Superior Court Judge William Sullivan previously leaned heavily on it in the Quincy case.
"It would be a bizarre move for Massachusetts to revive a test that failed so badly at the federal level, especially since Lemon has no grounding in the Commonwealth’s Constitution," wrote Rassbach. "That document takes a different approach: It recognizes the vital role of religion in public life while guaranteeing equal protection for all religious denominations. That’s a far cry from forcing cities to scrub anything that smacks of the religious from all public property."
The court is expected to deliver its decision sometime this fall.
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REVIEW: ‘Uncanny’ Michael Jackson biopic moonwalks past controversy
The Michael Jackson biopic is finally here, and it’s already smashing records after a $217.4 million worldwide opening — which is the biggest of all time for a biopic.
“You think you’re watching Michael Jackson. You forget that’s not Michael,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”
“It’s uncanny,” he adds.
And while there have famously been allegations of child abuse at the hands of Jackson, the biopic didn’t cover them.
“His estate was sued again ... some more sexual abuse allegations. But the lawsuit is from that Cascio family who, they settled, but they claimed that the settlement was breached and broken,” Jeff Fisher explains, pointing out that the family initially claimed Jackson did nothing wrong but later changed their tune.
“It was really bizarre,” he says.
“I’ve always gone back and forth on that, but they don’t deal with it in the movie. I mean, they might in the future. I don’t know, because at the end of it, it says, ‘His story continues,’” Gray comments.
“So I don’t know if [the biopic] gives away too much, but it takes you up to 1988,” he adds, pointing out that this was before the allegations of child abuse.
“His story will continue,” executive producer Keith Malinak adds.
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