SCOTUS Scolds Hawaii For ‘Relegating’ Americans’ Second Amendment Rights To ‘Second-Class Status’
You're 'relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status,' said Justice Alito.You're 'relegating the Second Amendment to second-class status,' said Justice Alito.Christians win BIG: New York caves on forcing nuns and churches to fund abortion after knockout SCOTUS ruling
Christian organizations spent nearly a decade fighting New York's requirement that they pay for abortions. They came out victorious on Friday, thanks in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June.
In January 2017, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the Empire State would require employers to not only pay for contraceptive drugs and devices but for "all medically necessary abortion services."
Cuomo, a Catholic, said that the mandate was one of a number of regulatory actions that would "help ensure that whatever happens at the federal level, women in our state will have cost-free access to reproductive health care."
'The state has given up its disgraceful campaign.'
While there was a religious exemption built into the mandate, it was extremely narrow.
As satisfaction of the mandate would violate their deeply held religious beliefs, a coalition of Christian groups ineligible for the exemption — including the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Albany and Ogdensburg, the Anglican Sisterhood of St. Mary, Our Savior's Lutheran Church, and First Bible Baptist Church — sued the State of New York, claiming it violated the First Amendment's free exercise clause and both religion clauses.
After years of legal setbacks, the Christian plaintiffs' fight was renewed in late 2021 when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a mandate-affirming ruling by the state appellate court and ordered it to reconsider the case in light of its 2021 decision in Fulton v. Philadelphia. In Fulton, the SCOTUS ruled that the City of Philadelphia had violated Catholic Social Services' free exercise of religion by requiring the foster care agency to endorse homosexual couples as foster parents.
Again, the state appellate court considered the case, and again it ruled against the plaintiffs and in favor of the abortion mandate.
The Supreme Court took up the Christian groups' subsequent appeal, and in June 2025, it ordered the Court of Appeals of New York to reconsider the case in light of its June 5 ruling in Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor. In that particular case, the high court unanimously held that by denying the Catholic Charities Bureau a tax exemption that is available for religious entities, Wisconsin had violated the First Amendment.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in the opinion for the court, "When the government distinguishes among religions based on theological differences in their provision of services, it imposes a denominational preference that must satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny."
That Supreme Court ruling boded poorly for New York, whose abortion mandate had a similarly narrow and problematic religious exemption.
On Friday, New York agreed to surrender its effort to coerce the Christian plaintiffs into funding abortions.
"For nearly a decade, New York bureaucrats tried to strong-arm nuns into paying for abortions because they serve all those in need," said Lori Windham, senior counsel at Becket and attorney for the plaintiffs, in a statement. "At long last, the state has given up its disgraceful campaign. This victory confirms that the government cannot punish religious ministries for living out their faith by serving everyone."
"The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that religious groups shouldn't be bullied for staying true to their faith," Windham added.
Per the terms of the settlement with self-identified Catholic Gov. Kathy Hochul's administration, the following entities will now be recognized as religious employers, thereby securing exemptions from the mandate: the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Albany and Ogdensburg and the Catholic Charities thereof; St. Gregory the Great Roman Catholic Church Society of Amherst; First Bible Baptist Church; Our Savior's Lutheran Church of Albany; Teresian House Nursing Home Company, Inc.; Teresian House Housing Corporation; and Depaul Housing Management Corporation.
The Sisterhood of Mary and the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Brooklyn have dropped their free exercise claims against the state.
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America now looks like a marriage headed for divorce — with no exit
Marriages rarely end over one argument. They fall apart through a long breakdown in communication, a growing inability to resolve disagreements, and the slow realization that two people no longer walk toward the same future.
Healthy marriages don’t require full agreement on every subject. They require compromise on the decisions that shape daily life: money, children, priorities, responsibilities. They also require shared goals.
No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.
When those goals diverge — and neither side will realign — the relationship becomes unsustainable. The law calls the condition “irreconcilable differences.”
America now lives in that condition.
We remain bound under one nation, one Constitution, and one civic home. But we no longer share a common purpose. We no longer share a common story about what the country is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to endure.
This conflict no longer turns on tax rates or regulatory policy. It turns on the legitimacy and direction of the American experiment itself.
The modern left no longer argues about how to preserve the American system. It treats the system as the problem. Democratic leaders and activists call for “fundamental transformation,” flirt with socialism, and talk about the founding less as a flawed but noble legacy than as a moral failure that demands replacement. In that worldview, America doesn’t need reform. America needs erasure.
The right still believes the country can be repaired and preserved. The left increasingly treats the country as something to dismantle.
This rupture shows up in concrete ways. In 2021, the National Archives placed a “harmful language” warning on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — the documents that define the nation. That doesn’t signal ordinary partisan dispute. It signals contempt for the country’s moral foundation.
Socialism sits at the center of this divide. It contradicts the American system at its roots. America rests on the premise that rights come from God, not government. Socialism elevates the state over the individual and makes rights conditional on political approval. It centralizes power in the name of enforced equality — “equity.”
RELATED: Americans aren’t arguing any more — we’re speaking different languages
America protects private property as an extension of liberty. It channels ambition into innovation and prosperity. Socialism treats success as a social offense and demands equality of outcome. When people refuse to surrender the fruits of their labor, socialism turns to coercion. Coercion requires centralized authority. Centralized authority punishes dissent.
The pattern repeats: less freedom, greater dependency, and a governing model incompatible with constitutional self-rule.
The irony remains hard to miss. The left calls Donald Trump “Hitler” while cheering figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist. Yet the Nazi Party sold itself as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — a collectivist project built on centralized power and state control.
The same left often excuses Antifa, a movement built on intimidation, street violence, and political enforcement designed to silence opposition. Those tactics don’t belong to liberal democracy. They belong to regimes that fear debate.
Even basic reality has become contested. The left and right can’t agree on something as elemental as what a man or a woman is. The Supreme Court recently showcased the collapse when ACLU attorneys arguing sex-based discrimination refused to define “woman.” When a society refuses to name biological facts that every civilization once treated as obvious, compromise collapses with it.
This crisis goes deeper than polarization. It reaches the level of knowledge itself. The left increasingly treats biology, history, and moral limits as malleable social constructs. The right still believes objective reality binds us all.
These aren’t normal disagreements. They describe incompatible worldviews. And incompatibility carries consequences.
During the COVID era, polls found majorities of Democrats willing to endorse coercive measures against the unvaccinated, including house arrest. Nearly half supported imprisoning people who questioned vaccine efficacy. Those numbers didn’t represent a fringe. They revealed a growing comfort with state force in service of ideological conformity.
After Trump’s 2016 election, many friendships survived political conflict. By 2020, after years of dehumanization — after constant accusations of “Nazism” aimed at ordinary voters — many of those relationships broke. The political battle stopped sounding like disagreement and started sounding like moral extermination.
RELATED: Washington, DC, has become a hostile city-state
In September 2025, someone assassinated Charlie Kirk. Large segments of the left didn’t just rationalize the killing. Many celebrated it.
After Scott Adams died following a long fight with cancer, prominent voices responded with mockery instead of decency. People magazine ran a headline labeling him “disgraced.” Even death became a political verdict.
This is what irreconcilable differences look like at a national scale.
A country cannot endure when one side believes the nation stands as fundamentally good — worthy of preservation and reform — while the other believes it stands as irredeemably evil and must be dismantled. Marriages end when partners stop seeing each other as allies and start treating each other as enemies.
Nations fracture for the same reason.
America cannot solve this the way a couple dissolves a marriage. The Constitution binds us to one civic order. No clean separation awaits. No tidy divorce court exists for a nation-state. We share one flag, one legal framework, and one public square.
When irreconcilable differences exist but separation remains impossible, the danger grows.
Only three paths remain: recommitment to constitutional principles, enforced coexistence through expanding coercion, or escalation into open conflict as dehumanization becomes normal.
Pretending this amounts to another election cycle, another policy dispute, or another cable-news food fight invites catastrophe. A nation cannot survive when its people no longer agree on what it is, why it exists, or whether it deserves to continue.
Unlike a failed marriage, America can’t walk away.
Judges now veto Trump prosecutors after the Senate stalls confirmations
One of the core executive powers is the authority to prosecute criminals. Article II of the Constitution assigns “the executive power” — all of it — to the president of the United States. In practice, the power to execute the laws against those who have violated them is delegated by the president to the attorney general, the Department of Justice she heads, and the 93 U.S. attorneys spread across the country.
Yet since he took office for the second time last January, President Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have had a heck of a time getting their people in place.
The criminal prosecution work of the US attorneys’ offices does not abate while Washington plays out its slow-walking games.
Of the roughly 50 U.S. attorney nominations the president has sent to the Senate, fewer than half — just 19 — had been confirmed by December 15, and all of those but three were confirmed en masse in October, some 10 months after Trump took office. Although another 13 were confirmed en masse on December 18, 14 are still awaiting confirmation as we approach the one-year mark of Trump’s second term.
A good bit of the holdup is caused by the Senate’s “blue-slip” process, whereby nominations will not be considered unless both senators from the nominee’s home state return a blue slip allowing the nominee to be considered.
Originally designed to allow input from the elected senators who presumably are most familiar with the nominee’s qualifications and temperament — the “advice” part of the “advice and consent” process mentioned in the Constitution — the refusal to return a blue slip has become an obstructionist tactic deployed by Democratic senators bent on blocking as much of Trump’s agenda as they can.
But the criminal prosecution work of the U.S. attorneys’ offices does not abate while Washington plays out its slow-walking games, and the president of the United States — the nation’s top executive and chief law enforcement officer, who has the constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — needs to have people in charge of those offices.
RELATED: The ‘blue-slip block’ is GOP cowardice masquerading as tradition
Democratic obstruction
The Constitution’s default rule for the appointment of U.S. attorneys is presidential nomination followed by Senate confirmation. But because U.S. attorneys are “inferior officers” in the Constitution’s language, Congress can allow for appointments by the president alone, by the heads of the executive departments, or by the courts of law. It has done so by allowing the attorney general to appoint “interim” U.S. attorneys for up to 120 days to fill vacancies.
But after the 120-day period expires, the interim can remain in charge of the office only if the district court in that jurisdiction approves. Six of the U.S. attorneys appointed to interim positions have been rejected by their respective district courts: Bill Essayli in the Central District of California, Julianne Murray in the District of Delaware, Sigal Chattah in the District of Nevada, Alina Habba in the District of New Jersey, Ryan Ellison in the District of New Mexico, and John Sarcone in the Northern District of New York. Not surprisingly, five of these district courts are overwhelmingly stacked with Democrat-appointed judges, another outgrowth of the more aggressive “blue-slip” policy that has been deployed by Democratic senators in the last decade.
The Nevada District Court has seven judges, for example, and all seven were appointed by either President Obama or President Biden. It’s the same situation with the Northern District of New York, where all five judges on that court were appointed by Obama or Biden. The New Jersey District Court has 17 judges, and all but two (both George W. Bush appointees, not Trump appointees) were appointed by either Obama or Biden. The Central District of California has 28 judges, and fewer than one-third were appointed by Republicans. And five of the seven federal judges in New Mexico were appointed by Obama or Biden.
Alina Habba, who brought the indictment against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) for interfering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforcement operations, was famously disqualified by the District Court in New Jersey after the cumulative 120-day period expired. And Lindsey Halligan — the interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who obtained the high-profile indictments of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying to Congress and of New York Attorney General Letitia James for allegedly falsely claiming a home in Virginia as her personal residence in order to obtain a more favorable mortgage interest rate — was disqualified by her local district court after the 120-day interim period in that office expired.
The bigger obstacle
The Department of Justice has said it will challenge these disqualifications on appeal. One issue will be whether the 120-day limit on the interim appointment authority is cumulative or successive. That is, if someone is appointed as interim U.S. attorney and then resigns before the expiration of the 120 days, does the attorney general get to appoint a new, different interim to fill the new vacancy for another 120 days, or does the new interim appointee only get to serve until the original 120-day clock expires?
The practice has been the latter, but that leaves the president without someone to exercise his executive authority in charge of the office, as long as the obstruction tactics in the Senate hold. That seems to be a big threat to the president’s ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed and therefore a big Article II executive authority problem.
An even bigger obstacle for Trump, though one that has not received much attention, is the separation-of-powers problem lurking in this statutory scheme, which requires approval by the district court at the conclusion of the 120-day period.
Yes, the Constitution’s text allows for the appointment of inferior officers by the courts of law, which would technically allow Congress to create a scheme whereby the courts appoint the prosecutors who prosecute cases before them.
There is nothing in the records of sparse debate during the 1787 federal convention to suggest the drafters had such an interbranch appointment authority in mind however. Rather it would seem more likely that they intended inferior executive officers to be appointed by the president alone, or the heads of the executive departments, and inferior judicial officers to be appointed by the courts of law.
RELATED: Ketanji Brown Jackson still can’t define ‘woman,’ yet rewrites sex law
When it upheld the independent prosecutor law in the 1988 case of Morrison v. Olson, which had provided for the appointment by a “Special Division” of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court rejected that interbranch argument, but it also pointed out that the independent prosecutor statute was designed to allow for investigation and prosecution of high-ranking officials in the executive branch, and the interbranch appointment process therefore avoided the obvious conflicts of interest.
No such conflict exists in the run-of-the-mill appointment (or rejection) by district courts of interim U.S. attorneys at the expiration of the 120-day interim period. The interbranch appointment authority raises serious separation-of-powers concerns, and the Supreme Court has been particularly solicitous of them in recent years. It also raises serious concerns about the president's ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed when the people executing them are not the ones he has chosen.
A century ago, in the case of Humphrey’s Executor v. the United States, the Supreme Court upheld congressional restrictions on the ability of the president to remove executive branch officials. But already on the Supreme Court’s docket this term is a case, Trump v. Slaughter, in which most observers rightly predict that it will overrule that old, New Deal-era case and restore a large measure of control of the executive branch to the head of that branch, the president — the only member of the entire executive branch that we the people actually elect.
If the Slaughter case ends up slaughtering the bad constitutional law from Humphrey’s Executor, it does not take much imagination to conclude that the question of judges appointing prosecutors who appear before them — that is, those officials who exercise the core executive function of prosecuting crimes — should also be in for a very serious reconsideration.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.
'It's about freedom': Celebs push for boys in girls' sports in new ad
Boys playing on the girls' soccer team? It's the American way.
That's the bizarre message of a new ad in which a motley assemblage of actors and athletes lecture the viewer on the importance of allowing male high school athletes to compete against females.
'Time and time again, we see powerful politicians fixate on trans kids.'
Released Monday, the 30-second clip kicks off the ACLU's "More Than a Game" campaign, which seeks to draw attention to two Supreme Court cases the organization brought challenging state bans on transgender-identified biological males playing women's sports.
'Free'-for-all
In the spot, celebs ranging from soccer player turned activist Megan Rapinoe to actors Naomi Watts and Elliot (née Ellen) Page deliver feel-good, fact-free slogans like, "Supporting trans youth isn't just about sports. It's about freedom."
The ad also claims that transgender children are "the living, breathing fabric of this country."
"Sports are for every kid who wants to play — including trans youth," the ACLU wrote in a message underneath the clip.
Targeting 'trans'
The group simultaneously released a petition against what it calls the Trump administration's "attacks" on "trans kids."
"Over the last several years, politicians across the country have targeted trans people and our families — and under the Trump administration, these attacks have only gotten more unconscionable and cruel," the organization wrote in a statement accompanying the petition.
"One of their most consistent targets? Trans student athletes. Time and time again, we see powerful politicians fixate on trans kids and attempt to ban them from playing school sports with their friends."
Without providing any citations, the ACLU claimed children have been subjected to "invasive and demeaning sex testing" which has allegedly resulted in "all of us [being] less safe and free to be ourselves."
As of this writing, the petition has secured some 23,500 of the 25,000 signatures it seeks.
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Ban wagon
Other notable personalities to appear in the ACLU's commercial included former WNBA player Sue Bird, current WNBA player Brianna Turner, actress Kara Young, and fashion designer Willy Chavarria.
Following oral arguments Tuesday, a majority of the justices signaled skepticism toward the challenges, suggesting the bans are likely to be upheld. The Court is expected to issue a formal ruling by late spring or summer.
Ketanji Brown Jackson still can’t define ‘woman,’ yet rewrites sex law
How many years of graduate biology did you need to learn the definition of “woman”? Zero. Children grasp the difference between male and female before they can spell either word. Yet liberal Supreme Court justices and the lawyers who argue before them now treat that distinction as unknowable.
This confusion did not happen by accident. Once a culture rejects God’s creation and natural law, nonsense fills the vacuum.
If you cannot define the subject, you cannot defend it. If you cannot name what a woman is, you cannot decide a case where the law turns on protecting women as a class.
God created the world with real distinctions. Those distinctions do not depend on feelings, desires, or political fashion. When people refuse to think according to what is, scripture describes the result as a “darkened mind,” a mind that cannot grasp even basic truths.
This week, the Supreme Court confronted that reality. The cases before it, arising from West Virginia and Idaho, ask whether biological males who identify as female may compete in women’s sports. The exchanges between the justices and counsel revealed more than legal disagreement. They exposed an unwillingness to define the very terms the law requires.
Several of the court’s conservative justices asked what should have been the most basic question: What does it mean to be a man or a woman?
Justice Samuel Alito pressed an attorney for the ACLU on that point. The attorney conceded that he could not offer a definition of “man” or “woman.” He even admitted his notes warned: “Don’t define sex.” Alito then asked the obvious next question: How can a court determine whether discrimination “on the basis of sex” has occurred if no one will say what “sex” means?
That exchange should have ended the argument.
Congress wrote Title IX in 1972. “Sex” meant biological sex. It did not mean “gender identity,” self-conception, or an internal psychological state. It meant male and female. Everyone understood that because everyone lived in that reality.
Yet one attorney urged the justices to avoid deciding the case on the definition of sex, arguing that Title IX’s purpose was not to define sex accurately but to prevent discrimination. That move should make every American nervous.
Discrimination with respect to what? Opportunities based on what? You cannot prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex while refusing to say what sex is. That is not legal reasoning. That is verbal fog.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor leaned into the confusion by suggesting that excluding a biological male who identifies as female from women’s sports is “by its nature” a sex-based classification requiring heightened scrutiny. Notice what happened. The argument claims no one can define sex, yet it demands courts treat sex as a controlling legal category. A category of what, exactly? The reasoning collapses under its own weight.
This is what a darkened mind looks like in public office. People use words after they drain them of meaning. They demand that others affirm a contradiction and call it clarity.
Human beings have understood the difference between boy and girl across centuries and civilizations. This is not advanced biology. It is ordinary knowledge that undergirds family, language, and society.
So what changed?
The distinction between male and female did not become complicated. It remained simple and permanent. That permanence blocks any ideology that tries to rebuild reality around will and self-definition. God created male and female. No court can repeal creation.
Progressive jurists increasingly treat being “assigned” a sex at birth as oppression. The individual must claim sovereignty over reality. The self becomes god. Identity becomes law.
This worldview also reveals hypocrisy. Liberal justices demand that society submit to one person’s internal feelings about identity, while dismissing the concrete concerns of women who do not want to compete against men in zero-sum athletic contests.
RELATED: Top UK court deals devastating blow to cross-dressing activists
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson exposed that contradiction when she questioned why the “fear” of women should govern policy. That question reveals the priority system: One set of feelings can redefine reality and restructure competition; another set — concerns about fairness, safety, and equal opportunity — counts for little.
Justice Jackson famously said she cannot define what a woman is, yet she presents herself as a defender of women’s rights. That contradiction matters. If you cannot define the subject, you cannot defend it. If you cannot name what a woman is, you cannot decide a case where the law turns on protecting women as a class.
Natural law has been pushed aside. The created order is treated as optional. What remains is raw will — whatever a judge, an activist, or an institution demands at the moment. That is not law. It is power dressed up in robes.
The consequences extend beyond sports. Women lose opportunities. Men receive rewards for denying reality. Courts move from recognizing truth to enforcing ideological compliance.
Scripture teaches that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). What we witnessed from liberal justices was the opposite: fear of acknowledging God’s created order. When leaders refuse to name basic truths, they do not climb toward enlightenment. They descend into madness.
When justices on the highest court in the land cannot say what a woman is, the problem is no longer sports. The problem is spiritual.
SCOTUS Upholds Candidates’ Ability To Challenge Election Rules
'Candidates have a concrete and particularized interest in the rules that govern the counting of votes in their elections,' wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.Today's top stories