What Happened Today: June 21, 2022
Supreme Court’s school choice decision; Uvalde Police Department’s “abject failure”; Israel goes back to the polls for a fifth time
The Big Story
Advocates of school choice and religious liberty notched a major victory today after the Supreme Court issued one of the year’s biggest remaining decisions on its docket. In a 6-3 majority opinion, the court found that Maine’s tuition assistance program withholding state money from private religious schools violated the constitutional rights of two Christian families. Of the 180,000 secondary school students in Maine, roughly 5,000 students, primarily located in the state’s rural north, live far enough from a public school that they receive tuition assistance from the state to attend any accredited private school that is both “nonsectarian” and provides the equivalent of a public education. David and Amy Carson, along with another family, qualified for the assistance and sued Maine for the exclusion of two Christian schools from the program. One of the schools, Temple Academy, forbids the admission of students with gay parents, teaches lessons on the immorality of homosexuality, and seeks to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion.”
In previous instances, the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional to withhold public money from religious entities simply because they were religious. In the high court’s latest ruling, the majority opinion found that beyond allowing the participation of religious schools, the state is required to fund religious education, even if those schools do not adhere to some of the state’s rules on public education. The implications are wide reaching and could significantly rewrite public secular education nationwide. The decision could apply to parents who wish to choose schools in larger school systems or publicly funded charter schools that previously were not allowed to include religious teaching. More broadly, the decision implicates other publicly funded institutions. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent, “What other social benefits are there of the State’s provision of which means … that the State must pay parents for the religious equivalent of the secular benefit provided?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more blunt in her assessment: “Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”
“There is nothing neutral about Maine’s program,” countered Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority opinion. “The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”
In the Back Pages: Human Beings Are More Than Just Antique Vibrators
The Rest
→ Contradicting previous reports that officers had attempted to breach the locked door of the classroom where the Uvalde school shooter was holed up for over an hour, law enforcement officials have now confirmed that officers never even attempted to open the door, which was, in fact, unlocked. An “abject failure” is how Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas State Police, described the Uvalde Police Department’s response to last month’s massacre. Other reporting found that there was an opportunity for officers to stop the shooter before he entered the school in the first place: Police reached the school while the shooter was still outside firing his weapon in the parking lot, but officers did not engage the shooter out of fear for the children playing in the vicinity. Once inside, officers were equipped with rifles and at least one ballistic shield, possessing adequate firepower and protection to confront the shooter, and yet still waited 58 minutes to engage. The response from the Uvalde Police Department is now the subject of investigations by the Texas Rangers, the U.S. Justice Department, and a special committee of the Texas Legislature.
→ For the fifth time in three years, Israelis will vote to elect a new government, as the country’s current leader, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, announced on Monday that his fractious coalition of eight political parties would disband this week. The coalition has collapsed due to infighting, defections, and pressure from Likud, the opposition party, with the recent defection of two right-wing coalition members amounting to the final straw. The disbanding of Bennett’s coalition marks the end of an experiment in Israeli politics that brought together left-wing, right-wing, and centrist parties—including the first Arab Israeli party to belong to a governing coalition—in an arrangement bound together more by its opposition to Israel’s long-ruling former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu than to any common political program. With elections now scheduled for the fall, Netanyahu’s Likud Party is leading in the polls. It is unclear if Netanyahu, currently on trial for corruption charges, will be able to reemerge as his party’s leader.
→ A new Willis Towers Watson survey found that 36% of U.S. employees making more than $100,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck, doubling the number from the same survey three years prior. Survey administrators attributed the surge in household economic vulnerability for even high-income earners to the escalating cost of living, and the results echo a LendingClub survey that found 1 in every 3 of those making even $250,000 are likewise living paycheck to paycheck. In Europe, a new report by the European Central Bank forecasted that consumer grocery bills will rise at or close to record rates through at least the summer of 2023. That sticker shock at the market is driven not only by grain prices pegged to the Ukraine conflict but also by downstream effects like unprecedented fertilizer expenses, which were up 151% year over year as of April.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I can’t deny that I regret taking leave of life. I would be false and lying if I said otherwise because life is great and we only have one. But unfortunately that’s the way it went.”
In a letter read after his death, Federico Carboni, an Italian truck driver paralyzed in an accident 12 years ago, reflected upon his life and death. His was the first legal medically assisted suicide in Italy—an end that Carboni fought a long and arduous legal battle to achieve, in the hopes of securing this right for all Italian citizens. The Catholic Church and Pope Francis are emphatic in their opposition to medically assisted suicide, calling it “intrinsically evil” in “every situation and circumstance,” while Italy’s Committee for Bioethics remains deeply divided on the issue. In the United States, meanwhile, 10 states and the District of Columbia permit medically assisted suicide.
→ Turns out working in the Metaverse is a major pain, at least for some of the 18 volunteers who took part in a weeklong study to see what it was like to work entirely via virtual reality. It took only a few hours for two of the participants to bow out because of intense headaches and nausea, while the remaining 16 noted symptoms of eye pain and feeling more anxious and nervous. Volunteers spent the week working regular eight-hour days with a 45-minute break inside Facebook’s Metaverse, then a week in a normal office. Of those who’d noted intensifying feelings of anxiety inside the virtual realm, they also reported a 20% drop in their general well-being. “We hope this work will stimulate further research investigating longer-term productive work in-situ in VR,” one researcher wrote of the experiment. Though one wonders how easy it will be to find willing participants.
→In March of last year, Axios offered a forecast for the Biden administration that seems remarkable today—if only as a historical snapshot of how wrong media analysis can sometimes be. Following a White House session between President Biden and historians to discuss how “big is too big—and how fast is too fast—to jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America,” and using it to support the claim that the White House was poised to make “vast changes to voting, immigration and inequality,” Axios noted that Biden, “popular in polls,” also has “full party control of Congress, … party activists egging him on, … [and] strong gathering economic winds at his back.” Axios says that its trusted sources informed it that “Biden won’t hesitate” to pull the trigger on all the above but that during his victory lap “he won’t rub their noses in it. … That’ll be the Biden touch to rolling the opposition—and getting that much closer to the status of latter-day FDR.”
Read More: https://www.axios.com/2021/03/24/biden-filibuster-agenda-history
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: 300,000
The number of public school teachers and staff members who quit between 2020 and 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—a 3% decrease in the total staff of U.S. public schools. Teachers are responding to a litany of horrors, from the familiar—low pay, crowded classrooms, difficult children or parents—to the new, with teachers now bearing the brunt of two of the most contentious debates in contemporary America: COVID-19 policies (particularly school closures and masks for kids during the height of the pandemic) and discussions of race and gender in the classroom. With staff quitting in droves, things will only get worse for those who remain, who will now be expected to shoulder the burdens dropped by their former colleagues. According to the National Center for Education, 44% of schools had teaching vacancies at the start of this past year, which they filled by asking those remaining staff members to work beyond their usual duties.
→ In March, The Scroll reported that Amazon’s Prime Air program, which would see thousands of Amazon drones airlifting deliveries to customers, had been consistently running aground, with a drone falling from the sky every other month or so, including one that caused an acres-wide bushfire. But at long last, for the lucky residents of one pastoral California town full of farmers, vintners, and ranchers, it can be their fields and farms that get immolated in these drone crashes! The company announced its plans last week to open up its first drone-delivery facility in Lockeford, California, choosing the town, one Amazon employee told The Washington Post, for its weather and transit access and because it “felt sort of cowboy and do-what-you-will out there.” Do what you will, indeed.
→ MAP OF THE DAY:
China is beginning to dot the map with what its military calls “strategic strong points”—ports that are owned by Chinese state enterprises and seamlessly blend the logistical needs of the country’s globalizing economy with the political needs of its expanding empire. This is in contrast to the United States’ strategy of expansion, which relies on increasing its power through a growing chain of military bases; in the past year in the Pacific, the United States has built or discussed building bases in Australia, Guam, Palau, and Micronesia.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
Human Beings Are More Than Just Antique Vibrators
The Case for Bioconservatism
By Zineb Riboua
The technological crisis we are facing today is not about digital technology itself—we do not yet have the Frankenstein problem of our creations turning against us. The danger comes from our misguided faith that technology will save us. Our fallacious belief turns tools into sacred objects worthy of reverence and obedience and finds us kneeling before the idols of our own invention.
In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford wrote that modern technological advancements required a “cultural preparation” involving the evaporation of religious beliefs and the emergence of a mechanical universe where man triumphs over nature. Yet Mumford’s image of the future—a place where humans covered great distances in cars and airplanes, and factories belched smoke—now strikes us as a vision of the past. The technologies of the mechanical universe still required the interference of the human body to function, but we have now escaped into the digital ether. A century ago, people fled the countryside to find their futures in industrial cities. Today we flee our own bodies looking for a “better life” in post-human technologies while entertaining the illusion that human perfectibility is possible through technological enhancement.
Ancient Romans saw bodies as the best representation of the human mind and soul, worthy of preservation and cultivation. Twenty-first-century Americans see their bodies as mere devices. Millennials have been conditioned to see their bodies as machines that need to be fed and taken care of but are no longer intimately connected to their identity. It is not a coincidence that movements such as “body acceptance” and “body positivity” have emerged at a moment when the body has come to be viewed as an antiquated piece of equipment.
The evidence for this changing attitude toward the body is everywhere, but one example is the marked decline in rates of sexual activity among young people, coupled with the dramatic rise in the normalized consumption of virtual sex and sexual devices. Indeed, there is now an emerging SexTech market worth more than $30 billion, according to multiple estimates.
“There are prosthetic arms and legs, why not genitals?” one SexTech industry leader told Forbes last year, as if sexuality can be optimized like an engine and humans can be replaced with customized vibrators. Out with the physical experience of human intimacy and in with the Matrix-like simulation. The idea that every aspect of our lives requires a sophisticated automaton to be perfected is not just unnatural, it is dangerous. Virtual platforms such as the Metaverse will only exacerbate this pull away from living as humans have always understood it, as the physical experience of a material world, and toward digital prosthetic replacements for real life.
Read more here.
Isn’t Axios the one who has a “be smart” summary of each article? Perhaps the horizon for being smart is very short..
I appreciate Federico Carboni's quote (Quote of the Day), as it's true "life is great," if you choose to make it so, but thankfully, not true that we only have one. We are spiritual beings (eternal souls) occupying physical bodies, which we choose deliberately for whatever service the experience provides to eternity itself (which is not for us to know on an individual basis, but which we understood before we came.) We can and do "come back." This fact is documented. Past lives are a thing.