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California church wins court battle over COVID fines

Ainsley Earhardt speaks with Pastor Mike McClure of San Jose's Calvary Chapel and constitutional attorney Mariah Gondeiro of the Advocates for Faith & Freedom non-profit to hear about their victory against COVID mandates.

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A California appeals court dropped nearly $200,000 in fines for a San Jose church that came under fire for violating COVID-19 restrictions on indoor gatherings during the height of the pandemic.

Mike McClure, pastor of Calvary Chapel, and constitutional attorney Mariah Gondeiro detailed the experience on "Fox & Friends" Thursday, relaying what they consider a victory for religious freedom.

"It's a blessing for the First Amendment," McClure told host Ainsley Earhardt.

CALIFORNIA CHURCH THAT WAS FINED OVER $200K FOR DEFYING COVID-19 RESTRICTIONS GETS FINES DROPPED

Pastor Mike McClure, from Calvary Chapel San Jose, speaks during a press conference outside of Santa Clara Superior Court in downtown San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (Nhat V. Meyer/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images)

"Pastors across the country, I think we need to realize that we have this freedom that God's given us, and we're needed more today than ever with the hope, truth, love"

Gondeiro said the appellate court elected to drop the charges because the U.S. Supreme Court had already established a legal precedent on the issue.

"The Supreme Court has been very clear over the last year that these orders violated the First Amendment. This is a religious freedom case, and they violated the First Amendment because they discriminate against religion," she said.

SUPREME COURT DENIES NEVADA CHURHC'S APPEAL OF ATTENDANCE RESTRICTION AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Supporters of Calvary Chapel San Jose wave to cars outside of Santa Clara Superior Court in downtown San Jose, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (Nhat V. Meyer/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images)

"The county as well as the state of California allowed a lot of essential businesses or businesses that they deemed essential to stay opened, but not this church."

Gondeiro went on to restate the court acted in accordance with judicial precedent by dropping the fine.

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The legal struggles for McClure are not over yet, however. The county is still attempting to slap him with a $2.8 million fine for the pandemic-era violations.

"If it's jail time, I'm ready for whatever. Honestly, I'm not wanting to fight the county. I think that they just don't understand the Constitution," he said.

"The fees are something I have honestly not thought about."

In a press release, Gondeiro said she expects the church to have a "complete victory" in that case as well.

Taylor Penley is a production assistant with Fox News.

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California church that defied COVID restrictions wins court battle: 'A blessing for the First Amendment' - Fox News

The ordinance bans soliciting from people within 50 feet of some public spaces including Town Hall, the Joe Eakes and Ocean Front parks, The Community Center banks and financial institutions, and beach access points. (PCD).

KURE BEACH A Pleasure Island town overhauled its solicitation amendment on Monday, removing its permit process and offering clearer guidance on prohibited areas.

The most notable additions to the new Kure Beach ordinance, which restricts peddling, solicitation and begging in certain public spaces, are the ban on solicitation in an aggressive manner and a fine for violations.

During the meeting, Town Attorney James Eldridge said the rewrite lists specific public spaces such as beaches and right-of-ways where those activities are barred and eliminate its discretionary permit process. Previously, solicitors would have to gain town permission to apply to solicit services or beg for money.

Council passed the amendment with unanimous approval.

However, it raises questions about the legality of its contents under the First Amendment. Panhandling is protected in public spaces, including roads and sidewalks, per 2015s U.S. Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit case, Reynolds v. Middleton. Since it is considered free speech, municipalities would need to provide a burden of proof to enact restrictions, which are required to be narrow and specific in scope.

In July, the City of Wilmington discussed initiatives to deter solicitation as it cannot ban it, despite a prohibition ordinance in its books. It essentially decided to increase funding for social services and encourage people to donate to nonprofits rather than directly give money to people on the street.

Municipalities can regulate panhandling that intimidates, threatens or causes physical harm to the public. Under North Carolina statute, law enforcement is within its rights to cite someone for aggressive behaviors while panhandling.

Kure Beachs new ordinance identifies six categories of whats considered aggressive:

The ordinance bans soliciting from people within 50 feet of some public spaces including Town Hall, the Joe Eakes and Ocean Front parks, The Community Center banks and financial institutions, and beach access points. Also, people cannot solicit operators of cars on a public street or people in line at a commercial establishment.

Solicitors cannot operate on the beach, in parking lots, within town-owned or Wave Transit vehicles and in the Towns public right-of-ways. At the meeting, Eldridge said he would change the latter to specific paved right-of-ways to allow people to utilize sidewalks and dirt roadsides.

The bottom line is that if someone is in the street, they cant solicit, but if they are on the sidewalk or the dirt, they can, Eldridge said.

Private property is also forbidden if the owner or tenant informs the solicitor to stop or posts a visible notification banning the act.

Solicitation is limited to daylight hours and if someone violates the ordinance, they can now be charged with a $50 civil citation, due no more than 72 hours after issuance.

One Kure Beach resident pointed out during the meetings public comment period the amendment may still cause confusion and be too restrictive.

[The amendment] does not produce reasonable places when you take away all the prohibited places listed, Megan Garrett said during the meeting. It pretty much says you can do this in public but not in any of the public parts of the town.

However, Garrett approved banning aggressive solicitation only. Allowing people to panhandle anywhere, in her opinion, does not impede the welfare of citizens and is exercising the right to free speech.

Eldridge noted that the towns restrictions are permitted under the amendments purpose. He added the public welfare and safety is served by restricting where solicitation can occur.

We recognize the right to the First Amendment to solicit and panhandle, Eldridge said. As you all know, theres been a lot of prohibitions or regulations that have been struck down by the way they are worded, whereas reasonable time, manner and place restrictions are bound to be enforced.

During her comment, Garrett also raised concerns about other activities that could be considered solicitation, like busking.

One could argue that having an open guitar case could be interpreted as a request for a donation, and therefore, prohibited in all the places one would normally busk, she said. If this is the councils intent, I ask that you reconsider.

Eldridge told Port City Daily busking would not be subject to the new amendment and is still under review by town staff, but council members had questions about other activities like ice cream trucks and door-to-door salespeople.

He added the town distinguishes advertising from solicitation salespeople would be soliciting, but ice cream and food trucks are more nuanced. He said the town is considering revising the solicitation definition to give clearer guidelines on busking and mobile businesses.

Port City Daily reached out to the Kure Beach Police Department to find out how it will enforce the ordinance, but no one responded by press.

Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan atbrenna@localdailymedia.com

Want to read more from PCD? Subscribenowand then sign up for our newsletter,Wilmington Wire, and get the headlines delivered to your inbox every morning.

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Solicitation in Kure Beach: Town adds fine and defines banned areas, raises First Amendment concerns - Port City Daily

In the middle of July, three big blue billboards went up in and around Jackson, Mississippi. Pregnant? You still have a choice, they informed passing motorists, inviting them to visit Mayday.Health to learn more. Anybody who did landed on a website that provides information about at-home abortion pills and ways to get them delivered anywhere in the United Statesincluding parts of the country, such as Mississippi, where abortions are now illegal under most circumstances.

A few days ago, the founders of the nonprofit that paid for the billboard ads, Mayday Health, received a subpoena from the office of the attorney general of Mississippi. (The state has already been at the center of recent debates about abortion: Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, upheld a Mississippi statute by allowing states to put strict limits on abortion.) The subpoena, which I have seen, demands a trove of documents about Mayday Health and its activities. It may be the first step in an effort to force Mayday Health to take down the billboards, or even to prosecute the organizations leaders for aiding and abetting criminal conduct.

Mayday Health is not backing down. This week, it is taking out a television ad on Mississippi channels and putting up 20 additional billboards. This makes the legal fight over the Jackson billboards a crucial test in two interrelated conflicts about abortion that are still coming into public view.

Read: The abortion-rights message that some activists hate

The first is that the availability of abortion pills, which are very safe and effective during the first three months of pregnancy, has transformed the stakes of the abortion fight. The pro-life movement has hoped that states new powers to shut down abortion providers will radically reduce the number of abortions around the country. The pro-choice movement has feared that the end of Roe will lead to a resurgence of back-alley abortions that seriously threaten womens health.

Yet the changes wrought by the recent Supreme Court ruling may turn out to be more contained than meets the eye: Legal restrictions on first-trimester abortions have become much harder to enforce because a simple pill can now be used to induce a miscarriage. Abortion by medication is widely available in large parts of the country; as Mayday Health points out on its website, even women who are residents in states where doctors cannot prescribe such pills can set up a temporary forwarding address and obtain them by mail.

The second brewing conflict is about limits on free speech. So long as abortions required an in-person medical procedure, the pro-life movement could hope to reduce them by shutting down local clinics offering the service. Now that comparatively cheap and convenient workarounds exist for most cases, effective curbs on abortion require the extra step of preventing people from finding out about these alternatives. That is putting many members of the pro-life movement, be they Mississippis attorney general or Republican legislators in several states who are trying to pass draconian restrictions on information and advice about abortions, on a collision course with the First Amendment.

Some limits on speech are reasonable. States do, for example, have a legitimate interest in banning advertisements for illegal drugs. If a cocaine dealer took out a billboard advertising his wares, the government should obviously be able to take it down. Especially when it comes to commercial speech, some common-sense restrictions on what people can say or claim have always existed and are well-justified.

But the laws that Republicans are now introducing in state legislatures around the country go far beyond such narrow limits on objectionable commercial speech. In South Carolina, for example, Republican legislators have recently sponsored a bill that would criminalize providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, internet, or any other mode of communication regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion, knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion.

Read: The coming rise of abortion as a crime

This lawwhich is modeled on draft legislation that the National Right to Life Committee is trying to get passed in many states around the countrywould seriously undermine the right to free speech. It could potentially make doctors in states where abortion is actually legal liable to prosecution for discussing their services with someone who calls them from a state where abortion is illegal. It could even outlaw basic forms of speech such as news stories containing information that might be used by someone seeking an abortion. Theoretically, even this article could fall under that proscription.

The subpoena issued by the office of Mississippis attorney general is objectionable for similar reasons. Mayday Health is not advertising a commercial product or service. The organization does not handle or distribute abortion pills. All it does is provide information. Although one could reasonably believe that the information Mayday Health is providing may be used to commit acts that are now illegal in some parts of the United States, a ban on informational speech that can be used for the purposes of lawbreaking would be unacceptably broad and vague. After all, would-be lawbreakers might also consult the blog posts of lawyers who explain how to object to an improper search of a vehicle or study the pages of a novel to figure out how to make a Molotov cocktail. Should the attorney or the novelist also be considered to have aided or abetted a crime?

Recent efforts to suppress speech about abortion would seriously undermine the nations ability to debate the topic openly and honestly. Anybody who believes in the importance of the First Amendment should oppose them. As Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has pointed out, These proposals are a chilling attempt to stifle free speech Whether you agree with abortion or not is irrelevant. You have the right to talk about it.

In recent years, the wider debate about free speech has undergone a strange transformation. Historically, the American left staunchly defended the First Amendment because it recognized the central part that free speech played in the struggles against slavery and segregation, and in the fight for the rights of women and sexual minorities. But as establishment institutions, including universities and corporations, became more progressive, and parts of the left came to feel that they had a significant share in institutional power, the absolute commitment to free speech waned.

Progressives started to find the idea of restrictions on free speech appealing because they assumed that those making decisions about what to allow and what to ban would share their views and values. Today, some on the extremist left endorse restrictions on free speech, demanding campus speech codes and measures to force social-media sites to deplatform controversial commentators and censor what they claim is misinformation.

Mary Ziegler: Why exceptions for the life of the mother have disappeared

The transformation of the lefts position on freedom of speech has allowed both principled conservatives and the less-than-principled protagonists of the MAGA movement to cast themselves as defenders of the First Amendment. In the mind of many people, the cause of free speech has astoundingly quickly shifted from being associated with left-wing organizations such as the ACLU to becoming the property of right-leaning pundits and politicians.

This makes the new front in the fight over abortion rights an important reminder of why the left should never abandon the cause of free speech. If the left gives up on the core commitment to free speech, what people can say is as likely to be determined by the attorney general of Mississippi as it is by college deans or tech workers. Curbs on free expression have always been a tool of governments that seek to control the lives of their citizens and punish those who defy them. The same remains true today.

See the article here:
Why Freedom of Speech Is the Next Abortion Fight - The Atlantic

With help from Derek Robertson

"Mixers" like Tornado Cash were crucial to various crypto hacks. | shapecharge/iStock

Over the past 24 hours, a video of a bearded man crooning lines of computer code with the aid of an auto-tuner has achieved minor virality online.

In addition to being amusing, the video gets to the crux of a momentous legal question hanging over the digital era: How does the First Amendment apply to computer code?

In the song, by musician Jonathan Mann, the lyrics are lines of code from Tornado Cash, a software tool called a mixer used to obscure the provenance of crypto tokens, which the Treasury Department sanctioned last week after it was used by North Korean hackers.

The refrain of Manns song This is illegal argues that the sanctions amount to a constitutionally dubious ban on discussing the Tornado Cash code itself.

Its not clear that the sanctions actually outlaw reciting code, melodically or otherwise. But they do include what appears to be the first-ever ban on interacting with blockchain addresses controlled by self-executing code (sanctions normally ban transactions with accounts controlled by specific people or entities). And as crypto advocates mull legal challenges to the sanctions, theyre homing in on First Amendment objections.

A showdown over the constitutionality of the sanctions would reopen decades-old questions about the legal status of code. In all likelihood, it would be just the first major skirmish in a broader fight over the First Amendments application to blockchain systems, one that crypto advocates have been anticipating for years.

In the early 90s, the Justice Department launched an investigation of a programmer who had released an encrypted messaging system, Pretty Good Privacy, under the logic that the software which had the potential to thwart U.S. spying capabilities counted as a munition, and was therefore subject to an export ban. The government eventually dropped the case, and in 1999, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on First Amendment grounds in favor of another programmer, Daniel Bernstein, who challenged the application of export controls to cryptographic code.

This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented Bernstein in the 90s, has expressed reservations about the Tornado Cash sanctions, arguing that the government doesnt have the power to ban the dissemination of computer code.

EFF did not immediately respond to a request to discuss its First Amendment reservations in more depth. But the crypto advocacy group Coin Center, which is considering a lawsuit over the sanctions, fleshed out its First Amendment objections in a lengthy analysis published Monday. The analysis argues that both the intent and the effect of the sanctions is to have a chilling effect on people exploring the very idea of cryptocurrency mixers.

While this affects only a niche class of blockchain applications, the question of how far First Amendment protections extend to transmissions of information within blockchain systems could have more profound implications. Bitcoin advocates have long made the case that both Bitcoins source code and Bitcoin transactions are protected by the First Amendment.

But what if theyre wrong, and the government can ban Bitcoin?

Many legal experts contend that speech protections for computer code are context-dependent, weakening or disappearing when someone executes the code with a computer.

People would argue that is more akin to action than it is to speech, First Amendment lawyer Bob Corn-Revere, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine, told me.

But Corn-Revere, who served on Bernsteins legal team, said that since that case there has been a dearth of court decisions on the issue. As new software applications have raised new legal dilemmas, he said, new guidance about where and how computer code crosses from the realm of speech into the realm of action has yet to follow.

Thats the unanswered question, he said, in terms of where the courts go.

The Federal Reserve | AP Photo

Another unlikely crypto-world alliance is revealing just how unpredictable the fault lines around the new technology can be.

As POLITICOs Sam Sutton reported today for Pro subscribers, the crypto industry is flexing its burgeoning muscle on the Hill to convince lawmakers to stay out of the stablecoin business. The Federal Reserve has been exploring the concept of a digital dollar for some time now, and Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who released a Fed digital dollar proposal earlier this year, told Sam that not only do private stablecoin providers view a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, as a potential threat, banks dont like it either, viewing it as as a potential disrupter of their very profitable payment systems.

Its a notable alliance if only because, as you might have heard (frequently), the crypto and banking industries dont exactly agree with each other on much. Neither, presumably, did Sens. Kristen Gillibrand, a progressive standard-bearer, or Cynthia Lummis, from deep-red Wyoming, who sponsored this years biggest piece of crypto legislation. The next unlikely team-up around a crypto policy issue whether it ends up being around regulatory classification, international relations, or maybe even rural revitalization will officially make a trend, by old newsroom rules. Derek Robertson

Crypto may be down, but it looks like the meme coins are making a comeback.

The mostly-worthless joke crypto tokens most notably touted by Elon Musk in the case of Dogecoin, which hes boosted so consistently that its more or less ceased to be a joke have seen a sudden jump in their value as of late even amid the overall crypto slump, with Dogecoin spiking nearly 11 percent over the past week as of this writing, and Shiba Inu nearly 20 percent. (And yes, theyre nearly all still named after dogs, from Akita Inu to Zelda Inu.)

Of course, these are matters of degrees. The current value of Dogecoin hovers around eight-tenths of a cent. Shiba Inus is mere fractions of a penny that stretch to six digits. Trading these coins is, essentially, a game: Theres no promise of technological transformation, financial anonymity, or the creation of fortunes, just playing around with miniscule amounts of money on your phone.

Provided, as always, that one doesnt get too greedy, theyre probably one of the lower-stress, and certainly one of the lower-stakes, means of dipping ones toe into the crypto market but to be clear, as they say on the forums and subreddits that comprise the communities which are essentially these coins raison detre, this is not financial advice. Derek Robertson

Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger ([emailprotected]); Derek Robertson ([emailprotected]); Konstantin Kakaes ([emailprotected]); and Heidi Vogt ([emailprotected]). Follow us @DigitalFuture on Twitter.

Ben Schreckinger covers tech, finance and politics for POLITICO; he is an investor in cryptocurrency.

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Crypto pleads the First- POLITICO - POLITICO

Speaking after Ryan was Leslie Kendrick, the director of the Center for the First Amendment at UVA Law. Kendrick, who chaired the committee that crafted UVAs free speech statement, invited the new UVA students to, among other things, take a broad view on the meaning of free inquiry.

Its debating people you disagree with, but its also finding communities and organizations of like-minded people thats freedom of association, Kendrick said. Its getting involved with your fellow students on issues that seem to have nothing to do with free speech. Sharing a common goal with different people such as volunteering for public service or playing on a team exposes you to new perspectives, helps you appreciate the good in others, and builds trust and respect.

Even something as simple as spending time with your roommates builds trust, which makes having real conversations easier. And the more real conversations we can have, the better off well be.

The search for the truth, Kendrick said, is not an easy process. She challenged students to keep an open mind.

If you went to the gym and didnt break a sweat, you would know you werent getting your moneys worth, she said. And if you go through college without sometimes being uncomfortable with ideas, the same thing is true. We learn, and we progress, by facing challenging ideas, not suppressing them.

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President Ryan to the Class of 2026: Be Curious, Not Judgmental - UVA Today