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Younger readers probably wont comprehend how important magazines like Sports Illustrated were in pre-internet culture. Most sports news wasfound in local papers and in short segments at 10 p.m. on the nightly news. Sports Illustrated was oftenthough, periodically, competition would pop upthe sole venue in which a sports fan could find deeply reported, well-crafted features and profiles, not to mention often-remarkable photography (the swimsuit issues, naturally, sold best). The magazines circulation hit around 3.5 million in the mid-1980s, with another million copies being bought on newsstands.

In my late 20s, I brieflyworkedfor the company (well, the website, which was then called CNN/SI.comperhaps a portend of terrible things to come), where I occasionally interacted with one of my writing heroes, Frank Deford. What a dream it was. I would have done it for free. I guess I almost did.

Ive largely ignored the magazine for the past decade or so, not for any philosophical reasons or any animosity, but with all the choices it simply fell off my radar. But after running across an astoundingly nonsensical pieceheadlinedWhen Faith and Football Teamed Up Against American Democracy, Im glad I did.

Ostensibly, the feature is about Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a SCOTUS case regarding a school district punishing a football coach named Joseph Kennedy for a 30-second silent prayer on the 50-yard line after every game. The pieces subhead describes the case as so:

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide the case of a football coach at a public high school who was told he wasnt allowed to pray on the field in front of players. The expected result is a win for the coachand the further erosion of the separation between church and state.

In frontof players? Can you imagine? How will our brittle democracy survive an open display of religiosity? Greg Bishop, who could easily have written this piece for The Nation, offers no explanation of how a prayer is eroding separation of Church and State. Even this atheist, after all, understands that the Establishment Clause doesnt ban praying in public placesnot in schools, and not even in Congress, where prayers are recited before every session.

Bishop anoints Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State his proxy, allowing her to frame the debate over Kennedy in the most preposterously hyperbolic, partisan terms imaginable, even though the only thing her organization excels at is losing cases. The bad-faith retelling of Kennedys story is crammed with partisan platitudes about democracy being under attack on issues like voting rights, LGBTQ rights, and the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Now, its unimaginable that a major publication would allow areporter to throw around phrases like voting integrity, religious freedom, and protecting the life of the unbornwithout quotation marks intimating that the ideas arent realand thats probably always been the case. Though the piece brings upRoethree times, no one explains how a court (concerned solely with the constitutionality of laws) is undermining democratic institutions by giving abortion rights, unmentioned in the Constitution, back to voters. Washington State, home of Bremerton High School, sadly, will not be restricting abortion any time soon.

In any event, Bishop also uses appeals to authority, tapping independent scholars or legal experts who hold no vested interest in the outcomeone of the only names offered isconspiracy theoristLaurence Tribe. He warns readers about the nefarious, big-money forces propping up Kennedy. First Liberty($7,255,961in assets), writes Bishop, is a powerful Christian conservative law firm, part of apowerful right-wing machinepowerfulis the key word herewhile Americans United for Separation of Church and State($11,141,577in assets, not counting in-kind contributions from places like the Meredith Corporation, which has $6.727 billion in assets), are simply terrified and transported to an alternate universe of disinformation and propagandaand, in that world, even democracy is in danger.

Disinformation? Its all just progressive mad libs. Thats what happens when democracy is a euphemism for achieving political ends in whatever fashion happens to be convenient. Sometimes, when the numbers are there, it means crass majoritarianism and centralized federal power; and when the numbers arent there, it can mean compulsion or a court dictating rights by fiat.

In this case, a school district, not the coach, is attempting to limit speech. There is no prohibition on praying in public institutions. Such a prohibition has never existed. Any scholarand Bishop claims to have spoken to many for the piecewho claims that the Constitutions authors would have found the act of kneeling after a competition perilous to foundational American ideals is a complete fraud. Then again, When Faith and Football Teamed Up Against American Democracy is a microcosm of the incurious activism that dominates journalism these days. Its one thing to put up with relentless bias thats infected virtually every area of mainstream culture, but another to see once-respected magazines putting out such banal, predictable propaganda.

Link:
Sports Illustrated Is Now A Bullhorn For Attacks On The First Amendment - The Federalist

In a pair of decisions in the past week, the Supreme Court took a major step forward in both education and religious liberty by ruling that states cant discriminate against religion in education in the name of erecting a wall of separation between church and state. If you turn on cable news, youd think the justices had mandated the force-feeding of communion wafers to schoolchildren. In reality, these decisions are the modest culmination of a line of cases undoing glaring judicial mistakes of the 1970s. They come at an opportune time, providing support to parents who are dissatisfied with the conventional education system, which failed their kids during the pandemic.

The First Amendment prohibits laws respecting the establishment of religion. The state of Maine (in Carson v. Makin, decided June 21) and a Washington school district (Kennedy v. Bremerton, on Monday) used this rationale to forbid, respectively, tuition assistance to parents who send their children to religious schools and quiet prayer on the football field by a high-school coach. The justices ruled that these were violations of the First Amendments other religion clause, which bars laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

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The Justices Give Education a Prayer - The Wall Street Journal

Steven Waldman

Staff | AEJMC

The Professional Freedom & Responsibility Committee of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) is proud to announce the 2022 First Amendment Award winner:

Steven Waldman is a nationally known veteran journalist and social entrepreneur dedicated to saving journalism. He is president and co-founder of Report for America, a national service program that places emerging journalists into local newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered issues. The organization is now placing 300 journalists in newsrooms across all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam in 2022. He is also the founder and chair of the Rebuild Local News Coalition, which advocates for public policy to help save local news. Both are initiatives of the GroundTruth Project.

Previously Waldman worked as national editor of U.S. News & World Report, national correspondent for Newsweek, and senior advisor to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. At the FCC he was the prime author of the landmark report "Information Needs of Communities" in 2011 which sounded the alarm about the decline of local news. He is author of the national bestseller, Founding Faith" and the award-winning "Sacred Liberty."

Read more here about Report for America and the GroundTruth Project.

Waldman will be presented the award at the 2022 AEJMC Annual Conference in Detroit.

Award Presentation and Q&A:Friday, Aug. 5, 4-5:30 p.m.

PF&R Panel SessionFirst Amendment Award Presentation and Q&A

Moderating/Presiding:Jason M. Shepard, California State, Fullerton

To view all AEJMC award recipients, click here.

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AEJMC to present 2022 First Amendment Award to Steven Waldman of Report for America - Editor And Publisher Magazine

Yesterday, the Supreme Court voted to uphold a Mississippi abortion ban and overturn Roe v. Wade, ending abortion access in some states and triggering impending bans in others. The decision wont end abortion in America, but in many places it will move the procedure underground and, based on recent history, online.

Understandably, abortion advocates have focused on surveillance issues in the immediate aftermath of the ruling, concerned about states using online records for criminal prosecutions. But theres also a fight brewing over how and where advocates will be able to share abortion information online. If a procedure is illegal, then states could claim content enabling that procedure is illegal too raising thorny questions for platforms and activists alike.

Abortion bans in states like Texas already have provisions to penalize people seen as aiding and abetting the procedure, and some anti-abortion activists are pushing to define this as simply describing how to self-manage an abortion. As The Appeal noted earlier this week, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) has proposed model legislation that would prohibit offering instructions over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication or hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion.

The language seems aimed at sites like Plan C, which offers detailed information about obtaining misoprostol and mifepristone for self-managed abortion. Many news outlets, including Verge sister site The Cut, have also published detailed information about the subject. Broad terms like hosting would even seemingly let states go after internet infrastructure providers that support sites like Plan C or social networks that they use to spread information.

Civil liberties advocates assert that this would be unconstitutional. This kind of legislation raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Knight First Amendment Institute executive director Jameel Jaffer. We intend to consider challenging any legislation that uses todays Supreme Court decision as a justification for new limitations on protected speech, or new forms of surveillance.

Motivated prosecutors may still try to punish outlets that share information, arguing that the material is specifically intended to help others break the law, and drag them into expensive and protracted legal cases even if they ultimately prevail. Explaining what abortion is, where you can get one, advocating for a persons right or ability to get an abortion all these things are general truthful information that cannot be prosecuted without violating the First Amendment, says ACLU counsel Jennifer Granick. The risk is that prosecutors will take those private conversations where people are exchanging information and try to cast those as criminal encounters. And that will be something that were going to probably end up having to fight.

Activists and health care providers have an incentive to fight these battles but the digital platforms they use might not. Opponents of legal abortion could threaten any company involved in hosting speech with lawsuits if they allow abortion-related communications. Potential targets range from social networks like Facebook, where its easy to connect with people seeking abortions, to infrastructure providers like content delivery networks (CDNs), which provide critical logistical support for independent websites.

Right now, platforms have an easy answer to threats: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 shields apps and websites from being considered the publisher or speaker of user-generated content, protecting them from liability over hosting it. Unlike a First Amendment defense, it doesnt require fighting over whether the content in question is illegal, reducing the legal burden of lawsuits. The thing about Section 230 is you dont have to demonstrate that its First Amendment protected speech, which can take a long, long time sometimes in litigation, says Granick. Theres an exception for conduct that violates federal criminal law, but not violations of state laws like the current abortion bans.

Still, Section 230 has become increasingly unpopular among Republicans and Democrats alike. Federal bills like the EARN IT Act and the SAFE TECH Act have proposed chipping away at its protections, while Texas and Florida have passed laws on the premise that Section 230 shouldnt stop states from implementing their own content moderation laws. In 2018, then-President Donald Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA, which removed protections for material related to sex work, with support from both parties.

Critics of Section 230 have cited real cases of sites (usually not the typical Big Tech targets) using it to avoid responsibility for encouraging nonconsensual pornography or defamatory lies. Many proposals for fixing this, however, contain broad carveouts that could be exploited to make learning about abortion harder even if thats not the goal.

Research suggests FOSTA-SESTA led to a mass deplatforming of sex workers online, whether or not they were directly posting illegal content, and the ripple effects made it harder to operate services like online sex education. Further weakening the law could have similar chilling effects on abortion information too, with sites deciding to err on the side of caution rather than risk legal liability.

Sometimes people say, well, whats the problem? says Granick of Section 230 carveouts. For instance, if we have an exception for federal crimes, why shouldnt we also have an exception to allow liability for state crimes? And this is like Exhibit A in why we dont want to open up liability to state criminal provisions.

Fight for the Future director Evan Greer says the death of Roe adds dangerous side effects to current proposals. Even well-intentioned changes to Section 230, like those proposed in the SAFE TECH Act or Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act, could unleash a wave of lawsuits from anti-abortion activists (who are already lawyered up, litigious, and highly motivated to get content about abortion access scrubbed from the internet), says Greer. Companies could respond by minimizing their risk, resulting in anything from crowdfunding sites banning abortion access funds to online social spaces shutting down people who try to arrange travel and logistics for cross-state abortions.

Weakening Section 230 would be a disaster in a post-Roe environment, Greer continues.

There are good reasons to be wary of organizing abortion access on major platforms, like leaving a data trail that could be used by police in prosecutions. But overzealous bans would just make finding health information harder. For lawmakers who have backed keeping abortion accessible, thats a risk any future Section 230 reform will have to reckon with.

Read the original here:
The brewing fight to keep abortion info online - The Verge

Abortion rights demonstrators walk down Constitution Avenue during the Bans Off Our Bodies march on May 14, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

If (when) federal constitutional protections for abortions fall, each individual state will have the power to craft its own restrictions on the procedure. Still, the First Amendment might be able to offer a bit of cover to those who seek an abortion as a life choice. Justice Alitos leaked opinion inDobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organizationeven offers a blueprint.

Alito vociferously argues that the choice to terminate a pregnancy is not protected by any constitutional right of privacy. In fact, he correctly points out that the Constitution provides no explicit right to privacy at all. That right has been interpreted into the constitutional space by the courts and has long been controversial. Instead, the justice asserts over and over again that the decision regarding an individuals right to choose to continue or to terminate a pregnancy is inherently political. He insists that it is a legislative question to be answered by that branch of each state government responsible for crafting laws.

We know any discussions about legislation and its implications and effects are, by definition, political. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection the First Amendment can provide.

Political speech is not merely communication transmitted during campaigns or among politicians, legislators, lobbyists and activists. Any person expressing an opinion or engaging in conversation on a matter of public concernwhether that be matters of policy, morality, economics or the likeis engaging in political speech. The courts have extended expansive constitutional defenses, including providing cover to those whoburn a cross when it serves as an expression of political ideology, to those who use threatening language in the heat of an argument, and to those whopicket funerals of our soldiers disparaging both the soldiers and the United States government. The ideas expressed by the speakers serve as a commentary on matters affecting the public. Although such speech might be immoral, disturbing or offensive and therefore not worthy of the superpower of the First Amendment, since the First Amendment does not measure morality, such speech enjoys the benefits anyway.

If sidewalk counseling regarding options to continue a pregnancy is protected political speech, so too should be counseling options regarding the choice to legally terminate a pregnancy.

The First Amendment always takes center stage in disputes between advocates and opponents of the right to choose. Two landmark post-Roe decisions addressed the ability ofprotestersandsidewalk counselorsto approach individuals who visit clinics that provide abortion services. In each of those cases, the individual conversations between a prospective clinic patient and an abortion opponent were recognized as political speech. The Court warned that attemptsby state governments through their legislatures to create barriers to discourse between abortion opponents and pregnant people were not constitutional if the burdens imposed effectively silenced the speakers. Certainly, if sidewalk counseling regarding options to continue a pregnancy is protected political speech, so too should be counseling options regarding the choice to legally terminate a pregnancy.

If the federal support for abortion is eliminated (as is anticipated once the Supreme Court announces its decision inDobbs), within weeks, multiple states will enact legislation that severely limits abortion access. By last count, ifRoe v. Wadeis overturned, abortion will become criminal in at least 13 states. Some have argued that if abortion is a criminal act, so too will be speech that assists individuals and their providers in accessing the procedure.

If speech regarding abortion choices is essentially political, attempts to criminalize it are censorship. Censorship is kryptonite to democracy and for that reason is subject to the strongest legal assault. Of course,it might be wise to script such discussions to include keywords that implicate the political nature of the discussion, such as, Lets discuss your options regarding the exercise of your right to choose to terminate a pregnancy in a jurisdiction that protects that right.

Individuals, advocacy groups, newspapers and online platforms that provide information to an individual regarding out-of-state choices available to them should all be shielded by the First Amendment.

Currently,Texas and Oklahoma have provided a civil (as opposed to criminal) avenue for vigilantes to collect $10,000 by suing those who aid and abet a person who seeks an abortion. In those states, even someone who has no relationship to the pregnant person or the abortion provider can sue. However,individuals, advocacy groups, newspapers and online platforms that provide information to an individual regarding out-of-state choices available to them should all be shielded by the First Amendment.

Indeed, in a case initially prosecuted beforeRoe v. Wade,the Supreme Court upheld the rightof a newspaper editor to include advertisements informing Virginia residents of the availability of legal abortions in New York, even if they were illegal in Virginia.So, accessing information about legal out-of-state abortions is certainly safeguarded by the First Amendment.

Similarly, monetarycontributions and expenditureshave long been recognized as an element of political speech, so that any attempt to punish those who offer financial support to groups who aid individuals in their efforts to obtain legal abortions should be on safe ground. Again, tagging any such monetary assistance as funding for political purposes might be wise.

I am of course not arguing that the First Amendment will supplant the protections inRoe, which also relied on the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 14th Amendments to provide individuals with autonomy and power. Those of us who insist it is the personal and private decision of a person to choose how their body should be used and whether or when they will become a parent are now tasked with rebuilding that right. We will have to fight state-by-state. It is nice to know that all federal protections have not abandoned us and that the First Amendment will provide wind at our backs.

Sign and share Ms.s relaunched We Have Had Abortions petitionwhether you yourself have had an abortion, or simply stand in solidarity with those who haveto let the Supreme Court, Congress and the White House know: We will not give up the right to safe, legal, accessible abortion.

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Abortion Rights Advocates Can Still Count on the First Amendment - Ms. Magazine