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Two teachers who resigned from Kennedy Catholic High School last week spent several months under the threat of losing their jobs upon sharing their same-sex engagements with school officials, their attorney told KUOW.

The Archdiocese allegedly wanted their keys and wanted them to be gone.

Paul Danforth and Michelle Beatties resignations from Kennedy Catholic have garnered international media attention since last week. Locally, hundreds of students, parents, and other supporters participated in a series of protests on Tuesday in support of the teachers, who many speculated were forced to step down as a result of their sexual orientations.

READ: LGBT teachers 'pushed out' of Catholic high school, families demand reinstatement

"Ultimately, this has been looming over them since November," McMinimee said. "So while it may have felt very abrupt to the students and staff at Kennedy, Paul and Michelle had been going to work every day for three months, not knowing if they'd be fired the next day."

She added that it was made clear to them from the beginning that once they were honest about being engaged and gay, that their employment was no longer compatible with Kennedy Catholic.

Danforth declined to comment for this story and Beattie could not be reached by the time this story was published.

McMinimee said the terms of a confidentiality agreement between the teachers and the Archdiocese of Seattle were overstepped when a spokesperson for the Archdiocese told KUOW that "no one requested" the resignations.

McMinimee added that Danforth and Beattie were told by school administrators that, they might be allowed to finish out the school year, if they didn't wear their rings and kept their engagements secret.

Theres no clear legal precedent on the state or federal level regarding protections or the lack thereof afforded to employees who work at church-operated schools. But last December, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases brought by Catholic schools contending they are shielded from employment discrimination lawsuits under the First Amendment.

It is also unclear if Washington state's anti-discrimination laws would apply to non-ministerial employees who work for Catholic institutions.

Looking forward, McMinimee said Beattie and Danforth dont intend to take further legal action they simply hope to effect change. One solution would be to add protections that prevent morality clauses, such as one found in the Archdiocese teacher contract, which could be used to target LGBT educators.

They hope that this sparks a greater discussion of change with respect to how is the diocese going to enforce these provisions? she said. Are they only going to enforce them against people who are in same sex relationships? Or are they going to consider other options, including having teaching contracts that are not the same as ministerial contracts?

A walkout in support of those affected by the resignations is scheduled to take place at Bishop Blanchet High School on Friday at 11:10 a.m. A rally outside of the Archdiocese of Seattle is slated to follow.

The Archdiocese of Seattle did not comment by the time of publication, but a spokesperson said a statement would come later.

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Archdiocese called for resignation of gay teachers from Kennedy Catholic school, attorney says - KUOW News and Information

Fayette County has been ordered to comply with a request filed under the states Right-to-Know Law seeking records containing the names of all those a county commissioner may have blocked from his Facebook page over a two-year period.

The state Office of Open Records issued a final determination last week requiring the county to provide Marybeth Homistek of Fairchance any records responsive to her request for the names of any citizens that Commissioner Vincent A. Vicites, D-South Union Township, blocked and denied access to view, read or reply to what she stated was his official Facebook page.

Homistek, who alleged that Vicites blocked her on his official Facebook page, filed the RTK request in November 2019, seeking that information dating back to November 2017. The county denied the request, with county chief clerk and RTK officer Amy Revak stating that the request was not considered a record of Fayette County. Homistek appealed the denial in December.

The Office of Open Records ruled that the county failed to demonstrate that it doesnt have any records responsive to the request, noting that Revak did not say in her attestation whether Vicites was contacted to see if he was in possession of any responsive records and concluding that the county didnt conduct a good faith search in response to Homisteks request.

Vicites has two Facebook pages on which he posts personal and professional updates and has often published the same posts on both pages recently.

In a statement, Vicites said there would be an appeal to the Fayette County Court of Common Pleas to correct what he said was an erroneous decision.

I respectfully disagree with the decision of the Office of Open Records, Vicites said. The Facebook pages at issue were and are my personal pages used for personal and political matters. They are not official or governmental pages in any way. They are my private pages which I maintain in my individual capacity. As such, they are not subject to the Right-to-Know Law.

Scrutiny of public officials blocking users on social media isnt a new phenomenon.

When asked for comment, Homistek referenced a federal court ruling from July that the First Amendment does not allow public officials who use a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees.

That ruling affirmed a district court holding that President Donald Trumps practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account violates the First Amendment after the Knight Institute filed a lawsuit in federal court against Trump and his aides for blocking people from Trumps personal @realDonaldTrump Twitter account, which is different from the official @POTUS account.

Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said this week he would not unblock two men from his personal @JohnFetterman Twitter account who threatened to sue him if they did not unblock them on social media, and has said he doesnt block users from his official government @Fettermanlt Twitter account.

Homistek referred further comment to her attorney Charity Grimm Krupa, who could not be reached. Revak declined comment.

Kathryn Jones of Uniontown, a prominent online critic of Vicites and other county officials, said that she discovered she was blocked from interacting with Vicitess Facebook page last summer after Homistek asked her to try to interact on the page.

Obviously, being able to participate freely and fully in the democratic process, and to exercise our First Amendment right to petition our government officials for a redress of our grievances, is important, Jones said.

Homistek and Jones have also posted on discussion threads on local topics at Fay-West.com, where ad hominem and other inflammatory attacks on public officials and forum users abound. Jones said she did not recall ever interacting with Vicites on Facebook but couldnt rule it out.

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Office of Open Records rules in favor of request seeking names of those blocked by Fayette commissioner - Uniontown Herald Standard

This Weeks Guest: Michael Avi Helfand

Kendra Espinoza is a low-income single mother from Montana who applied for a tax-credit scholarship program (created by the Montana state legislature in 2015) that would allow her to keep her daughters enrolled in school. But soon after implementing the program, the state banned any of the scholarship funds from going to religious schools. Since the Espinoza girls were in a private Christian school, the family was cut from receiving support.

Espinoza sued, and the following legal battle made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last month heard oral arguments in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The case implicates the religion clauses of the First Amendment, the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause, and the notorious Blaine Amendments adopted by many states during the heyday of anti-Catholic bigotry in America.

In this episode, Michael Avi Helfand, professor of law at Pepperdine University, joins Harry Ballan, special guest host and senior director at the Tikvah Fund, for a discussion of this important religious-liberty case. Listen as two legal authorities examine the knotty legal doctrines at issue, speculate how the courts justices are likely to rule, and explain why Espinoza should matter to every American Jew and all American citizens.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Background

For more on the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic, which appears roughly every Thursday, check out its inaugural post here.

If you have thoughts about the podcast that youd like to share, ideas for future guests and topics, or any other form of feedback, just send an email to editors@mosaicmagazine.com.

More about: Politics & Current Affairs, Religious Freedom

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Podcast: Michael Avi Helfand on the Urgent Religious-Freedom Case Now before the Supreme Court - Mosaic

Lawyers disagreed with Clearview AI's defense that it has a First Amendment right to scrape people's images from public posts.

The First Amendment protects a lot of things, even flipping off a cop or burning the flag. But it may not give a controversial facial recognition company the right to keep scraping data from the internet for a database of more than 3 billion images.

On a CBS This Morning segment on Wednesday, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That said his company has a First Amendment right to access public data, including photos from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Venmo. It uses those photos for a controversial database primarily accessed by law enforcement. (Disclosure: CBS News and CNET are owned by the same parent company.)

Facebook, Twitter and Google have already sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview, saying data scraping violates their terms of service. Clearview's legal counsel has been in touch with the companies, Ton-That told CBS, defending the practice with the first item in the Bill of Rights. On Thursday, LinkedIn said it's also sending a cease-and-desist letter to the company.

"There is also a First Amendment right to public information," Ton-That said in the interview. "The way we have built our system is to only take publicly available information and index it that way."

Privacy and technology lawyers are finding plenty of holes in the company's argument. They say that First Amendment protections apply only in cases where the government interferes with someone's speech and that an activity protected by the First Amendment could run afoul of a specific law. In addition, the First Amendment argument hasn't worked in previous data collection cases, though none of those involved facial recognition.

"I don't really buy it," said Tiffany C. Li, a privacy attorney and visiting professor at Boston University School of Law teaching technology law. "It's really frightening if we get into a world where someone can say, 'The First Amendment allows me to violate everyone's privacy.'"

Clearview didn't respond to a request for comment.

The First Amendment specifically protects people from the government interfering with someone's free speech. But it says nothing about private businesses, like Twitter and Google, which can set up ground rules for their sites and services. Because it doesn't cover private business, arguments that Twitter and Facebook violate the First Amendment by "censoring" postsalso often fall flat.

"Defending and respecting the voices of the people who use our service is one of our core values at Twitter, and we remain committed to protecting their privacy," Twitter said in a statement.

Google didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

"If this were a government website that was posting information and someone was scraping it, as opposed to Facebook or Twitter data, there could be a much clearer argument," Li said. "Here, these were private parties."

Privacy attorney Tiffany C. Li

Even if the First Amendment does protect data scraping, Clearview's use of it could still violate privacy and biometrics laws across the US, said Albert Fox Cahn, a civil rights and technology attorney and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. Clearview is already facing a class action lawsuit in Illinois, in which plaintiffs claim the company violated the state's biometrics law.

"The way First Amendment analysis works is that just because you're protected under one law doesn't mean that you're protected under all laws," Cahn said. "Biometrics surveillance is different than other forms of data scraping -- to the extent that you're taking my image and profiting off of me, that creates a different legal issue than creating a directory."

Another way to think about this: The First Amendment protects your right to burn the flag, but it doesn't protect you from being charged with arson.

Still, tech giants would face an uphill battle if their main defense is that Clearview is violating their terms of service. Tech companies have tried to fight data scraping in the past. It hasn't always worked.

In 2017, LinkedIn, a professional network owned by Microsoft, sent a cease-and-desist letter to data analytics firm HiQ, saying the company was violating its terms of service by scraping public profiles and posts on the social network. LinkedIn blocked HiQ's access to public posts and warned the company would be violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act if it developed a workaround. The 1986 law contains broad definitions of what constitutes "hacking."

Like Clearview, HiQ used the First Amendment as a defense, arguing that the CFAA was a use of government authority to stifle access to information that was publicly available on LinkedIn. The social network lost the case and the data scraping was allowed to continue.

Now playing: Watch this: Clearview AI's facial recognition goes creepier than...

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The use of the First Amendment in the HiQ case, however, might not be a precedent for Clearview, lawyers say. That's because the decision ultimately came down to the court's interpretation of the CFAA's provisions, finding that data scraping on its own wasn't "hacking." In some cases, data scraping has benefits, like researchers using it to investigate racial discrimination on Airbnb.

On Thursday, LinkedIn said it's also taking action against Clearview AI.

"We are sending a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI. The scraping of member information is not allowed under our terms of service and we take action to protect our members," the company said.

Lawyers say Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter might not need to rely on the CFAA. Instead, they can use privacy protection to address the situation.

"If you want to deal with this, the way is not by messing with the CFAA. It's by going through biometric privacy laws," Li said. "I'm in favor of allowing for web scraping generally, but I'm also in favor of privacy."

Clearview says it's partnered with more than 600 law enforcement agencies in the US. Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has said Clearview presents "chilling privacy risks," while New Jersey's attorney general has barred the state's police from using the app over concerns about privacy and cybersecurity.

"Even if they're protected for the purposes of scraping, that doesn't mean they're protected for the ways they're using that data for biometric surveillance," Cahn said. "We shouldn't conflate immunity from the CFAA with immunity from every possible state and legal claim."

Originally published Feb. 6, 8 a.m. ET.Update, 3:12 p.m. ET:Adds that LinkedIn is now sending a cease-and-desist to Clearview.

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Clearview AI says the First Amendment lets it scrape the internet. Lawyers disagree - CNET

When it comes to free expression and the First Amendment, its important for us to know when it protects what we say and write and when it doesnt.

Case in point: Proposed Arizona House bill HB2124, related to access to online content. The sponsor, state Rep. Bob Thorpe, proposes to allow users or the state attorney general to sue an internet site that edits, deletes or makes it difficult or impossible for online users to locate and access content on the site in an easy or timely manner for politically biased reasons.

The bill is in line with complaints now fashionable among political conservatives nationwide that online platforms and social media sites from Google to Facebook to Twitter and others somehow exclude or downplay their views while emphasizing liberal viewpoints.

Nothing wrong with raising such concerns. The inner policies and algorithms of these web behemoths largely generally remain hidden and the entire online world is simply too new and ever-changing to provide an accurate portrait from the outside.

So, in effect we dont know what were not seeing when we search or use such sites, and those companies are free to set their own practices and rules on what we do see or post. Whether for altruistic or political motives, proposals such as the Arizona legislation would change that except that the First Amendment rules out such government intervention in a private business.

The First Amendment guarantees against content or viewpoint discrimination and by extension, access to information apply to government, not private individuals or companies, which have their own First Amendment rights to decide what they will or wont say and post. And even legislation cannot empower individuals (or attorneys general) to override that constitutional protection by using civil penalties rather than criminal law see the old legal adage, you cannot do by the back door what you cannot do by the front door.

Moreover, do we really want to override the First Amendment with such open access laws? Turn to another adage the law of unintended consequences. Requiring internet providers to permit unrestrained access and right to post material denies such companies the ability to respond to their consumers demands on materials that can range from offensive to repulsive. Thorpes bill excludes libelous or pornographic material, but what about currently banned content on most social media sites, such as videos that show public assaults or are intended to bully or harass? Would internet companies and social media sites be mandated to carry deliberate misinformation about health issues?

There is a small window in the wall of First Amendment protection that could possibly permit regulation of private online companies, called the public function exception. In effect, it turns a private concern into a government operation when performing an essential government function. The exception rests on a 1946 Supreme Court decision, in Marsh v. Alabama, involving a so-called company town. The court reasoned that since the town functioned as a government entity, not a private enterprise, it had become one.

But the court has refined its ruling through the years, and in 1974 held that such a conversion takes place only when the private concern is providing services exclusively done by government. Clearly, providing an online platform or a social media site fails to meet that test.

Some critics of the current social media policies argue that those sites are effectively a digital public square by virtue of their ubiquitous presence in modern life. Some reports say that more than seven in every 10 Americans used social media sites in 2018 and that the number increases each year. But the very nature of the web, in which start-ups and competing sites of all kinds arise constantly, would also seem to prevent isolating even dominant companies for such a quasi-government role with the required exclusive provider condition.

As shown in other examples where First Amendment protections come into conflict with practices or actions that offend, or seem to run counter to the marketplace of ideas concept of the widest exchange of ideals or viewpoints, the court of public opinion often functions more effectively and more quickly than legal action or legislation. Public discussions and resulting social pressures to combat online bullying or videos showing assault or even murders have demonstrably changed those private provider policies on what is posted and permitted, for example.

A shortcut through First Amendment protections may seem an expedient method at the time but for very good reasons, free expression advocates should resist quicker solutions for some, in the name of protecting those long-term freedoms for us all.

Gene Policinski is president and chief operating officer of the Freedom Forum Institute. He can be reached at gpolicinski@freedomforum.org, or follow him on Twitter at @genefac.

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COMMENTARY: Focus on when the First Amendment protects ... and when it doesn't - Crow River Media