Tag: Ban

Why Washington won’t ban TikTok

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Some insiders are even starting to worry that the government may never be able to meaningfully restrict TikTok’s use — and are considering alternative approaches to mitigate any threat it poses.
“I don’t really care what Congress writes, or what the administration writes. They’re not going to ban TikTok,” said James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “They can ban financial transactions, or they can try to force divestiture. But they don’t have the ability to ban TikTok itself.”
The challenges that confront Washington as it works to rein in TikTok compound on each other. Between the company’s steep price tag, antitrust concerns and expected resistance from Beijing, almost no experts believe Washington will be able to force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app. If divestiture fails, the government will need new authorities from Congress to prevent getting laughed out of court when it attempts a direct ban — and there’s no guarantee lawmakers can get on the same page to grant those powers in time for Biden to use them.
Even if Capitol Hill can deliver on a new law, a legal battle over the impact of a TikTok ban on the First Amendment is almost inevitable. “All roads lead to court,” said Lewis. “ByteDance has tons of money, they’ll hire an army of lawyers. And this will be fought out.” He and others expect the government would likely lose any First Amendment case.
Optimistic TikTok hawks compare their efforts with Washington’s successful ban on networking equipment made by Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant suspected of serving as Beijing’s sock puppet. But there are meaningful differences: While the ban on Huawei hardware impacted the bottom line of a few U.S. telecom firms, it had virtually no bearing on the free speech rights of millions of Americans. And Washington seemed to have more evidence that Huawei posed a security threat, including the discovery of major security flaws in its systems. A similar smoking gun does not appear to exist for TikTok.
As Washington stares down the dizzying obstacle course, there’s an increasing sense that it’s already missed its best chance to ban TikTok. “Time is not on our side,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the new House Select Committee on China. “Every day that passes is a day that we have not taken action on this critical issue. And I think TikTok is trying to wait out the clock.”
TikTok spokespeople declined requests to comment on the social media giant’s predicament, discuss its strategy or handicap its chances in a court battle with Washington.
But banning a popular communications tool, foreign or otherwise, is virtually without precedent in the United States. Washington has tried this once before and failed: In August 2020, former President Donald Trump attempted to ban TikTok and several other Chinese-owned apps by executive order. A federal court threw out that effort within months.

Though Biden’s attempt is more deliberate, starting with his support for a bill in Congress that would give him new authority to restrict foreign apps, any fresh effort to ban TikTok is likely to hit a similarly daunting set of hurdles.
With an estimated 150 million monthly American users, talk of a TikTok ban has prompted fear of a political backlash. The social media giant has also hired plenty of lobbyists since its tussle with the Trump administration, making it an even tougher nut for Washington to crack.
But in this case, the politics may almost be a sideshow. The real story, say those who have looked ahead to the practical steps of a ban, is the U.S. government’s constitutional inability to shut out any digital platform that hasn’t already proven a clear threat.
A repeat of Trump’s mistakes
Years after Trump’s failure, the Biden administration is attempting a more methodical approach to a TikTok ban. But it may already be steering into one of the former administration’s errors.
Trump’s first mistake, according to former administration official Keith Krach, was his attempt to force the sale of TikTok to Microsoft, Oracle or another U.S. tech company. Krach called the effort a “major distraction” that gave TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, the breathing space needed to challenge Trump’s executive order.
“It was a strategy that wasn’t going to work. And yeah, that took up quite a bit of time,” said Krach, who served as Trump’s undersecretary of the State Department in charge of economic growth, energy and the environment.
Now Washington is now back to where it was in 2020. In March, reports emerged that White House — acting through the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. — is now demanding that ByteDance sell TikTok to a company it can trust, or face a full-scale ban.
But three years after Trump tried to force a sale, the environment for such a deal is even worse. TikTok is bigger, more popular and more valuable — and Washington is far more aggressive about blocking big mergers. Virtually no one expects a buyer to materialize.
While ByteDance keeps TikTok’s valuation private, most observers believe the app is worth well over $40 billion. That likely puts it out of reach for all but the richest companies or investors. And at least one possible buyer has already spent that amount on a separate social media platform. (“Where’s Elon Musk where you need him?” asked Lewis.)
Tech giants like Meta or Google have seen their own valuations fall from their 2021 peaks, making it tougher for those companies to scrape together the cash to buy TikTok. And even if they could find the money, antitrust concerns would likely cause them to steer clear of the Chinese-owned app.
Antitrust concerns likely take both Meta and Google (which owns YouTube) out of the running as potential TikTok buyers, said Daniel Francis, a former deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition who’s now a law professor at NYU. “Any large tech deal will get close antitrust scrutiny in the present climate,” he said.
Companies like Amazon or Microsoft, which control smaller shares of the social media market, may be better positioned to buy TikTok without triggering a competition complaint. But they’re just as unlikely to pick up a property laden with so much baggage.
“All of these companies are skittish,” said Florian Ederer, an economics professor at Yale University who specializes in antitrust policy. “They already have plenty of antitrust problems. They don’t want any additional ones.”
Given a lack of obvious buyers, Ederer said the most realistic scenario could be an initial public offering, which would spin off TikTok into an independent (and presumably U.S.-based) entity. But IPOs are notoriously complicated, and also tightly regulated — and Ederer said there’s still no guarantee that a domestic spin-off would satisfy Washington’s security concerns.
“You’re essentially just making [TikTok] separate,” Ederer said. “What prevents them from sharing information or sharing data with their previous Chinese parent?”
The looming China veto
Even if those hurdles are cleared, the Chinese government is expected to sabotage any attempt to change TikTok’s ownership.
ByteDance is one of China’s most globally successful tech companies, and TikTok runs on powerful and closely guarded software systems. In response to the Trump administration’s abortive ban, in 2020 Beijing updated its export control rules so that Chinese-owned algorithms — including those that power TikTok’s personalized recommendation engine — could be blocked from leaving the country.
Lindsay Gorman, a former technology and national security adviser in the Biden administration who studies emerging tech at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said Beijing is likely still mulling whether it should block Washington’s effort to force a TikTok sale. But she said some pushback is a virtual certainty.
“China’s definitely unlikely to let the U.S. policy process play out how it’s going to play out, and sit on the sidelines,” Gorman said.
The Biden administration knows how badly the odds are stacked against a TikTok divestiture. “I don’t see how they can make the sale work,” said one person familiar with the national security discussion inside the administration, who requested anonymity in order to address sensitive talks.
From the price tag to antitrust concerns and the expectation that Beijing will withhold TikTok’s algorithm, the person claimed the prospect of a TikTok sale is “almost a false premise.”
“I think Treasury was optimistic that Meta or Amazon would just show up and save the day,” the person said. “We started to go down this path, and it became clear to them that this was much more complicated.”
Can Congress pick up the ball?
If divestiture fails, the Biden administration has indicated it will seek to impose a direct ban on TikTok. But it would first need a big assist from Capitol Hill.
When federal judges blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban in 2020, they did so in part based on violations of the Berman amendments — obscure but important 30-year-old provisions in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that allow for the free flow of “informational material” from adversarial nations.
The White House has suggested it needs Congress to blow a hole in the Berman amendments before it can target TikTok on firm legal footing. And last month it backed the RESTRICT Act, a bipartisan bill from Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Senate Minority Leader John Thune that would short-circuit the Berman amendments and formally allow the administration to ban technologies from China and five other countries.
But the RESTRICT Act is just one of several TikTok bills now percolating on Capitol Hill. That includes legislation from House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), which advanced out of that committee last month on a party-line vote, as well as a bill backed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and former Rep. Gallagher and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill). More bills may be coming — late last month, House Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said she’s working on her own TikTok bill.
All of these lawmakers back a federal ban on TikTok, and most of their bills aim to undercut the Berman amendments to achieve that goal. But their supporters are already sniping at one another over the details. While key House Republicans argue that the RESTRICT Act gives too much leeway to TikTok, some GOP senators claim the bill goes too far and could restrict civil liberties. Meanwhile, House Democrats — wary of angering young voters and stoking anti-Chinese sentiment — are distancing themselves from Warner and other Senate Democrats pushing a hard line on TikTok.
The mishmash of bills and splintering of viewpoints suggests a long and testy process will need to play out in Congress before the administration can move on a TikTok ban. And given the alleged national security concerns raised by the app, Washington doesn’t have time to spare.
“We should all act with a greater sense of urgency,” said Gallagher. The representative said he plans to sit down soon with McCaul, McMorris Rodgers and House leadership to “figure out what’s the most sensible path forward.”
Warner said the RESTRICT Act is still moving forward, and that he and Thune are now engaged in “sausage-making” with their House counterparts. But even legislative pushes with broad bipartisan support regularly get bogged down on Capitol Hill. Krach compared the congressional TikTok debate to early talks around last cycle’s sprawling CHIPS and Science Act, which went through well over a year of discussion (and more than one near-death experience) before finally being signed into law last summer. “That went through a lot of maturation, [and] I think you’re gonna see the same thing,” he said.
The Biden administration will be stuck spinning its wheels on a TikTok ban until Congress passes a fix to the Berman amendments. But even if lawmakers decide to beef up the president’s authorities, a more fundamental challenge awaits.
The First Amendment wall
A ban on TikTok from a newly-empowered White House would almost certainly trigger a legal challenge on free speech grounds. And while judges never seriously grappled with the First Amendment implications of a TikTok ban in 2020, even some China hawks believe the Constitution would block Washington if it tried again.
“The ban stuff — that’s just politics,” said Lewis. “You cannot ban the First Amendment.”
Proponents of a TikTok ban claim the national security risks posed by the app are self-evident. ByteDance is headquartered in China, and Chinese law requires companies to cooperate with any and all requests from Beijing’s security and intelligence services. Even if there’s no evidence of nefarious activity, they claim it’s only a matter of time before the Chinese government flips a switch and weaponizes TikTok.
But that line of reasoning is unlikely to sit well with federal judges, who will be weighing the potential security risks with the imposition of real-world restrictions on the rights of 150 million Americans to post and exercise free speech on an extremely popular platform. (TikTok also has its own First Amendment rights, though it’s less clear how judges would rule if the company sought to assert them in court in response to a ban.)
Caitlin Vogus, deputy director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology think tank, said it’s “theoretically possible” that the government could convince a judge that the risk posed by TikTok is so high that a ban is the only option. But Washington would need to come armed with concrete evidence that the app represents a threat — and so far, there’s little to indicate such evidence exists.
Warner, when asked if he’s seen classified material that indicates the TikTok threat is worse than the public record suggests, did not offer specifics: “Some of this is still potential,” he said.
Vogus said “potential” threats likely won’t cut it in a courtroom. “The government would be facing an extraordinarily high burden that it would have to meet before it could justify an outright ban,” she said.
The First Amendment has trumped external threats before: Vogus and others pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling in Lamont v. Postmaster General, which dealt with the legality of restrictions on the mailing of foreign communist propaganda. Even at the height of the Cold War, the Court unanimously ruled that those restrictions violated the First Amendment and allowed the propaganda to continue.
Vogus laid out a few ways that courts could approach the First Amendment concerns raised by a TikTok ban. If judges decide that a TikTok ban represents a prior restraint on the speech of its users, she said Washington would have to prove an “exceptional government interest” in order to justify a ban. If they determine that a ban is based on viewpoints espoused by TikTok — a real possibility, given the government’s fears that Beijing will use the app to conduct covert influence campaigns — the administration would need to prove a “compelling government interest.” Even if judges rule that a TikTok ban is neutral when it comes to content and viewpoint, the government would still have to prove that the remedy is narrowly tailored to serve a “specific government interest.”
Proponents of a TikTok ban, so far, have avoided discussing the free speech implications of the policy. When asked directly if he believed a ban could survive a First Amendment challenge, Warner would not comment on the record. A subsequent email with follow-up questions for the senator’s legal team on whether a ban would pass constitutional muster went unanswered by a Warner spokesperson.
After some prodding, Thune admitted there are “First Amendment issues” with a TikTok ban. And while the senator remains hopeful that his bill would allow an outright ban to withstand legal scrutiny, he said it’s possible that Washington will instead be stuck “mitigating [TikTok] in some fashion.”
Back at square one?
The array of obstacles now confronting the government on TikTok has led to the sense that Washington has already botched its best chances to rein in the Chinese-owned app.
“The missed opportunity was last December,” said Lewis. That was when CFIUS and ByteDance reached a tentative deal, known as “Project Texas,” which would theoretically have siloed off U.S. user data from Beijing’s surveillance. It was ultimately derailed by objections from the FBI and Department of Justice.
“We might find ourselves going down the path of going to court, losing and then thinking about what a Project Texas would look like,” said Lewis.
If TikTok is still alive and well and on people’s phones in two years, Washington may be looking for other ways to hit TikTok where it hurts. While the First Amendment likely limits the government’s ability to ban the app outright, it could still target TikTok’s ability to conduct U.S.-based financial transactions. That includes potential restrictions on its relationship with Apple and Google’s mobile app stores, which would severely hamper TikTok’s growth.
“If your goal is to keep Chinese content from reaching American citizens, there’s no way to do that,” said Lewis. “But if your goal is to keep Chinese companies from profiting from that content, we can do that.”
With no end in sight to the escalating confrontation between the U.S. and China, it increasingly feels like TikTok is just a proxy in the larger fight between the world’s superpower and its near-peer challenger. And with no easy fix for the TikTok problem, the issue is likely to languish until the two nations reach a broader understanding.
“The real problem is Chinese espionage,” said Lewis. “If we can find a way to mitigate that risk, you can move forward with TikTok. Otherwise, it’s just going to be messy.”
Gavin Bade contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 16, 2023
TikTok ban gets final approval by Montana’s GOP legislature

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Gianforte banned TikTok on state government devices last year, saying at the time that the app posed a “significant risk” to sensitive state data.
TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter promised a legal challenge over the measure’s constitutionality, saying the bill’s supporters “have admitted that they have no feasible plan” to enforce “this attempt to censor American voices.”
The company “will continue to fight for TikTok users and creators in Montana whose livelihoods and First Amendment rights are threatened by this egregious government overreach,” Oberwetter said.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has been under intense scrutiny over worries it could hand over user data to the Chinese government or push pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation on the platform. Leaders at the FBI and the CIA and numerous lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, have raised such concerns but have not presented any evidence that it has happened.
Ban supporters point to two Chinese laws that compel companies in the country to cooperate with the government on state intelligence work. They also cite troubling episodes such as a disclosure by ByteDance in December that it fired four employees who accessed the IP addresses and other data of two journalists while attempting to uncover the source of a leaked report about the company.
Congress is considering legislation that does not single out TikTok specifically but gives the Commerce Department the ability more broadly to restrict foreign threats on tech platforms. That bill is being backed by the White House, but it has received pushback from privacy advocates, right-wing commentators and others who say the language is too expansive.
TikTok has said it has a plan to protect U.S. user data.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, whose office drafted the state’s legislation, said in a social media post Friday that the bill “is a critical step to ensuring we are protecting Montanans’ privacy,” even as he acknowledged that a court battle looms.

The measure would prohibit downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” — an app store or TikTok — $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access or download the app. There would not be penalties for users.
The ban would not take effect until January 2024 and would become void if Congress passes a national measure or if TikTok severs its connections with China.
The bill was introduced in February, just weeks after a Chinese spy balloon drifted over Montana, but had been drafted prior to that.
A representative from the tech trade group TechNet told state lawmakers that app stores do not have the ability to geofence apps on a state-by-state basis, so the Apple App Store and Google Play Store could not enforce the law.
Ashley Sutton, TechNet’s executive director for Washington state and the northwest, said Thursday that the “responsibility should be on an app to determine where it can operate, not an app store.”
Knudsen, the attorney general, has said that apps for online gambling can be disabled in states that do not allow it, so the same should be possible for TikTok.
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#TikTok #ban #final #approval #Montanas #GOP #legislature
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 15, 2023
DeSantis skipped talking about his 6-week abortion ban to an anti-abortion audience

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Abortion was given only a passing reference, underscoring how uncomfortable the topic makes leading Republicans, even as Republican-dominated legislatures aggressively pursue more restrictive laws. The night before, DeSantis marked the bill signing with an 11 p.m. tweet, not a press event that often accompanies a signature policy achievement.
During DeSantis’ 20-minute speech at the evangelical university he only had this to say about abortion: “We have elevated the importance of family and promoted the culture of life.”
The politics surrounding abortion have become a major issue recently after a federal judge in Texas suspended the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. A federal appeals court ruled this week that it can remain on the market but with availability restricted.
As a further sign of the difficult spot Republicans are in, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who announced a presidential exploratory committee on Wednesday, avoided questions on whether he’d support a federal abortion ban but later clarified that he’d support some sort of federal restriction and would sign a 20-week abortion ban if he were president.
Polling shows that many Americans don’t support strict abortion bans, including 62 percent who oppose outlawing abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected — usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature on Thursday passed a six-week ban on abortion that provides exceptions for victims of rape and incest up to 15 weeks if they can show some proof such as a police report. But almost 10 Florida Republican lawmakers rejected the ban, many of them representing Democratic areas like Miami or Tallahassee.
DeSantis’ signing of the bill late Thursday night also marked a stark difference from 2022, when he also approved Florida’s 15-week ban on abortion. DeSantis approved the 2022 law during a public event at a church with dozens of people and a large video screen showing the message “Florida is Pro Life.”
On Friday at Liberty University during DeSantis’ event, the most explicit mention of Florida’s six-week ban came from campus pastor Jonathan Falwell, who praised the governor while introducing him to the audience.

“Last night, after the legislature there in Florida passed the bill, [DeSantis] signed the heartbeat Protection Act,” Falwell said to cheers. “And as he signed that into the law at a state of Florida, it will protect all unborn babies because he recognizes that life is a gift.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 14, 2023
Pence commends DeSantis for Florida’s 6-week abortion ban

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“The progress in Florida and the progress in nearly 20 other states is part of a new beginning for life,” Pence said. “I’m going to continue to be a voice for advancing the cause of the unborn on principle and compassion.”
Pence added that he trusts Republicans to choose a different leader other than former President Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Pence has not declared a 2024 presidential bid yet but is expected to do so in the coming weeks.
“With the challenges we’re facing at home and abroad, I have a sense the American people are looking for different leadership to take us back to the conservative agenda,” Pence said. “I believe different times call for different leadership, and I trust Republican voters to bring us to victory in 2024.”
The dig comes hours before Pence and Trump are both slated to speak at the National Rifle Association’s annual leadership summit in Indianapolis Friday afternoon.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 14, 2023
The Drag Brunch That Tennessee Wants to Ban, in 19 Photos

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One of the first laws passed by the Tennessee General Assembly this year regulates drag show performances, criminalizing “adult cabaret entertainment” that takes place in public or in front of minors. Conservatives backing the legislation believe the performances expose minors to inappropriate sexual themes — a claim that advocates reject. Republican state Sen. Jack Johnson, who sponsored the Tennessee legislation, said the legislation was meant to “ensure that children are not present at sexually explicit performances.”
In response, Memphis-based theater company Friends of George’s filed a federal lawsuit claiming the law violates First Amendment rights. A federal judge agreed the law is “vague and overly-broad” in an order that temporarily blocked it from taking effect. Tennessee’s law has drag performers “eat the proverbial mushroom to find out whether it is poisonous,” wrote U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker in the order issued March 31, the day before the law was set to take effect.
For now, drag performances can evade the law’s scrutiny due to an extension of the order. Once that extension expires May 26, however, first-offenders would face a misdemeanor, while any subsequent violations would be a felony. Although the law doesn’t explicitly ban drag shows, its broad language could leave performers like DuBalle at risk.
And yet there is a touch of irony in the way a law attempting to quash drag has brought the art to the forefront, DuBalle said. While the law itself hasn’t packed the house — Atomic Rose is already standing-room only for brunch — it has tripled the number of youth attendees each Sunday, according to Charlie Barnett, the general manager.
Attendees gushed over the drag queens, eager to tip before performances were really underway.
“This is what the world needs more of,” said Jennifer Iverson, explaining why she brought her young daughter to the show Sunday. “Everybody is so nice, and people are so friendly, and I can’t see anything wrong with it all, in any way, shape or form.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 14, 2023
Opinion | Can the 19th Century Law That Banned Walt Whitman Also Ban Abortion by Mail?

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While a federal circuit court panel issued a partial stay until the ruling can be fully appealed, the reasoning on which both the plaintiff and Kacsmaryk partially based their arguments is arguably more eye-popping than the decision itself. Citing the Comstock Act, a sweeping anti-obscenity measure passed by Congress in 1873, Kacsmaryk found that it was patently illegal to access abortifacients by mail.
While the legal battle over mifepristone has real-world implications for millions of Americans, the decision itself portends a more aggressive agenda that extends well beyond abortion access. In citing the Comstock Act, Kacsmaryk tipped his hand.
Over 150 years ago, evangelical Protestant leaders, then at the height of their political influence, used state power to impose their personal, religious worldview on the entire country. It worked. But the Comstock Act, while still on the books, has been largely superseded by over a century of jurisprudence. That today’s conservative legal activists want to resurrect it suggests that we are in store for a much broader culture war — one that the right may win in a partisan Supreme Court but will lose in the political arena.
The Comstock laws (the first was passed in 1873 and companion acts cleared Congress in subsequent years, strengthening the statute) outlawed the interstate mailing of any device or medicine used to terminate a pregnancy, as well as written materials that instructed women and doctors how to terminate pregnancies. It also barred use of the mail to transport “obscene” or “immoral” materials — be it pornography or smutty literature — as well as contraceptive drugs and devices. They even banned personal letters whose content pushed the prevailing bounds of decency. The law explicitly encouraged states to address the same range of materials on an intrastate basis, and indeed, by 1900, 42 states had enacted their own Comstock laws.
Named for Anthony Comstock, a Civil War veteran who moved to Brooklyn after the war and became involved in citywide anti-vice campaigns, the federal law and its state equivalents represented a major victory on the part of evangelical Christian organizers who, in the 1870s, asserted an active role for religion in the public and political spheres. Concerned by the temptations that young people faced in the country’s burgeoning cities, these activists sought to reimpose Christian values and order in the defense of public health and safety. They also sought to curtail women’s reproductive rights in the service of maintaining a gendered hierarchy that the war and its dislocations had temporarily upended in the prior decade.

Anthony Comstock was a Civil War veteran who moved to Brooklyn after the war and became involved in citywide anti-vice campaigns.
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Wikimedia Commons
To understand both how and why evangelical Christians imposed their personal religion on the entire country, it’s helpful to take a step back.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, America experienced a great religious awakening, as millions of ordinary people flocked to new evangelical churches. The ranks of the clergy swelled. Tract societies and evangelical newspapers became key staples of public culture. Evangelical Christianity also inspired a wave of reform movements that bridged otherwise disparate causes like temperance, public education and abolitionism. But while antebellum churches supported a range of reform movements, they focused for the most part on moral suasion — on filling pews and saving souls, and on convincing sinners to right their own ways — rather than using the political process for coercive measures.
Until the Civil War.

The war fundamentally politicized the nation’s evangelical churches, particularly in the North. Evangelical leaders, both lay and clergy, overwhelmingly agreed (in the words of Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune and a deeply religious political activist) that the war was fundamentally a “war for Christian civilization.”
Individual denominations often blurred the line between the sacred and the secular in their own fashions. A Presbyterian synod likened the Confederacy to Satan’s attempted usurpation of the throne of God. At Methodist meetings, flags were often on prominent display and congregants were frequently encouraged to swear mass loyalty oaths. The churches raised money for the war effort, ran recruitment drives, sent thousands of clergymen into the field to serve as chaplains and staffed two government-sanctioned organizations: the Sanitary Commission and the U.S. Christian Commission, which ministered to soldiers’ physical and spiritual needs. They also lent full-throated support to the abolition of slavery and the government’s increasingly punitive approach to fighting a total, rather than limited, war against the Confederacy.
By 1864, support for the Union quickly evolved into support of the Republican Party.
Prominent clerics like Henry Ward Beecher, Granville Moody of Ohio and Robert Breckinridge — and hundreds of political clergymen, particularly in the battleground states of the Midwest — stumped for Lincoln and the GOP with impunity. On the eve of the election, Matthew Simpson, a leading Methodist bishop, rallied the faithful at the New York Academy of Music. In a special election version of his famous “war speech” — part sermon, part patriotic exhortation — the bishop waved a bloody battle flag belonging to New York’s 55th Regiment and called on all Christians to vote for “the railsplitter … president” in the upcoming canvass.
Whereas in the antebellum era, Protestant reformers focused on saving souls and influencing individual behavior from the pulpit, now they actively embraced politics.
Political Christianity came in different flavors. In the late nineteenth century, liberal Christians involved themselves with gusto in the Social Gospel, a new movement that advocated for safer and cleaner housing, public infrastructure and the right of workers to organize and strike.
The Social Gospel represented one, but not the only, outgrowth of the political brand of Protestantism that emerged from the 1860s. More socially conservative Christians threw themselves into a broad array of coercive social reform campaigns. Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice — an offshoot of the Young Men’s Christian Association — was the most prominent of the conservative leaders. He built a powerful coalition that worked toward criminalizing contraceptive devices, abortion, prostitution and pornography. Frances Willard, a devout Methodist, led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization devoted to the prohibition of manufacturing or selling alcohol. Unlike the evangelical reform movements of the mid-19th century, the brand of reform championed by religious leaders like Comstock and Willard focused on state intervention — and state power — rather than moral suasion at the individual level. In the same way that today’s conservative culture warriors are going to war with school librarians, teachers and corporate boards, the religious conservatives of Comstock’s day used politics to enforce their private understanding of what was right and righteous. Like their liberal counterparts in the Social Gospel movement, evangelicals concerned with vice and morality had learned during the Civil War to see a natural confluence between church and state.
Comstock began his anti-vice career as something of a crank, but with the support of New York’s evangelical church establishment — and later, as an official agent of New York state and the federal government — he proved devastatingly successful at imposing his particular understanding of morality on the American public. He was single-handedly responsible for the arrests of almost 100 people and the seizure of 202,214 obscene photographs and drawings, 21,150 pounds of books, 63,819 contraceptive items and abortifacients and innumerable devices designed for sexual pleasure — that is, 19th-century sex toys. He even managed to get a new edition of Walt Whitman’s classic, Leaves of Grass, barred from the mails.
Armed with state power, conservative evangelicals operated at the peak of their influence. In the coming decades, that influence waned as a rising wave of Jewish and Catholic immigrants made America more pluralistic and modern science challenged longstanding ideas about biblical inerrancy. But it was a testament to the organizing acumen of activists like Comstock that they were as effective as they were.
Fast forward to 2023, and it’s not at all clear how activist judges like Matthew Kacsmaryk believe they can wind back the clock. The Comstock laws have long been superseded by a statutory and legal privacy revolution — beginning at least with Griswold v Connecticut (1965) — that granted individuals the right to consume pornography, purchase sex toys, use contraception and, in roughly half the states, terminate a pregnancy.
In a world where telehealth is on the rise and most insurers encourage the use of mail-order prescriptions, the Comstock Act is both an obsolete tool ill-suited to the modern health care economy and a menace. If the statute bars the mailing of abortifacients — drugs used to perform a procedure that is still legal in half the country — doesn’t it also criminalize mail-order birth control and Viagra? Mail-order sex toys, lingerie, pornography (for those without a good internet connection) and steamy romance novels? Paintings depicting nudity?
The answer is yes, of course — if one applies consistent logic (a standard that has never much concerned conservative legal activists). And that is the tell. No thinking person would invoke the Comstock laws in a modern legal brief or court ruling unless they truly endorsed the use of state power to restrict private freedoms.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 14, 2023
Tim Scott gets tripped up on abortion ban questions

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By Thursday morning in New Hampshire, Scott said he did believe some type of federal restriction should be implemented, and said if president, he would “definitely” sign into law a 20-week ban — a measure he has supported in the Senate.
“We have to have a federal limit on how far we can go, and that is something that we have to discuss,” Scott said in a local television interview in Manchester.
Pressed later on the issue outside the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester, Scott deflected — accusing Democrats of hypocrisy and raising objections to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen suggesting that abortions could increase the African American workforce. He did not elaborate on how far the federal government should go to restrict abortions.
Scott is expected to hinge a potential presidential campaign on his Christian faith and court the evangelical vote — a voting bloc that overwhelmingly opposes abortion rights. But his answers over the past 24 hours suggest that he believes Republicans have done themselves no electoral favors by celebrating recent abortion restrictions and calling for sweeping national bans.
But by the standards of many in the GOP — and as red states around the country have passed six-week and even total bans — the 20-week ban that Scott said he would sign does not go far enough. Scott’s reluctance to weigh in on earlier, more restrictive bans illustrates the fine line he and other Republican White House hopefuls must walk. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has similarly avoided providing specifics about her position on a national ban, while former President Donald Trump has suggested that Republicans suffered electorally by not embracing exceptions to their abortion ban bills.
Scott in 2021 co-sponsored the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill that proposed jailing doctors for up to five years for performing abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Scott did not directly answer a question about whether he agreed with prosecuting doctors who did so. He has, however, condemned a bill introduced in the South Carolina legislature that could impose the death penalty on women receiving abortions.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 13, 2023
DeSantis wants a 6-week abortion ban. These Republicans say no.

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“The only thing red in our district is our sun burns,” said state Sen. Alexis Calatayud, a Miami-area Republican who voted against the abortion bill last week when the full Senate approved it.
Calatayud said she voted against the measure because thousands of her constituents in the blue stronghold of Miami don’t support such a restrictive law. Despite being a Republican, she’s still beholden to the will of the voters.
Republicans hold supermajorities in the Florida Legislature, so the few GOP lawmakers who reject the measure have no power to stop or even slow its passage. But their opposition shows how abortion remains a tough issue for the party, especially after Republicans nationally underperformed in the 2022 midterms in part because the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade energized Democratic and swing voters.
That dynamic was much different in Florida, however, Republicans picked up seven new GOP members in the state House and four in the Senate. DeSantis also won the state by historic margins, even in traditionally Democratic areas like Miami.
When Florida lawmakers last year passed a 15-week ban on abortions that offers no exceptions for victims of rape and incest, only one Republican, state Rep. Rene “Coach P” Plasencia of Orlando, voted against it. He later resigned a few months before he was term-limited out of office.
House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell (D-Tampa) said the difference this year is that more Republicans are realizing the consequences of the six-week ban, which does have exceptions for victims of rape, incest and human trafficking up to 15 weeks of pregnancy.
“They know and understand, like we do, that at six weeks most women don’t even know they’re pregnant,” Driskell said. “This is effectively an outright ban.”
At least 12 other states have enacted six-week bans, including neighboring Georgia. The Florida bill, once DeSantis signs it into law, will effectively end the state’s reputation as a safe haven for people seeking abortions in the South. Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe last year, at least 4,000 people have traveled to Florida to get abortions from as far away as Texas and Alabama, where abortion is prohibited at any stage of pregnancy.

In addition to its exceptions, the six-week ban includes a provision that would give $5 million to the state Department of Health for programs that promote causes such as contraception, and $15 million for programs that support mothers who give birth.
Republican state Rep. Mike Caruso of Delray Beach told POLITICO he will vote “no” Thursday on the six-week ban, while GOP Rep. Traci Koster of Tampa previously rejected the bill during a March committee vote. She did not respond to requests for comment this week.
“I don’t think the bill takes into consideration certain religious rights,” Caruso said on Wednesday. “And based on that, and some other things, I’m going to be down on the bill.”
Several faith-based groups filed legal challenges last year against the state’s 15-week abortion ban, arguing that it violates the constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion, among other things.
“I do not like this bill,” Caruso said.
The Republicans who vote against it, however, are unlikely to face any blowback from their caucus. The vast majority of the 84 House Republicans are expected to vote for the six-week ban, and Florida GOP Speaker Paul Renner told reporters on Wednesday that some Republicans in Democratic districts must still represent their constituents.
“We have members who will likely not be able to support the bill because they are a good representative of their district. And that’s not where their district is.” Renner said. “We respect those differences in our caucus.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 13, 2023
PMK legislator seeks ban on CSK for not selecting players from Tamil Nadu

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Chennai: As the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) is all set to take on the Rajasthan Royals here, a Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) legislator on Tuesday demanded a ban on the IPL team as it does not have players from Tamil Nadu.
Though it is branded as a Tamil Nadu team, CSK lacked talented players from the state in the current IPL edition, S P Venkateshwaran claimed.
Raising the issue during the debate on the demand for grants for the Youth Welfare and Sports Development department in the Assembly, the MLA said: “They are making profits from our people through advertisements projecting it as a Tamil Nadu team. But there are no talented players from our State (in the team).”

CSK will host Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2023 at the M A Chidambaram Stadium here on Wednesday.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 11, 2023
Delhi HC upholds ban on gutka, pan masala for public health reasons

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New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has upheld a ban on the manufacture, storage, and sale of gutka, pan masala, flavoured tobacco, and similar products in the city, citing their direct and harmful impact on public health.
The ban was initially imposed by the food safety commissioner, but was later quashed by the high court in September 2022.
The Centre and Delhi governments appealed against the decision and a bench headed by Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma has now set aside the earlier decision and upheld the ban.

The court rejected objections raised by entities in the tobacco business against the ban, stating that there was no justification for the quashing of the notifications.
The court has declared that there was no justification for the previous decision to quash the notifications, and has rejected objections from tobacco business entities against the ban that was in place from 2015 until 2021.
“We find ourselves unable to sustain the impugned judgment rendered by the learned Judge. These appeals shall consequently stand allowed. We find no merit in the challenge raised (against the ban). It shall, in consequence, stand dismissed,” said the bench, also comprising Justice Yashwant Varma.
“It becomes necessary to observe that the writ petitioners (manufacturers of tobacco related products, etc) did not dispute that both cigarettes as well as smokeless tobacco have a direct and pernicious impact on public health. Once it was found and conceded that both categories of tobacco constituted substances which had a direct impact on public health, the impugned notifications clearly did not warrant being quashed,” observed the court.
In its 176-page judgment, the court noted that the Supreme Court has already urged governments to ban the manufacture and sale of gutka and pan masala, and the previous single judge’s decision could not have deemed this not applicable in the current case.

Regarding the objection raised by tobacco businesses that the ban was discriminatory because it only applied to smokeless tobacco and not cigarettes, the court rejected this and stated that the ban was implemented because of the “larger number of users of smokeless tobacco” and that food safety authorities were authorised to impose such prohibitions.
The court also mentioned that Article 14 could not be used to argue that since a specific type of tobacco had not been banned, there should be no prohibition on other similarly harmful products. It noted that there were 163.7 million smokeless tobacco users in the country compared to 68.9 million smokers.
The court also mentioned that products such as pan masala, chewing tobacco, and gutka were not exempted from the definition of “food” under Section 3(1)(j) of the FSSA.
The court noted that the petitioners had operated under the mistaken belief that the notifications aimed to ban or prohibit tobacco, when in reality, they sought to prohibit the addition of tobacco or tobacco products to food products.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 11, 2023