#Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

[queersatanic]

The Satanic Temple is very bad at court cases (December 2023)

Changes from November include:

Confirmation both Travis County, Texas, lawsuits have not seen any new filings in more than one year.

Ninth Circuit granted TST partial victory in form of an additional opportunity to make defamation claims in federal district court against Johnson et al Defendants.

Full list on The.Satanic.Wiki

Full list on r/TheSatanicCirclejerk

Moreover, we’re still being sued by The Satanic Temple in federal appellate court and now King County Superior Court.

TST is also still suing Newsweek and its reporter (but maybe not her anymore!) for writing about us. In addition, The Satanic Temple is now suing a TikToker in Texas for talking about our case. Check the pinned post for more.

While it looks bad on its own, compare how things looked just one short year ago for The Satanic Temple and notice how so many of those "ongoing" cases turned out.

When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there's always more and it's always worse.

[ttpd-chair]

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a decision by a lower court that physicians are protected from prosecution under Idaho’s abortion ban if they are providing an abortion in cases of severe illness.

[naturalresourcestoday]

Federal Appeals Court Rejects Effort to Compel Amended Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan

A federal appeals court turned away Jan. 19 a case that sought to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to update its recovery plan for the grizzly bear. The decision cast recovery plans as being outside the scope of a federal statute’s provision allowing for petitions to amend agency rules. The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit seeking to compel amendment of USFWS’ framework…

[iww-gnv]

Microsoft reneged on promises it made in court during its Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial in 2023 by laying off 1,900 employees in late January, according to the FTC. FTC lawyer Imad Abyad filed a letter with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday, effectively telling on Microsoft. “This newly-revealed information contradicts Microsoft’s representations in this proceeding,” the FTC lawyer wrote. Microsoft announced on Jan. 15 that it was laying off 1,900 workers from its gaming division — around 8% of that part of the company. A large portion of those layoffs were at the newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The percentage of Activision Blizzard layoffs has not been made public, but at least 899 of that 1,900 worked out of Activision Blizzard’s California offices, according to public records.

[zvaigzdelasas]

In a blow to tribes, a U.S. appeals court has denied a last ditch legal effort to block construction of what's expected to be the largest lithium mine in North America on federal land in Nevada. In a decision Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. government did not violate federal environmental laws when it approved Lithium Nevada's Thacker Pass mine in the waning days of the Trump administration.[...] Several area tribes and environmental groups have tried to block or delay the Thacker Pass mine for more than two years. Among their arguments was that federal land managers fast tracked it without proper consultation with Indian Country.

17 Jul 23

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ian Millhiser at Vox:

The Supreme Court will hear a case later this month that could make life drastically worse for homeless Americans. It also challenges one of the most foundational principles of American criminal law — the rule that someone may not be charged with a crime simply because of who they are. Six years ago, a federal appeals court held that the Constitution “bars a city from prosecuting people criminally for sleeping outside on public property when those people have no home or other shelter to go to.” Under the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Martin v. Boise, people without permanent shelter could no longer be arrested simply because they are homeless, at least in the nine western states presided over by the Ninth Circuit. As my colleague Rachel Cohen wrote about a year ago, “much of the fight about how to address homelessness today is, at this point, a fight about Martin.” Dozens of court cases have cited this decision, including federal courts in Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Florida, Texas, and New York — none of which are in the Ninth Circuit.

Some of the decisions applying Martin have led very prominent Democrats, and institutions led by Democrats, to call upon the Supreme Court to intervene. Both the city of San Francisco and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, filed briefs in that Court complaining about a fairly recent decision that, the city’s brief claims, prevents it from clearing out encampments that “present often-intractable health, safety, and welfare challenges for both the City and the public at large.” On April 22, the justices will hear oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, one of the many decisions applying Martin — and, at least according to many of its critics, expanding that decision.

Martin arose out of the Supreme Court’s decision in Robinson v. California (1962), which struck down a California law making it a crime to “be addicted to the use of narcotics.” Likening this law to one making “it a criminal offense for a person to be mentally ill, or a leper, or to be afflicted with a venereal disease,” the Court held that the law may not criminalize someone’s “status” as a person with addiction and must instead target some kind of criminal “act.” Thus, a state may punish “a person for the use of narcotics, for their purchase, sale or possession, or for antisocial or disorderly behavior resulting from their administration.” But, absent any evidence that a suspect actually used illegal drugs within the state of California, the state could not punish someone simply for existing while addicted to a drug.

The Grants Pass case does not involve an explicit ban on existing while homeless, but the Ninth Circuit determined that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, imposed such tight restrictions on anyone attempting to sleep outdoors that it amounted to an effective ban on being homeless within city limits. There are very strong arguments that the Ninth Circuit’s Grants Pass decision went too far. As the Biden administration says in its brief to the justices, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion did not adequately distinguish between people facing “involuntary” homelessness and individuals who may have viable housing options. This error likely violates a federal civil procedure rule, which governs when multiple parties with similar legal claims can join together in the same lawsuit. But the city, somewhat bizarrely, does not raise this error with the Supreme Court. Instead, the city spends the bulk of its brief challenging one of Robinson’s fundamental assumptions: that the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” limits the government’s ability to “determine what conduct should be a crime.” So the Supreme Court could use this case as a vehicle to overrule Robinson.

That outcome is unlikely, but it would be catastrophic for civil liberties. If the law can criminalize status, rather than only acts, that would mean someone could be arrested for having a disease. A rich community might ban people who do not have a high enough income or net worth from entering it. A state could prohibit anyone with a felony conviction from entering its borders, even if that individual has already served their sentence. It could even potentially target thought crimes.

Imagine, for example, that an individual is suspected of being sexually attracted to children but has never acted on such urges. A state could potentially subject this individual to an intrusive police investigation of their own thoughts, based on the mere suspicion that they are a pedophile. A more likely outcome, however, is that the Court will drastically roll back Martin or even repudiate it altogether. The Court has long warned that the judiciary is ill suited to solve many problems arising out of poverty. And the current slate of justices is more conservative than any Court since the 1930s.

[...]

The biggest problem with the Ninth Circuit’s decision, briefly explained

The Ninth Circuit determined that people are protected by Robinson only if they are “involuntarily homeless,” a term it defined to describe people who “do not ‘have access to adequate temporary shelter, whether because they have the means to pay for it or because it is realistically available to them for free.’” But, how, exactly, are Grants Pass police supposed to determine whether an individual they find wrapping themselves in a blanket on a park bench is “involuntarily homeless”? For that matter, what exactly does the word “involuntarily” mean in this context? If a gay teenager runs away from home because his conservative religious parents abuse him and force him to attend conversion therapy sessions, is this teenager’s homelessness voluntary or involuntary? What about a woman who flees her violent husband? Or a person who is unable to keep a job after they become addicted to opioids that were originally prescribed to treat their medical condition?

Suppose that a homeless person could stay at a nearby shelter, but they refuse because another shelter resident violently assaulted them when they stayed there in the past? Or because a laptop that they need to find and keep work was stolen there? What if a mother is allowed to stay at a nearby shelter, but she must abandon her children to do so? What if she must abandon a beloved pet? The point is that there is no clear line between voluntary and involuntary actions, and each of these questions would have to be litigated to determine whether Robinson applied to an individual’s very specific case. But that’s not what the Ninth Circuit did. Instead, it ruled that Grants Pass cannot enforce its ordinances against “involuntarily homeless” people as a class without doing the difficult work of determining who belongs to this class. That’s not allowed. While the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure sometimes allow a court to provide relief to a class of individuals, courts may only do so when “there are questions of law or fact common to the class,” and when resolving the claims of a few members of the class would also resolve the entire group’s claims.

The Grants Pass v. Johnson case at SCOTUS could make life worse for unhoused Americans.

[anarchywoofwoof]

A federal appeals court on Wednesday evening granted the Biden administration’s request to strike down a landmark federal youth climate case, outraging climate advocates.

“This is a tragic and unjust ruling,” said Julia Olson, attorney and founder of Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that brought the suit.

The lawsuit, Juliana v United States, was filed by 21 young people from Oregon who alleged the federal government’s role in fueling the climate crisis violates their constitutional rights.

The Wednesday order from a panel of three Trump-appointed judges on the ninth circuit court of appeals will require a US district court judge to dismiss the case for lack of standing, with no opening to amend the complaint.

The decision affirmed an emergency petition filed by the justice department in February arguing that “the government will be irreparably harmed” if it is forced to spend time and resources litigating the Juliana case. It’s a measure the justice department should never have taken, said Olson.

“The Biden administration was wrong to use an emergency measure to stop youth plaintiffs from having their day in court,” she said in a statement. “The real emergency is the climate emergency.”

The lawsuit has faced numerous obstacles since it was first filed in 2015. A different panel of judges on the ninth circuit court of appeals previously ordered the case to be dismissed in 2020, on the grounds that the climate crisis must be addressed with policy, not litigation. But a US district court judge allowed the plaintiffs to amend their lawsuit, and last year ruled the case could go to trial.

Olson said the fight for the Juliana plaintiffs is “not over”.

“President Biden can still make this right by coming to the settlement table,” she said. “And the full ninth circuit can correct this mistake.” The Biden administration has not indicated it will come to the settlement table.

Litigation filed by Our Children’s Trust has seen success elsewhere. Earlier this year, Montana’s supreme court upheld upheld a groundbreaking decision requiring state regulations to consider the climate crisis before approving permits for fossil fuel development. Youth plaintiffs have similar pending lawsuits in Hawaii – which will go to trial in June – as well Florida, Utah and Virginia.

In December, Our Children’s Trust filed another federal lawsuit on behalf of a group of California youths, targeting the Environmental Protection Agency.

[beardedmrbean]

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Idaho serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech's last-minute request for a stay of execution.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan issued the decision to deny Creech's request Wednesday morning, clearing the way for prison authorities to carry out his execution by lethal injection.

Attorneys for the 73-year-old Creech, Idaho's longest-serving death row inmate, had filed a certiorari petition that the High Court halt the execution to give the panel time to review the decision by the Idaho Supreme Court denying Creech's appeals.

"The application for a stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied," the ruling said. "The edition for a write of certiorari is denied."

Barring a last-minute reprieve by Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Creech will become the first person executed in Idaho in 12 years.

Little has already said he has "zero intention" of halting the execution at Idaho Maximum Security Institution near Boise.

"Thomas Creech is a convicted serial killer responsible for acts of extreme violence," Little said in a statement issued on Jan. 29. "His lawful and just sentence must be carried out as ordered by the court. Justice has been delayed long enough."

In the petition to the Supreme Court, Creech's attorneys argued that his due process rights were violated by the Idaho Supreme Court.

"Mr. Creech has identified a substantial need for guidance from the Court on an issue of great national importance and he has brought a strong vehicle for it to do so," Creech's attorney wrote in the petition, asking for "clarity on [the] question of when a state's post-conviction regime affords little meaningful review to legitimate federal constitutional claims that it violates due process."

The petition added, "There are strong reasons to suspect that at least some states have gone too far in limiting post-conviction review, thus calling for the Court's intervention."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco also denied Creech's latest appeal in a ruling issued Saturday, prompting attorneys for the condemned man to take their argument to the Supreme Court.

Creech, according to prosecutors, has been convicted of five murders in three states, including three committed in Idaho.

In a 1993 opinion issued by the U.S. Supreme Court denying an appeal filed by Creech, late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that "Creech admitted to killing or participating in the killing of at least 26 people."

"The bodies of 11 of his victims -- who were shot, stabbed, beaten, or strangled to death -- have been recovered in seven states," she said.

The last murder Creech pleaded guilty to occurred in 1981 at an Idaho maximum security prison when he killed 23-year-old David Dale Jensen, a disabled fellow inmate, by beating him to death with a sock filled with batteries, according to prosecutors. At the time of Jensen's slaying, Creech was serving two life sentences for a double murder he committed in Idaho and had been convicted of murders in California and Oregon.

Creech argued in his recent appeal that his due process rights were violated by the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole and the Ada County, Idaho, Prosecuting Attorney's Office.

At the commutation hearing in October, Ada County deputy prosecutor Jill Longhurst told the commission that Creech is a "sociopath" who has "utter disregard for human life."

"Mr. Creech is a serial killer, and in 1981 said he would kill again, and he did," Longhurst told the commission. "Thomas Creech is the most prolific serial killer in Idaho."

[voskhozhdeniye]

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, advocates and policy analysts have warned of a homelessness “tsunami.” It’s the worst-case scenario where the combination of lost income, backlogs of owed rent, and a lack of local government foresight contribute to a surge of people losing housing and ending up on the street. Well, it has arrived—and it’s poised to get much worse as the Supreme Court is set to decide whether to make homelessness a de facto crime.

This past month, many cities and counties conducted their annual point-in-time homelessness counts. The results of January’s counts won’t be known for several more months, but they’re likely to be dire. The end-of-2023 results found that approximately 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness. That’s up more than 70,000 over 2022, or a 12 percent increase. In the 12 months since that data was collected, those numbers have likely gone up.

But the raw numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.

If it does so, that will have ramifications for all unhoused people, from those who have been chronically homeless for some time to those currently falling into homelessness. And that last category is a large one: In the time since the January 2023 homeless count, there have been at least 1,076,396 evictions across 10 states and 34 cities, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab project, which has tracked data related to evictions through the end of 2023. In December alone, there were more than 69,000 evictions in those monitored areas. According to the data, evictions have almost fully returned to pre-Covid pandemic levels, after federal moratoriums and protections expired.

It’s also becoming harder to pay for housing. The housing market remains tight for anyone looking to buy, and renters are losing options. Inflation has eaten into people’s available income, pandemic-era protections have ended, rents are rising, and data from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies that came out last month showed that renters are spending more—even as the amount of affordable housing available is decreasing.

Nearly 22.4 million households—or half of all renters—can’t afford their rent, according to an accepted standard that paying more than 30 percent of one’s income on rent renders it unaffordable. Without immediate assistance to renters, it’s a situation that will only worsen. Back rent due, as well as new rent increases, is likely to magnify the financial strain that’s already being keenly felt by renters, forcing more people out of their homes, either to depend on friends and family or end up on the streets.

If the Supreme Court sides with Grants Pass, it will effectively undo all of the protections created by the Boise case, which means that the thousands of people currently experiencing homelessness as well as those likely to fall into homelessness in 2024 will face additional challenges in an already traumatic situation. Added legal and financial burdens will only make it harder for them to become rehoused, creating a vicious cycle of escalating misery that will do nothing to actually solve the underlying causes of homelessness.

Grants Pass v. Johnson hasn’t received the same fanfare as many of the other cases before the Supreme Court this term, but perhaps no other case has as much at stake for some of the most vulnerable Americans, who now face the prospect of both additional financial burdens and the possibility of being transformed into a new class of criminal, solely because so many states and municipalities have chosen to wash their hands of a crisis their own policies have created.

Jesse Rabinowitz, the campaign and communications director with the National Homelessness Law Center’s “Housing Not Handcuffs” program (which plans to file an amicus brief in the case prior to oral arguments but has not as of press time) told The New Republic that an arrest record only makes it harder to get a job or find a new apartment to rent—and unpaid fines can lower a credit score, causing more financial hardship.

If the highest court sides with lawmakers that have abandoned the homeless to face more punitive measures for their misfortune, anyone left on the streets could be subject to arrest or other criminal penalties simply for having nowhere else to go, even in instances where local government has fallen through on the provision of adequate shelters. They will either be left to rot in jail or be forced out of the communities they call home.

The biggest obstacle to solving homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. That’s it. Either people are being priced out of homes or those on the streets can’t afford to obtain a permanent home. Thousands of units are either in the approval process or being built, but at the moment there is a nationwide deficit in housing, and construction is not matching pace with the growth of the unhoused population.

“Homelessness is increasing in many communities because rents are sky high and there is a severe shortage of affordable rental homes. More people are just one financial shock away from falling behind on rent and facing evictions and, in worst cases, homelessness,” Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told The New Republic. “As homelessness has increased, elected officials are under a lot of pressure to take action, but too many of them are turning to misguided, ineffective, and costly approaches, like criminalization, rather than investing in proven solutions.”

This is not some abstract conundrum. In Los Angeles this past month, before and during dangerous storms that found officials urging sheltering in place for safety, police and city agencies were out dismantling encampments. Efforts by local advocates and organizations to help get unhoused people into promised shelters were met with confusion by local government and a lack of actual help, as documented by the group Ktown for All. Prior high-level sweeps, such as at Echo Park Lake in 2020, cleared the park of tents, but despite initial claims by Los Angeles City Council members, only a handful of the nearly 200 people cleared by the lake found temporary shelter, let alone permanent housing. Additionally, representatives with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said such clearances disrupted outreach attempts intended to get people to shelter and temporary housing, undoing trust-building efforts that took time to develop.

And real solutions to homelessness are up against long timelines and limited political will. There are major efforts to build new housing and fund services—the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $3.16 billion last month for those very issues—but these resources take time to spin up, and they face political challenges along the way. An ambitious plan by New York City Mayor Eric Adams, announced in 2022, shriveled over a year, with several cuts to social services. It’s an initiative that joins other community programs in facing financing and budget issues, all while the mayor pushes increasing money to the already massively funded NYPD. Los Angeles elected a slew of progressive officials in 2022 and passed a mansion tax to fund housing and services, however it will still be some time before any new housing funded by it opens.

Meanwhile the city’s wealthy interests and corporate donors are funding the campaigns of conservative challengers to several progressives this year. If the Grants Pass case ends up allowing widespread criminalization of homelessness, it could lead to major setbacks that could render these projects far less effective.

Even large cities that have committed significant resources to helping unhoused people can’t adequately shelter people. New York, with a right-to-shelter law, still falls short of helping all of the people in need. Los Angeles has initiated several measures—several very good ones, as a matter of fact—to fund housing and services, but new units take time to actually be built, and more reactionary elements in the city government are pushing anti-homeless ordinances of their own.

And shelter, although helpful, is not housing. People in transitional or bridge housing still struggle to find permanent solutions, mainly because there simply isn’t enough affordable housing available. And it’s worth remembering that tens of thousands of people fall into and out of homelessness a year, including many who might experience homelessness for just a brief period of time before safety programs, family, or good fortune help them regain housing stability. Those who fit into this category could find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system for just a few days’ misfortune.

If the Supreme Court does side with criminalizing homelessness, local and state governments could start punishing people very quickly, according to Rabinowitz. “A lot of states have carve-outs that say this policy of criminalization can’t be enacted unless there is adequate shelter,” Rabinowitz said. “I imagine the ‘adequate shelter’ part will go away very quickly if the court rules that way.”

There are even more hostile proposals being dreamt up. In Florida, the state legislature—with the endorsement of Governor Ron DeSantis, fresh off his failed presidential run—is proposing criminalizing homelessness and putting unhoused Floridians in camps. Donald Trump is running on a nationwide version of this same policy. Under his proposal, unhoused people would be sent to “tent cities” on “inexpensive land” (exactly what that means is unclear, but it’s implied to be outside of cities).

Notably, the proposal is missing any real details on getting people out of those camps into actual permanent supportive housing. Trump hasn’t provided any idea of what his indefinite internment plan will cost or how he will pay for it; it goes without saying that it’s impossible to determine whether it would be more cost-effective than simply building more housing. But the former president appears to have retribution, not solutions, on his mind. In his 2023 video, he accused cities of focusing on “the whims of a deeply unwell few,” outright ignoring the root causes of homelessness and the factors that keep people unhoused.

When one considers the draconian ideas being conceived behind closed doors, the implications of any decision in Grants Pass are very real. The mechanisms and political desire to criminalize the homeless already exists, and lawmakers seem to be racing toward drastic and punitive approaches, instead of solutions that might actually ease the crisis. Should the Supreme Court contribute to the momentum of criminalization, it will likely exacerbate the crisis—it certainly will neither contribute to rehousing the homeless nor alleviate the economic conditions that force people out onto the streets. It’s a recipe for shortsighted, “out of sight” policies that will enable officials to pursue the cruelest possible approaches to a problem they helped create.

[homomenhommes]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … December 15

1904 – W. Dorr Legg (d.1994), was a landscape architect and one of the founders of the United States gay rights movement, then called the homophile movement.

He trained as a landscape architect at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and from 1935 was professor of landscape architecture at Oregon State Agricultural College (now Oregon State University), but moved back to Michigan in the 1940s to care for his father and the family business. While there he fell in love with Merton Bird, an accountant.

Hoping to find a social environment more accepting of their interracial relationship, Legg, who was white, and Bird, an African American, moved to Los Angeles in 1949. Shortly thereafter the couple founded a social organization for interracial gay couples, the Knights of the Clocks, a name that Legg called "deliberately ambiguous." The society flourished for several years in the early 1950s.

The couple actively joined the national Mattachine Society, but Legg later led a split to co-found ONE, Inc.. Legg and Bird were among the six original members of ONE, which took its name from a line by Thomas Carlyle, "A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one."

Legg gave up his career as a landscape architect to become the business manager of the organization's monthly publication, also called ONE, the first issue of which appeared in 1953. It became the first widely distributed gay publication in the United States.

The magazine was a slim volume at first, typically running from twenty to thirty pages in length. The content initially consisted mainly of essays on topics of interest to the gay community but also included stories, poems, and book reviews. As time went on, the magazine grew, featuring articles on gay studies in the humanities, social and natural sciences, and medicine. By the end of the 1950s, the magazine had attained a distribution of five thousand copies.

The United States Post Office confiscated the October 1954 issue of ONE on the grounds that it was "lewd, obscene, lascivious and filthy" and could therefore not be sent through the mails.

ONE sued Los Angeles Postmaster Otto K. Olesen, who prevailed in the first round when in March 1956 U. S. District Judge Thurmond Clark agreed that the publication was obscene. He also stated that "the suggestion that homosexuals should be recognized as a segment of the populace is rejected."

ONE appealed the decision in the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the lower court's ruling in March 1957. The case next went to the United States Supreme Court.

The justices ruled in favor of ONE in January 1958. Their decision in ONE, Incorporated v. Olesen was per curiam, meaning that they held the issue to be so obvious that no lengthy written opinion was needed.

The news media gave the Supreme Court decision scant attention. Nevertheless, the case was a landmark, establishing the right to send gay and lesbian material through the mail. It had enormous consequence for the fledgling rights movement.

ONE remained in publication until 1969. Financing it had long been a problem. Donors had helped keep the magazine afloat, but the loss of their monetary support combined with a loss of readership to magazines of a more radical viewpoint made the enterprise no longer viable.

Legg traveled to Germany in the 1950s to recover the remains of the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

Legg died in Los Angeles on July 26, 1994 of natural causes. He was survived by his life partner of thirty years, John Najima.

In 2011 the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association announced that Legg would be inducted into its hall of fame.

1937 – In his explicitly gay works, Mutsuo Takahashi, internationally recognized poet and playwright, celebrates homosexual desire.

Takahashi was born in Japan on December 15, 1937, and educated at Fukuoka University of Education. He has published several volumes of poetry, including You Dirty Ones, Do Dirtier Things (1966), Poems of A Penisist (1975), The Structure of The Kingdom (1982), A Bunch of Keys (1984), Practice/Drinking Eating (1988), The Garden of Rabbits (1988), and Sleeping Sinning Falling (1992).

As a child, Takahashi spent much time with extended family and other neighbors. Especially important to him during this time was an uncle that served a pivotal figure in Takahashi's development, serving as a masculine role model and object of love. However, historical fate intervened, and the uncle, whom Takahashi later described in many early poems, was sent to the battlefield in Burma, where illness claimed his life.

Takahashi and his mother went to live in the port of Moji, just as the bombings of the mainland by the Allied powers intensified. Takahashi's memoirs describe that although he hated the war, World War II provided a chaotic and frightening circus for his classmates, who would go to gawk at the wreckage of the B-29s that fell from the sky and to watch ships blow up at sea, destroyed by naval mines. Takahashi writes that when the war came to an end, he felt a great sense of relief.

In his memoirs and interviews, Takahashi has mentioned that in the time he spent with his schoolmates, he became increasingly aware of his own sexual preference for men. This became a common subject in the first book of poetry he published in 1959.

Few poets bring as much skill and passion to their poems, especially those that consider homosexual desire. His work in drama has also earned acclaim. He won the Yamamoto Kenkichi Prize in 1987 for his stage script called Princess Medea. Other works in drama include an adaptation of W. B. Yeats's play At The Hawk's Well and a noh play inspired by Georges Bataille's Le Procès de Gil de Rais.

Even in his earliest work, Takahashi writes with vitality and precision about homosexual desire. Although Japan does not outlaw homosexual relations, the homosexual there remains an outcast because often he does not engage in the rituals and practices of Japanese family life.

The "okama" ("queen") is laughed at and ostracized. The more he is ostracized, the easier it is to keep the laughter going—at the okama's expense. Takahashi's poems give dignity to the okama, celebrating both his sexual desires and his outcast status.

Homoeroticism was an important them in his poetry written in free verse through the 1970s, including the long poem Ode, which the publisher Winston Leyland has called "the great gay poem of the 20th century." Many of these early works have been translated into English by Hiroaki Sato and reprinted in the collection Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature.

About the same time, Takahashi started writing prose. In 1970, he published Twelve Views from the Distance about his early life and the novella The Sacred Promontory about his own erotic awakening. In 1972, he wrote A Legend of a Holy Place, a surrealistic novella inspired by his own experiences during a forty-day trip to New York City in which Donald Richie led him through the gay, underground spots of the city. In 1974, he released Zen's Pilgrimage of Virtue, a homoerotic and often extremely humorous reworking of a legend of Sudhana found in the Buddhist classic Avatamsaka Sutra.

Moreover, most of Takahashi's explicitly gay work celebrates desire, finding joy in the male body much as Walt Whitman's poems do. The poems eagerly name body parts as they probe desire and longing.

The speaker of Takahashi's masterful poem "Ode" celebrates his erotic and promiscuous life much as a priest celebrates the Eucharist. This 1,000-line poem begins with a parody of the Mass: "In the name of / Man, member, / and the holy fluid, / AMEN." As the speaker seeks out sex in the places most frowned on by his society, he is reborn, saved by each new encounter. The glory hole, for example, takes on spiritual significance. Only what is "made flesh" satisfies.

Poems of A Penisist is one of the most important collections of poetry on homosexual desire and sex written in this century. The personae in these poems do not compromise—they see the world as outsiders ("a faggot that fingers point at") but being outsiders brings them joy and meaning. As the majority society mocks and condemns them, their joy in their identity as gay men, as individuals who enjoy pleasure with other men, gives them strength.

1958 – Alfredo Ormando, Italian homosexual, who committed ritual suicide to protest Church policies toward homosexuality.

Ormando was one of eight children from an impoverished family, who had been struggling to make a success of a writing career, after spending two years in a seminary. He had been suffering from serious depression, which clearly had multiple causes.

In December 1997 he wrote this letter to a friend of his in Reggio Emilia:

Palermo, Christmas 1997 Dear Adriano, this year I can't feel it's Christmas anymore, it is indifferent to me like everything; nothing can bring me back to life. I keep on getting ready for my suicide day by day; I feel this is my fate, I've always been aware but never accepted, but this tragic fate is there, it's waiting for me with a patience of Job which looks incredible. I haven't been able to escape this idea of death, I feel I can't avoid it, nor can I pretend to live and plan a future I do not have; my future will just be a prosecution of this present. I live with the awareness of who's leaving this life and this doesn't look dreadful to me! No! I can't wait for the day I will bring this life of mine to an end; they will think I am mad because I have chosen Saint Peter Square to be the place where I'll set myself on fire, while I could do it here in Palermo as well. I hope they'll understand the message I want to convey; it is a form of protest against the Church which demonises homosexuality, demonising nature at the same time, because homosexuality is its daughter. Alfredo.

On 13 January 1998 he set himself on fire in Saint Peter's Square in Rome to protest the attitudes and policies of the Roman Catholic Church regarding homosexual Christians. After two policemen put out the flames, he was brought to Sant'Eugenio hospital in critical condition. He died there 11 days later.

After his death, the Vatican denied that this had anything to do with the Church or homosexuality. Through its spokesperson, Father Ciro Benedettini, the Church downplayed the significance of the act.

In 2000, the year of the Jubilee, Pope John-Paul II exhorted his followers in the same spot where Alfredo Ormando had set himself on fire two years prior, telling them that homosexuality was "unnatural," and that the Church had a "duty to distinguish between good and evil."

In 2005, the new Pope Benedict committed himself to even harsher anti-gay teachings, initiating what some see as a gay witchhunt within the Catholic clergy, fighting same-sex partnership legislation worldover, and sending the message that homosexuals have no place in God's kingdom.

However, in September 2013, Pope Francis said the church shouldn't "interfere spiritually" with the lives of LGBT people in a wide-ranging interview in which he also said the church cannot focus solely on opposing abortion, contraception, and marriage equality. A month earlier, the pope told a group of reporters that he wouldn't judge gay priests, asking, "If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?"

Change comes slowly in the Catholic church.

1974 – We're not sure of the exact date but sometime in December 1974, two Boston Gay rights activists, Bernie Toal and Tom Morganti, created a symbol of Gay pride. It was not to have lasting influence but it's damned cute and certainly speaks to the creativity that occurred in the years following the Stonewall uprising. The symbol was the purple rhino. The entire campaign was intended to bring Gay issues further into public view. The rhino started being displayed in subways in Boston , but since the creators didn't qualify for a public service advertising rate, the campaign soon became too expensive for the activists to handle. The ads disappeared, and the rhino never caught on anywhere else. As Toal put it, "The rhino is a much maligned and misunderstood animal and, in actuality, a gentle creature. But when a rhinoceros is angered, it fights ferociously." At the time, this seemed a fitting symbol for the Gay rights movement. Lavender was used because it was a widely recognized Gay pride color and the heart was added to represent love and the "common humanity of all people." The purple rhinoceros was never copyrighted and is in the public domain.

1977 – On this date Quebec becomes the first jurisdiction (larger than a city or county) in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits discrimination in employment, housing, certain services and other activities in the public and private sectors.

[1americanconservative]

Kari Lake

@KariLake

In April 2022, I filed a case in federal court asking a judge to BLOCK the use of electronic tabulators in the election. The Obama-appointed judge dismissed it. On Election Day, 59% of those machines FAILED across Maricopa County. On Tuesday, 9/12 our appeal will be HEARD before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Election Day Sabotage in Maricopa County proved our case. Now, the voters of Arizona await justice from the courts.

[xxx0oo0xxx]

Appeals Court Finds FBI Did Violate 4th Amendment Rights of Los Angeles Residents by Seizing Hundreds of Safety Deposit Boxes without "Any Legal Basis" https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/appeals-court-finds-fbi-did-violate-4th-amendment/

[partisan-by-default]

On the precipice of a monumental decision, the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to establish whether to hear the case State Department v. Sandra Muñoz, a case that has the potential to drastically alter the constitutional rights of undocumented immigrants and their U.S. citizen family members within the consular process. This case centers around Sandra Muñoz, an American citizen and workers’ rights attorney based in Los Angeles, and her husband, Luis Asencio, an undocumented immigrant with a completely clean criminal record. The couple, who have been united in matrimony since 2010, embarked on the consular process to legitimize Asencio’s status.

The Denied Entry

In spite of satisfying all necessary prerequisites, a consular officer at the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador refused Asencio’s admission into the U.S. in 2015. The denial, shrouded in ambiguity, cited potential unlawful activity without providing further clarification. This decision led to a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which stated that such denial infringed upon Muñoz’s constitutional rights to marriage and due process.

The Appeal to the Supreme Court

However, the Biden administration is escalating the matter to the Supreme Court. Their argument posits that the Constitution does not extend its reach into the consular process, even when U.S. citizens are involved. The Supreme Court’s decision to take on the case could create a ripple effect, influencing the lives of over 1 million U.S. citizens married to undocumented spouses and nearly 4 million U.S. citizen children with undocumented parents.

Potential Impact on Millions

The matter, touching on the issue of consular nonreviewability, has the potential to encroach upon constitutional limitations. This includes procedural and substantive due process rights, equal protection, freedom of speech, and the inherent right to coexist as a family. As such, the case isn’t just about one family’s struggle, but echoes the concerns of millions of immigrant families across the nation. The Supreme Court’s decision will thus have far-reaching implications, shaping not only the constitutional rights of immigrants but also the very fabric of the consular process itself.

[iww-gnv]

In a victory for workers in California, a federal appeals court ruled Monday that employees can use a unique state law, known as PAGA, to join and sue their employers for violations of labor laws, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling limiting access to that law. The Private Attorneys General Act, enacted in 2004, allows employees to sue their employers in the name of the state for violating laws such as those regulating minimum wages, overtime, meal and rest breaks and sick pay. If their suit succeeds, the employees collect 25% of the penalties provided by the labor law, with the rest going to the state. PAGA suits have bolstered labor laws in a state that lacks the resources to fully enforce the laws on its own. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 that PAGA violated the rights of employers whose contracts required workers to take disputes to individual arbitration rather than going to court, a common practice for large companies. Arbitrators’ decisions are virtually unappealable, and studies have found that they usually favor employers, their frequent customers. But the California Supreme  Court, the final authority on the meaning of state law, breathed new life into PAGA in July. In a unanimous ruling, the court said that while employees were bound by their agreements to arbitrate individual claims, they could still join their coworkers and sue collectively in the name of the state.

[jonathantaylorthomas]

Taylor Swift herself weighed in Monday (Aug. 8) on a lawsuit that claims she stole the lyrics to “Shake It Off” from a song about “playas” and “haters,” filing a sworn declaration in which she said the words were “written entirely by me” and that she’d “never heard” the song she’s accused of copying.

Seeking to finally end a yearslong lawsuit that claims her 2014 chart-topping hit had infringed the copyright to the 2001 song “Playas Gon’ Play” by the group 3LW, Swift was unequivocal: “The lyrics to Shake It Off were written entirely by me.”

“In writing the lyrics, I drew partly on experiences in my life and, in particular, unrelenting public scrutiny of my personal life, ‘clickbait’ reporting, public manipulation, and other forms of negative personal criticism which I learned I just needed to shake off and focus on my music,” Swift explained.

The case against Swift was filed in 2017 by Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, the songwriters who wrote “Playas Gon’ Play.” In their 2001 song, the line was “playas, they gonna play” and “haters, they gonna hate”; in Swift’s track, she sings, “‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

Trending on Billboard

In her Monday statement, Swift suggested there was no need to steal those lyrics from Hall and Butler because she had heard them “countless times” throughout her life, including on the playground as a child.

“I recall hearing phrases about players play and haters hate stated together by other children while attending school in Wyomissing Hills, and in high school in Hendersonville,” Swift wrote. “These phrases were akin to other commonly used sayings like ‘don’t hate the playa, hate the game,’ ‘take a chill pill,’ and ‘say it, don’t spray it.'”

The star also said she’d heard the phrase in “many songs, films, and other works,” and she even cited a 2013 live performance in which she said she wore a T-shirt, purchased at Urban Outfitters, emblazoned with the phrase “haters gonna hate.”

“I was struck by messages that people prone to doing something will do it, and the best way to overcome it is to shrug it off and keep living,” Swift said.

Swift’s attorneys have already repeatedly made roughly that same argument – that the phrases “haters gonna hate” and “players gonna play” are so simple and so widely used in pop culture that nobody should be able to monopolize them. But their efforts to end the lawsuit have thus far been rebuffed.

Back in 2018, a federal judge tossed the case on the grounds that American culture was “heavily steeped in the concepts of players, haters, and player haters” and that the short snippet of lyrics from “Playas Gon’ Play” was not unique or creative enough to be copyrighted. But in 2019, a federal appeals court – the Ninth Circuit – overturned that decision, saying the case had been dismissed prematurely.

Last year, Swift’s lawyers again asked the judge to rule in their favor. But in December, the judge ruled that the case was too close to call and would need to be decided by a jury trial. A court date has not yet been set.

Monday’s filings, including Swift’s declaration, are a last-ditch effort to avoid such proceedings, again asking the judge to grant a so-called summary judgment without the need for a trial. In their motion, her attorneys said discovery had turned up other “fatal flaws” in the lawsuit and reiterated their arguments that Hall and Butler’s case was too weak to go in front of a jury.

“It is, unfortunately, not unusual for a hit song to be met by litigants hoping for a windfall based on tenuous claims that their own song was copied,” Swift’s attorney, Peter Anderson, wrote in the motion. “But even against that background, Plaintiffs’ claim sticks out as particularly baseless.”

In her declaration supporting that motion, Swift also made a far simpler argument for why she didn’t copy the song.

“Until learning about Plaintiffs’ claim in 2017, I had never heard the song Playas Gon’ Play and had never heard of that song or the group 3LW,” the star wrote, adding that her parents “did not permit me to watch TRL until I was about 13 years old.”

“None of the CDs I listened to as a child, or after that, were by 3LW,” she said. “I have never heard the song Playas Gon’ Play on the radio, on television, or in any film. The first time I ever heard the song was after this claim was made.”

“Playas Gon’ Play” was a minor hit for 3LW, peaking at No. 81 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 56 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs in June 2001.