Cities Church and its White Christian Nationalism deserve scrutiny • Minnesota Reformer Cities Church is not your run-of-the-mill Jesus-loving Christian church.

"Operation Metro Surge did more to disrupt church services than any single protest at Cities Church.... The pastor of the bilingual congregation Dios Habla Hoy reported that about 80% of his Latino congregation stayed away from church out of fear."

minnesotareformer.com/2026/04/21/c...

No one does street name trolling quite like Prague

The Terrifying Convergence of Fetal Personhood Laws and Abortion Bans A Georgia woman was charged with murder for an alleged abortion. “Fetal personhood” laws may be as much to blame as the state’s abortion ban.

I wrote about a Georgia case of pregnancy criminalization—in which a woman has been charged with murder and possession of a dangerous drug after an alleged self-managed medication abortion—and how the actually dangerous role of fetal personhood laws enable these cases:

“For hundreds of years Germany was good enough to receive these elements, although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases”.

-Hitler, speaking of the Jewish population in a speech to the Reichstag, January 30, 1930.

RFK Jr. just said that immigration is to blame for the outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S., not him.

I wish that disdain for history was new, but the court was loudly wrong in the Dred Scott case, claiming that Black people had never been citizens in any state (there were Black citizens in a majority of states at the founding of the country) and couldn't vote, which they could in some states.

So...originalism is just vibes after all? What a shock.

Calvinball shit

that's literally the joke from A Series Of Unfortunate Events but somehow more on the nose 💀

(the criminals are actively doing crimes inside the court room while everyone else's blindfolds themselves because "justice has to be blind")

Do I understand that the Court is saying that they are the ultimate deciders of what constitutes "historical facts"?

Oh, that’s really just “conservatism” in a nutshell. Ignorance is held as superior to knowledge because knowledge biases you.

Yep. When the supreme court got rid of Chevron Doctrine, the judiciary is over.

Basically, it allowed judges to use expert opinion in making decisions. Like scientists and doctors.

This is the kind of opinion that should have a judge removed from the bench and permanently disbarred

A dark day for all my teacher friends

The blood god is insatiable

This opinion is now binding law in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

I hate it here.

What the founding generation understood as an establishment of religion is a legal question to be decided by a court, not a “fact” question to be decided by experts, no matter how credentialed. To be sure, courts must make a determined effort to grasp the relevant history bearing on that legal question. Hilsenrath, 136 F.4th at 491 (“This kind of historical inquiry requires serious work.” (citation omitted)); McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 803 (2010) (Thomas, J., concurring) (noting “[h]istorical analysis can be difficult”). See generally Heller, 554 U.S. at 592–95, 600–03, 605–19. They do so by consulting articles, books, and historical sources and bringing their own independent judgment to bear on them—not by appointing an “expert,” whose “findings” are insulated by clear-error review on appeal.57 _________________

And then, in one last bizarre twist, the Court says that judges aren't allowed to ask experts in history about questions of history, because experts impact "independent judgment."

Brb going to scream.

But this principle has no application to government use of religious language or symbolism. See Lynch, 465 U.S. at 687 n.13 (declining to apply denominational preference cases to city crèche). Nor could it. Consider the cities of Corpus Christi, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Fe, San Jose, St. Augustine, and Sacramento, to name just a few. Do those names represent “denominational discrimination”? Or take our national motto. See 36 U.S.C. § 302 (“In God We Trust”). Does it show “favoritism” for monotheism over polytheism?

The Fifth Circuit says religious freedom doesn't apply to religious symbols posted by the government because place names exist.

I am not joking.

That is what they said.

Moreover, Plaintiffs have not identified a shred of founding-era evidence equating the government’s use of religious text, displays, or symbols with an establishment of religion. To the contrary, it appears that no one “ever claimed at the founding that the display of religious symbols was a form of religious establishment.” Chapman & McConnell,

See, the Ten Commandments in schools isn't coercive because that's not what the Founders considered coercive.

And then, we get to the most remarkable and batshit part of this whole opinion.

(Incorporation is the legal principle that the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, applies to the States as well as the Federal government. The Fifth Circuit pretends this is not a thing.)

But somehow, it then gets even worse.

The key phrase—“an establishment of religion”—was readily understandable to founding-era citizens. See District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 576–77 (2008) (relying on a phrase’s “[n]ormal meaning . . . known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation”). The reason is simple. At the time, establishments were “a familiar institution.” McConnell, Establishment, supra note 12, at 2107.13 Someone on the streets of 1789 Boston, reading that phrase, would have instantly thought of the Church of England, the colonial established churches, or the current state establishments—in other words, a polity’s official church or religion. Ibid.

Although the colonial establishments became more tolerant of dissenters as independence approached, their essence remained unchanged. The original state constitutions reflect as much. Far from rejecting establishments, many states preserved the core components of their establishments, such as public financial support for the official church, regulation of religious institutions, and religious qualifications for civic participation.36 Most explicit was South Carolina, whose 1778 Constitution declared that “the Christian Protestant religion” was “the established religion,” requiring religious societies to subscribe to enumerated articles of faith to receive legal recognition. S.C. Const. of 1778, art. XXXVIII, reprinted in Poore, State Constitutions, supra note 36, at 1626.

The Fifth Circuit flatly states that when the First Amendment says Congress may not create an "establishment of religion," it means the Church of England. They then argue the Founders intended states to have their own churches unaffected by the First Amendment (!!!).

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is out with a new (very bad) decision, and it's a doozy.

The Fifth Circuit says that Texas can require the Ten Commandments in classrooms. But somehow it gets worse.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Shredded posters of Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Dinkytown is for bros
🫩

Photo of three light skinned children in white shirts, sitting together and looking down adoringly at a grey tuxedo cat sitting in their laps.

Adoration of the Fluff Child. Photo from my collection, no date/info.

I want an inexpensive bike share where I can use my @metrotransitmn.bsky.social card to pay where you can often find bikes docked at LRT and BRT stations. We could call it NiceRide 🚲 #bikeshare

🫩🤬

So it's hard not to interpret this to mean if you want the mayor's attention on your neighborhoods, it's better if you vote for his friends - Shaffer, not Cashman - for city council.

The Uptown safety ambassadors were funded by the council in 2023. Chughtai & Cashman were banging their heads against the wall as the Frey admin refused to implement.

Last month Barnette told Shaffer (Cashman successor) there's no money, it's not happening.

Now it's happening.

Basically Twitter and this is just me complaining to management or a boring lazy diary that includes this kind of insignificant observation and I sometimes I wished I had figured that out sooner than later.