Friday Hodgepodge

Editor's Note: I'm taking Monday and Tuesday off from blogging. Happy Independence Day!

Notable Commentary

"[I]t is one thing to grant an exception in response to an out-of-the-ordinary situation on a one-time-only basis -- for reasons rooted in the government's authorizing mission -- and it is another to issue wholesale permissions for large swaths of the population to defy law on an ongoing basis when that basis does not stem from the government's function." -- Tara Smith, in "Religious Liberty or Religious License? Legal Schizophrenia and the Case against Exemptions" (PDF, 2016) at The Journal of Law and Politics, Vol. 32.

"What the Lockeans glimpsed and what Rand appreciates more fully is that without freedom, a person would not be able to use his rational faculty as the rational faculty. " -- Tara Smith, in "What Good Is Religious Freedom? Locke, Rand, and the Non-Religious Case for Respecting It" (PDF, 2016) at The Arkansas Law Review, vol. 69.

"Rather, [bombing Syria was against our interests] because of the standard by which Trump chose to justify the use of force." -- Peter Schwartz, in "Trump's Bombing of Syria: What's The Principle?" (April) at The Huffington Post.

"As long as our political and economic systems allow humans to freely think, experiment, and innovate, we can continue to find new ways to improve the quality of health care and the quality of human life." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Three Novel Health Care Innovations" at Forbes.

My Two Cents

Although the complementary Smith pieces listed above appear in academic journals, they are clearly-written and quite accessible to laymen. They are also very interesting and, most important, highly relevant to understanding current debates about the relationship between church and state. They are both long, but I highly recommend them.

-- CAV