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Supreme Court Rules That Judges Can’t Hit You Up For Donations

by NorbertoXPF Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a ruling that might surprise those who’ve watched recent Supreme Court’s rulings on campaign finance issues, the high court ruled today that states can ban judges from directly soliciting campaign donations.

The case, Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, was a First Amendment challenge to a Florida rule that barred judicial candidates from personally asking donors for money. Lanelle Williams-Yulee unsuccessfully ran to become a county judge in 2009. During her campaign, she signed a letter asking for campaign contributions. The Florida Supreme Court later found that she had violated state rules on judicial campaigns. Williams-Yulee challenged that decision but lost.

Among the 39 states hold judicial elections, 30 have bans on judges personally asking for campaign money. As Mother Jones reported last year, judicial elections have quietly become a major battleground in American politics over the last decade. State judicial candidates raised a combined $83 million in the 1990s, a total that was surpassed by roughly $30 million in the 2011-12 election cycle. More than $200 million has been donated to state supreme court candidates since 2000, and independent (and often unaccountable) spending on state judicial races has increased nearly sevenfold in that same time. Sue Bell Cobb, the retired chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, recently likened judicial elections to “legalized extortion.”

Justice At Stake, a nonpartisan watchdog group that often speaks out against big money in judicial elections, applauded the Supreme Court’s decision. “Today’s decision helps judges, by saving them from the compromising job of raising cash from people whose cases they will decide,” the group’s executive director, Bert Brandenberg said in a statement. ” It helps our court system, by shoring up its ability to be fair and impartial. And it helps the public, by reassuring them that they will not find themselves in court before a judge who has received a check directly from the opposing party in their case.”

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in the 5-4 decision. “Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” he wrote. “And a State’s decision to elect its judiciary does not compel it to treat judicial candidates like campaigners for political office. A State may assure its people that judges will apply the law without fear or favor—and without having personally asked anyone for money.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the minority, called the court’s decision a “wildly disproportionate restriction upon speech.”

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Supreme Court Rules That Judges Can’t Hit You Up For Donations

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Big Oil Uses Toxic Chemicals to Clean Up Spills. Will the Feds Finally Make Them Stop?

by ColbySambell Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Oil and dispersant in the Gulf of Mexico, a month after BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill began James Edward Bates/TNS/ZUMA

Five years ago this week, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and setting off the worst oil spill in US history. The images are unforgettable: The Gulf of Mexico on fire. Pelicans emerging from the water entirely covered in thick, black oil. Planes flying overhead, spraying more than a million gallons of an oil-dispersing chemical called Corexit in an attempt to control the spill.

Fast forward five years, and dispersants like Corexit are at the center of a growing political battle, as scientists and policymakers raise questions about their potential to harm the environment, wildlife, and human health. Right now in Washington, DC, the Environmental Protection Agency is developing new rules governing dispersant use—rules many experts worry won’t go nearly far enough to protect the public and natural resources. On Tuesday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), introduced legislation to temporarily ban dispersants until more tests are done to guarantee their safety.

Corexit is a go-to product for energy companies like BP when they’re dealing with massive spills. Dispersants don’t actually get rid of oil. But by breaking the oil up and submerging it in the water column, the chemicals make it easier for microbes to consume the oil. At least in theory. These days, some scientists are raising questions about how effective the 1.8 million gallons of Corexit dumped into the Gulf really was in achieving this. Dispersants have other benefits for oil companies, though. By moving oil out of sight, they quell public fears, facilitate PR, stabilize stock prices, and—potentially— help the polluters avoid stiff fines.

But all that Corexit may have done significant damage in the Gulf. One 2012 study found that in laboratory tests, mixtures of Corexit and oil were up to 52 times more toxic to microscopic animals known as rotifers than oil alone. Several leading scientists believe that the use of dispersants contributed to the environmental catastrophe that occurred throughout the Gulf, including the destruction of coral reefs. Studies have found that dispersants—as well as dispersant/oil mixtures—are more deadly to coral and coral larvae than oil by itself. A new report from the Government Accountability Project, a national whistleblower organization, describes the damage to Gulf coral as “arguably the most devastating and revealing of impacts documented in the five years since the BP spill.” This is particularly significant because coral reefs form a natural barrier against hurricanes and provide a habitat for thousands of marine species.

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Big Oil Uses Toxic Chemicals to Clean Up Spills. Will the Feds Finally Make Them Stop?

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Ex-State Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Are Like "Legalized Extortion"

by AnnelieseHXW Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Though they usually don’t get much attention, judicial elections have become just as cutthroat and cash-driven as other political races. To win a judgeship, many candidates must slime their opponents and win the financial backing of often unaccountable interests that may have business before them in court. (Read more in this Mother Jones investigation.)

The amount of money flowing into these races is staggering: State judicial candidates raised $83 million in the 1990s. Yet during the two years 2012 election cycle, they raised more than $110 million—and that doesn’t include outside spending. Altogether, more than $250 million has been spent on judicial races since 2000.

Judges themselves often hate the process of fundraising and mudslinging, but view it as a necessary evil. Sue Bell Cobb, a career judge and the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, just wrote about her experience for Politico. Her story is worth a full read, but here’s a taste:

While I was proud of the work I did for the next 4 1/2 years, I never quite got over the feeling of being trapped inside a system whose very structure left me feeling disgusted. I assure you: I’ve never made a decision in a case in which I sided with a party because of a campaign donation. But those of us seeking judicial office sometimes find ourselves doing things that feel awfully unsavory.

…

When a judge asks a lawyer who appears in his or her court for a campaign check, it’s about as close as you can get to legalized extortion. Lawyers who appear in your court, whose cases are in your hands, are the ones most interested in giving. It’s human nature: Who would want to risk offending the judge presiding over your case by refusing to donate to her campaign? They almost never say no—even when they can’t afford it.

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Ex-State Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Are Like "Legalized Extortion"

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

by KimberlyHollins Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nearly two dozen major corporations, including Walmart, Nordstrom, and Safeway, are bankrolling a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care—the benefits collectively known as workers’ compensation.

The companies have financed a lobbying group, the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation (ARAWC), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee. Richard Evans, the group’s executive director, told an insurance journal in November that the corporations ultimately want to change workers’ comp laws in all 50 states. Lowe’s, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sysco Food Services, and several insurance companies are also part of the year-old effort.

Laws mandating workers’ comp arose at the turn of the 20th century as a bargain between employees and employers: If a worker suffered an injury on the job, the employer would pay his medical bills and part of his wages while he recovered. In exchange, the worker gave up his right to sue for negligence.

ARAWC’s mission is to pass laws allowing private employers to opt out of the traditional workers’ compensation plans that almost every state requires businesses to carry. Employers that opt out would still be compelled to purchase workers’ comp plans. But they would be allowed to write their own rules governing when, for how long, and for which reasons an injured employee can access medical benefits and wages.

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

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Company at Center of “Debtors’ Prison” Case Accused of Racketeering

by GabrielLancaste Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

Judicial Correction Services (JCS), the for-profit probation company at the center of the recently settled Georgia “debtors’ prison” suit, is now being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for violating federal racketeering laws in Clanton, Alabama.

In the federal lawsuit, SPLC accuses JCS and its Clanton manager Steven Raymond of violating the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, by threatening jail time for probationers who failed to pay their misdemeanor fines and probationer fees in a timely fashion. This, the group argues, is plain and simple extortion.

The suit also goes after the current contract between Clanton and JCS, alleging that their relationship violates Alabama law, which forbids city courts from charging individuals extra money for being on probation. Since 2009, Clanton has contracted with JCS to manage its pay-only probationers (individuals who are only on probation because they can’t pay their court fines upfront); however, the courts pay nothing for the for-profit company’s services. Rather, JCS makes money off of the additional fees it forces upon probationers. For example, JCS charges probationers a $10 “set up” fee and then an additional $40 a month for the privilege of having their money collected.

This system has been likened to now-illegal debtors’ prisons, and has raised questions about how misdemeanor courts are relying on small level crimes to bring in funds.

“We’ve seen over the past few decades local governments and state governments have turned increasingly to the criminal justice system to fund themselves where budgets have been cut for courts and jails,” ACLU attorney Nusrat Choudhury told to me.

Choudhury and the ACLU recently settled with DeKalb county in a case that also named JCS as a defendant. Filed on behalf of Kevin Thompson, a Georgia teen who was jailed for five days after failing to pay JCS fines and fees that originated from a traffic violation, the lawsuit argued that Thompson’s treatment violated the 14th Amendment. The judge never conducted an indigency hearing to determine whether the teen was able to pay his court fines and fees, and rather assumed his lack of payment was purposeful.

Chris Albin-Lackey, a Human Rights Watch researchers and author of a 2014 report entitled Profiting from Probation, explained to me that for a long time injustices within the misdemeanor courts have flown under the radar as our “national obsession with the criminal justice system” has been laser focused on felony courts and prisons.

But Albin-Lackey and other human rights advocates are hopeful that this will soon change as lower level courts come under increased scrutiny. Last week, Georgia’s House of Representatives passed a probation reform bill that aims to rein in some of the more egregious practices occurring within the state’s for-profit probation system. If it is approved by the Senate, it is expected to become model legislation that other states, such as Alabama, can turn to for guidance. Additionally, the ACLU settlement surrounding the Thompson case came with a number of reform measures, including a “bench card,” which reminds judges of their ability to sentence people to community service instead of jail time, and instructions on how to protect a probationer’s right to counsel.

And earlier this month the Department of Justice released a scathing report on the discriminatory practices utilized by the Ferguson, Missouri police force—specifically when it came to ticketing and raking in funds for petty fines. The news led to the resignation of two police officers, the city’s top court clerk, the city manager, and the Ferguson Police Department chief.

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Company at Center of “Debtors’ Prison” Case Accused of Racketeering

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O Glory! Pops Staples Was Magnificent—and Rockin’

by HeriberDarker Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

The Staple Singers
Freedom Highway Complete – Recorded Live at Chicago’s New Nazareth Church
Legacy

Pops Staples
Don’t Lose This
dBpm/Anti-

What a monumental legacy Roebuck “Pops” Staples left behind! From the mid-1950s on, his family group, the Staple Singers, was a premier gospel act. In the ’70s, they scored a number of uplifting R&B hits, including “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” Up until his death in 2000, Pops Staples continued making compelling, moving music.

Freedom Highway Complete, recorded in April 1965, captures Pops and his kids, Mavis, Yvonne and Pervis, at the height of their testifying powers, electrifying a churchgoing audience the month after Dr. King’s history-changing marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. From the exuberant title track to the foot-stomping “Samson and Delilah,” it’s a thrilling concert, thanks to the interplay of the Staples’ robust voices, Pops’ shimmering, pithy guitar licks, and spirit-lifting rhythms. It’s magnificent—and rockin’!

Don’t Lose This collects 10 songs that Pops recorded in 1999 but never finished. Last year, daughter Mavis took the incomplete recordings to Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, who worked on her more recent solo albums, and together they turned the tracks into a proper album, adding voices and instrumentation. (If Tweedy took the liberty of mimicking Pops’ distinctive guitar in places, he did a great job.) Mavis’ rousing voice is prominent, but it’s still her dad’s show. His tender yet forceful singing on “Somebody Was Watching Me” and on Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” is sure to inspire. The album is a fitting memorial to this endearing genius.

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O Glory! Pops Staples Was Magnificent—and Rockin’

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5 States Where Republicans Are Getting Serious About Criminal Justice Reform

by RusselLoeffler Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A growing group of conservatives are stepping back from their traditional “tough on crime” stance and taking a lead on reforming the criminal justice system. There’s even talk that congressional Republicans and Democrats could come together on the issue: Earlier this week, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced a bipartisan prison reform bill. (Though it seems to have considerable flaws.)

At the state level, Republicans have already been taking on the issue. Here are five states where Republican governors and their fellow GOP lawmakers are taking on broken prison systems and the harsh laws that have fueled the incarceration boom:

Nebraska: Members of Nebraska’s legislature have introduced several bills that address the state’s overcrowded prisons. These include two bills introduced Wednesday, which would do away with mandatory minimum sentences for a slew of crimes (including distributing cocaine and heroin) and limit Nebraska’s “three-strikes” law to violent crimes. While the Cornhusker State’s legislature is nonpartisan, a majority of bills’ cosponsors are affiliated with the Republican Party, including Sen. Jim Smith, the head of the state branch of the American Legislative Exchange Council. Republican Governor Pete Ricketts reportedly supports the push for prison reform, as does the Omaha-based Platte Institute, a conservative think tank that recently released recommendations for decreasing incarceration that have drawn support from the Nebraska ACLU.

Utah: Republican state Representative Eric Hutchings is sponsoring legislation that aims to reduce Utah’s prison population and decrease recidivism. The bill, which has yet to be publicly released, would decrease the charge for drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor. Governor Gary Herbert, also a Republican, has put aside $10.5 million for recidivism reform.

Illinois: Governor Bruce Rauner’s agenda includes a plan to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison by instead sending them to community programs. Earlier this week, he created a commission of lawmakers, cops, and activists to recommend reforms to the state’s criminal justice system. More details about his plan will come out when he releases his 2016 budget recommendations next week.

Alabama: The legislature-appointed Alabama Prison Reform Task Force is gearing up to propose a new bill for the next legislative session, which begins in March. Led by Republican state Senator Cam Ward, an outspoken Second Amendment defender, the task force is seeking ways to cut down the state’s prison population, which is more twice its intended size. One of Ward’s ideas? Making re-entry easier by throwing out draconian laws for ex-felons, like those preventing them from getting driver’s licenses.

Georgia: A similar task force, the Georgia Council on Criminal Justice Reform, has been recommending reforms to lawmakers. Formed in 2011 by Republican Governor Nathan Deal, the group has pushed the state to stop imprisoning juveniles and reform sentencing for nonviolent offenders, which slashed $20 million off the cost to house inmates in Georgia. The council’s current agenda includes initiatives to improve reentry for ex-felons.

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5 States Where Republicans Are Getting Serious About Criminal Justice Reform

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The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

by Juli34Bfuc Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I got around to reading George Packer’s long New Yorker profile of German chancellor Angela Merkel, and it turned out to be a surprisingly absorbing piece. Unfortunately, that’s due more to Packer’s skill as a writer than to anything he ends up revealing about Merkel. In fact, the truly astonishing thing is that he manages to write 15,000 words about Merkel without really enlightening us in any serious way about what makes her tick. Apparently she’s really that enigmatic. Here, for example, is what he says about why a sober-minded East German chemist, who had never before displayed any political ambitions, suddenly decided to visit a political group that had formed after the Berlin Wall fell to ask if she could help out with anything:

Merkel’s decision to enter politics is the central mystery of an opaque life. She rarely speaks publicly about herself and has never explained her decision. It wasn’t a long-term career plan—like most Germans, she didn’t foresee the abrupt collapse of Communism and the opportunities it created. But when the moment came, and Merkel found herself single and childless in her mid-thirties—and laboring in an East German institution with no future—a woman of her ambition must have grasped that politics would be the most dynamic realm of the new Germany.

Well, OK then. Packer reports that Merkel is smart, methodical, genuinely unpretentious, and “as lively and funny in private as she is publicly soporific.” But her political views? Apparently she barely has any:

Throughout her Chancellorship, Merkel has stayed as close as possible to German public opinion….“The Chancellor’s long-term view is about two weeks,” a Merkel adviser says. The pejorative most often used against her is “opportunist.” When I asked Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Green leader, whether Merkel had any principles, she paused, then said, “She has a strong value of freedom, and everything else is negotiable.”

….“People say there’s no project, there’s no idea,” the senior official told me. “It’s just a zigzag of smart moves for nine years.” But, he added, “She would say that the times are not conducive to great visions.”

….The most daunting challenge of Merkel’s time in office has been the euro-zone crisis, which threatened to bring down economies across southern Europe and jeopardized the integrity of the euro….Merkel’s decisions during the crisis reflect the calculations of a politician more mindful of her constituency than of her place in history. When Greek debt was revealed to be at critical levels, she was slow to commit German taxpayers’ money to a bailout fund, and in 2011 she blocked a French and American proposal for coördinated European action.

….Throughout the crisis, Merkel buried herself in the economic details and refused to get out in front of what German voters—who tended to regard the Greeks as spendthrift and lazy—would accept, even if delaying prolonged the ordeal and, at key moments from late 2011 through the summer of 2012, threatened the euro itself. The novelist and journalist Peter Schneider compared her to a driver in foggy weather: “You only see five metres, not one hundred metres, so it’s better you are very careful, you don’t say too much, you act from step to step. No vision at all.”

It’s kind of scary, but all wrapped up in a hazy ball of pragmatism that’s hard to get a handle on. Take the eurozone crisis, for example. Over the past five years, Germany has seemed almost spitefully hellbent on destroying the European economy simply because Germans disapprove of the spendthrift southerners responsible for the mess—all the time self-righteously refusing to admit that they themselves played a role that was every bit as lucrative and self-serving in the whole debacle. Because of this, the European economy is now headed for its third recession since 2008.

Does Merkel share this view of things? Or does she recognize what needs to be done but simply doesn’t have either the will or the courage to challenge German public opinion? That’s never clear. And yes, I guess I find that a little scary. This is why I don’t quite get the comparison Packer makes between Merkel and Obama. Initially, he says, Merkel was put off by Obama’s lofty rhetoric:

As she got to know Obama better, though, she came to appreciate more the ways in which they were alike—analytical, cautious, dry-humored, remote. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me that “the President thinks there’s not another leader he’s worked closer with than her.” He added, “They’re so different publicly, but they’re actually quite similar.” (Ulrich joked, “Obama is Merkel in a better suit.”)

During the Ukraine crisis, the two have consulted frequently on the timing of announcements and been careful to keep the American and the European positions close. Obama is the antithesis of the swaggering leaders whom Merkel specializes in eating for breakfast. On a trip to Washington, she met with a number of senators, including the Republicans John McCain, of Arizona, and Jeff Sessions, of Alabama. She found them more preoccupied with the need to display toughness against America’s former Cold War adversary than with events in Ukraine themselves. (McCain called Merkel’s approach “milquetoast.”) To Merkel, Ukraine was a practical problem to be solved. This mirrored Obama’s view.

Personality-wise, perhaps, Obama and Merkel are similar. “No drama” could apply equally well to either of them. But politically? I don’t see it. Obama doesn’t strike me as someone with no vision who hews as close as possible to public opinion. It’s true that he can’t always get what he wants, and obviously he faces the same constraints as any politician in a democratic system—especially one who presides over a divided government. But certainly his broad political views are clear enough, as are his political sympathies. He hasn’t been able to change the course of American politics, but not because he wouldn’t like to. He just hasn’t been able to.

So: who is Angela Merkel? After 15,000 words, I still don’t feel like I know. Is she really just someone who’s skilled at keeping her political coalition together and doesn’t much care about anything more than that? It’s a little hard to believe. And yet, that sure seems to be the main takeaway from all this.

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The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

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Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

by panisylvia Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Vincent Rue, a marriage therapist best known for his discredited theories about how abortion causes mental illness, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars assembling legal teams to defend extreme anti-abortion bills. But lately, the states that hire him have been getting a raw deal.

On Monday, US District Judge Myron H. Thompson skewered Alabama for involving Rue in the defense of a law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. Thompson struck down the law, which had threatened to close three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics. Notably, Thompson disregarded two arguments made by John M. Thorp, an OB-GYN at the University of North Carolina Hospital and one of Rue’s go-to expert witnesses: that complications arise from abortion more often than is reported in official statistics, and that admitting privileges are necessary to good patient care. Both claims have been key for states defending these sorts of abortion restrictions.

This is the second time this year that a federal judge has dismissed evidence brought by Rue’s favored expert witnesses. In September, a Texas judge ruling on an anti-abortion bill that would close all but six of the state’s clinics raked the state’s attorneys across the coals for bringing on Rue—and hiding his involvement.

Rue was thoroughly discredited as an abortion expert long before Alabama hired him. When he testified in two landmark abortion cases in the 1990s, judges disregarded his testimony for being personally biased and lacking expertise. Mainstream medical organizations have rejected Rue’s research on a supposed mental illness caused by abortion, “post-abortive syndrome.”

In Alabama, Rue recruited expert witnesses for the state and in one case wrote the entirety of the report the state’s witnesses submitted to the court. Rue didn’t testify. But the state paid him $82,890 for his work. It paid the two witnesses that Thompson called out in his opinion, Thorp and James C. Anderson, a Virginia emergency room physician, $40,174.75 and $76,279.20, respectively. Thorp, Rue, and Anderson did not reply to requests for comment.

Thorp based his testimony on a study he wrote for a pay-to-publish journal. (Traditional academic journals do not charge authors for printing their work.) He misplaced decimal points in his report to the court compiling abortion complication rates. When challenged about his methodology on cross-examination, Thorp told the court to “knock a point off” his estimate of complication rates.

At trial, Anderson admitted that Rue had written a report to the court that Anderson signed. Anderson also said that Rue provided most of the research for a second report Anderson wrote. Anderson further testified that he didn’t know courts had disregarded Rue’s testimony. Thompson was incredulous.

“You say you don’t know his employment or any organizations that he belongs to,” the judge asked Anderson. “Why do you trust him?”

In his Monday ruling, Thompson tried to guess at the answer: “Either Anderson has extremely impaired judgment; he lied to the court as to his familiarity with Rue; or he is so biased against abortion that he would endorse any opinion that supports increased regulation on abortion providers. Any of these explanations severely undermines Anderson’s credibility as an expert witness.”

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Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

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Pennsylvania Teenager Simulates Oral Sex With Jesus Statue, Faces 2 Years in Prison

by ErlindaSpalding Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Teenagers are prone to dumb, tasteless pranks, but one 14-year-old is facing prison time for his latest stunt. The teen, from Everett, Pennsylvania, hopped on top of a statue of a kneeling Jesus—in front of an organization called “Love in the Name of Christ”—and simulated oral sex with the statue’s face. Naturally, he posted the pictures to Facebook, which made their way to authorities.

Officials in Bedford County charged the teen (whose name hasn’t been released) with desecration of a venerated object, invoking a 1972 Pennsylvania statute that criminalizes “defacing, damaging, polluting or otherwise physically mistreating in a way that the actor knows will outrage the sensibilities of persons likely to observe or discover the action.” You’d think an appropriate punishment for a kid violating this seldom-invoked law might be picking up trash or, at worst, paying a fine. If convicted, he faces much worse: two years in juvenile detention.

Truth Wins Out, a LGBT advocacy nonprofit, has argued that the law is unconstitutional because it violates the establishment clause—”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—and free speech rights—”Congress shall make no law abridging the right to hump a statue of Jesus.”

Pennsylvania is not the only state with a “venerated objects” law—many states have some version of it, but most define “desecration” as vandalizing or otherwise physically harming an object of civic or religious significance. Alabama, Tennessee, and Oregon have laws like Pennsylvania’s, which can be interpreted to punish individuals—like this bold, dumb teenager—who simply decide to do something offensive.

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Pennsylvania Teenager Simulates Oral Sex With Jesus Statue, Faces 2 Years in Prison

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