In 1982, Wisconsin was the first state to enact a non-discrimination law that prevented companies from firing individuals based on their sexual orientation.

Now, imagine if you will, a socially conservative business owner in rural Wisconsin who learns that a hard-working and  very reliable employee is gay.  In a misguided (but, from his point of view, well-meaning) action, this employer offers to enroll his worker in a conversion therapy program.  He refuses.   Their confrontation creates tension between the two, resulting in a decline in the employee’s work performance.  The employer fires him.

With the help of the ACLU and Fair Wisconsin, the employee takes the employer to court, contending the employer discriminated against the employee because he was gay (in violation of the 1982 statute).  The Alliance Defense Fund hears of the case and offers not just to defend the employer — but also to challenge the constitutionality of the Badger State’s 1982 law.

The Fund turns to the First, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments to make a case for the employer’s rights of free association as well as his liberty and property interests.  Seeing this case as an opportunity to strike down not just the 1982 Wisconsin law, but other state mandates on employers’ rights, a number of libertarian groups join the suit.

Accepting these libertarian arguments, Governor Scott Walker and state Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen elect not to defend the law.

Now, while I contend that the libertarian argument may well have constitutional merit, I believe Walker and Van Hollen would be wrong not to defend the state’s law.

Before I write a post on a related matter, let me ask you, our readers to guess that related matter and why I offer this hypothetical.

NB: Tweaked the piece since I first posted it in order to improve the flow and make my point clearer.

Over at the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, just back from vacation is blogging up a storm and her posts are, as always, well worth your time.  She mocks “the media horde” who, “like a moth to the flame”, have been congregating “around the egomaniacal Donald Trump.”  She asks if the president is going to “allow Gaddafi’s mercenaries to act with impunity“.  She critiques his “half-hearted Middle East policy.”

And, she notes, as the cost of a gas climbs toward $5 a gallon, at least here in California, this new kind of politician has turned to a page from the old Democratic playbook and decided to blame the oil companies for rising prices, devoting “his Saturday radio address to the issue of rising gas taxes”.

The problem, however, is not big, bad greedy oil companies, but the big, strong regulatory apparatus of the federal government, preventing companies from drilling for oil on our own shores and for developing, free of the hand of state intervention, new sources of energy.  Indeed, the Obama Administration, Rubin reminds us, has “helped restrict domestic supply.”  When we could pump more oil, we increase domestic supply.  A greater supply means lower prices.

Thus, “If Obama,” she concludes, “wants to do something productive, he’d open up new domestic sources of oil and natural gas instead of new inquisitions of energy executives.”  Exactly.

With his push for “‘clean-energy’ government subsidies”, the president pulls another page from his party’s playbook, calling for the federal government to “fix” a problem the federal government created  – and not by eliminating the source of the problem, but instead by compounding.  More government intervention as the answer to the failure of government intervention.

Without strict federal regulation over our natural resources, we could pump a lot more oil in the United States, thus sending fewer dollars overseas and keeping gas prices lower across the country.

UDPATE:   Doug Ross provides one example of how the administration is keeping gas prices high:  ”the EPA,” he reports, has “blocked Shell Oil’s second effort to drill an exploratory well in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea.”

Once again, Donald Trump raises an important issue about President Obama, but, then in the next breath, puts his foot into his mouth.  He’s right to question “Obama’s refusal to release his college grades” and to point out that this refusal is “part of a pattern of concealing information about himself.”  But, he’s wrong to speculate that “Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended.”

One thing we do know about the president’s academic record is that “he graduated magna cum laude” from Harvard Law School.  You don’t graduate magna cum laude if you’re not qualified to attend an institution.   To graduate magna cum laude, you often have to be in the top 10, if not 5% of your class.  One blogger has looked into this more deeply than I have and contends “Obama finished in, say, the top 30% or 40% at HLS in grades.”  Still not too shabby.

Not just that, most law schools have a policy of blind grading (and my preliminary research indicates that Harvard had such a system in place when Obama was a student there) which means his professors wouldn’t know whose exam they were grading, thus law school grading provides a pretty reliable measure of a student’s aptitude, not colored by the professor’s affection for the student (or concern about how much money his family could donate to the school).

If, at worst, Obama was in the top 40%, he was above the median GPA for his class.  If he didn’t deserve to be admitted to Harvard Law, then the majority of his class didn’t merit admission either.

In her article on Trump’s latest (and apparently successful) attempt to raise questions about Obama’s refusal to release his records, the AP’s Beth Fouhy includes this line, “The so-called “birther” controversy has dominated the early stage of the 2012 GOP nominating contest, with Trump leading the charge.”  Seems someone wants to make it appear the GOP is obsessed with birther-ism.

Hey, Beth, most Republicans aren’t even paying attention to the contest right now, just political junkies.  And the news media.

On Saturday, David Freddoso was the latest in a series of bloggers and pundits to find similarly (sizable) minorities (at least according to polls) of Republicans who buy into “birther-ism” as there are Democrats buying into “truther-ism”:

Politico’s Ben Smith notes something I’ve brought up several times in this space and had the opportunity to discuss once on MSNBC. People have made much of the surprising share of Republicans who will tell pollsters they buy into the fantasy that President Obama is really a foreigner in the Oval Office (a logical consequence of birther-ism).

But just a few years ago, you could get an equally, surprisingly large number of Democrats to tell pollsters they believed that George W. Bush either allowed 9-11 to happen, despite having foreknowledge, or else actually conspired to make it happen.

To be sure, this comparison does help us see that folks on both sides of the political aisle are susceptible to conspiracy theories.

There is, I should note, another comparison which also works in this context.  And not to understand the susceptibility of political partisans to conspiracy theories about their adversaries, but instead to show the mainstream media apparent indifference to gaps in the president’s biography.

That comparison is the way the mainstream media, particularly CBS News, reacted to the immediate past president’s National Guard service.  There were supposedly gaps in the records and suggestions (mostly brought up by his political opponents) that George W. Bush has shirked his duty.  So, CBS devoted years to an investigation.

Now, if reports in the conservative media are correct, Barack Obama’s team is spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to keep the long-form birth certificate under wraps.  You’d think a media wishing to hold politicians to account would be investigating to see if the Democrat is hiding anything. (more…)