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If we go back in time, we’ll see that much of today’s crisis is the fruit of yesterday’s dumb feelings. When Bill Clinton turned over the White House to George W. Bush, North Korea was nearly contained. A deal had been reached to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors in exchange for shutting down their plutonium reactor. Unfortunately, this disgusted Washington’s hawks, and they did their best to undermine it. Only an amoral egghead, went the sentiment, would stoop to cut a deal with a malevolent tyrant. Once Bush took office, the heart got to point the way. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” explained Vice President Dick Cheney. “We defeat it.”
Well, that worked out well. Going with gut revulsion toward North Korea’s tyranny regime led Pyongyang to tear up the deal and get back to its bomb-making ways. By the time Bush handed off the problem, North Korea was well on the way to being untouchable.
Then came Barack Obama, who looked at all his options. Failure might have been an unavoidable result, but what made it inevitable, at least after 2011, was yet another moment when sentiment pushed reason out of the car and grabbed the wheel. That was when Libyans started to protest the tyranny of their leader, Muammar Qaddafi, in February 2011. The protesters had grounds for complaint, especially since Qaddafi’s response was to promise to kill them all. But did it mean the United States should intervene?
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Yes, came the consensus reply. Decent people couldn’t stand by while mass killing unfolded. Reluctance to use force, of the sort Obama was showing, was “a disgrace,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic. Familiar names like Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot were among the many signatories to a letter urging Obama to take action “for the sake of our security as well as America’s credibility.” So did Samantha Power and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So did former Clinton employee and Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, with a New York Times op-ed headlined “Fiddling While Libya Burns.” This wasn’t her title, but it summed up the zeitgeist of the moment. Eventually, Obama relented and took out Qaddafi by force.
Rare in that stretch were the voices counseling nonintervention, and even fewer were those warning of the effect on nuclear proliferation. They included American Conservative blogger Daniel Larison, conservative provocateur Mark Steyn, and C.I.A. veteran Paul Pillar, who warned about the message sent when we whacked “someone who gave up not only terrorism but also his unconventional weapons programs in return for normal relations.” Arms expert Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey was among an even rarer group who warned that North Korea was watching.
As it turned out, the dissenters were right. Iran’s leaders took notice, and hard-liners redoubled their efforts to scuttle negotiations over the country’s nuclear program, warning that they could otherwise share Qaddafi’s fate. Similarly, Pyongyang’s news agency laid out its analysis: that the nuclear deal with Qaddafi had been a trap which, using “such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of relations,’” had caused Libya’s regime to disarm and “then swallowed it up by force.” To which the official U.S. response was something like, “Well, yeah, but . . . we didn’t destroy Qaddafi until he displeased us, and that was, like, eight years later.”
To be fair, sentiments here were running strong. If I recall my own thoughts correctly, for instance, I considered the effects of our actions on nuclear proliferation but still, I confess, felt only mildly opposed to the intervention. That was because thoughts about incentives or broken deals or sovereignty seemed legalistic and hypothetical, while the threat of bloody suppression in Libya seemed immediate and visceral. But that’s precisely the problem. After all, what’s theoretical today becomes visceral tomorrow. Qaddafi’s oppression bothered us, but a nuclear exchange with North Korea will bother us even more.
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In a major upcoming Supreme Court case that weighs equal rights with religious liberty, the Trump administration on Thursday sided with a Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
The Department of Justice on Thursday filed a brief on behalf of baker Jack Phillips, who was found to have violated the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act by refusing to created a cake to celebrate the marriage of Charlie Craig and David Mullins in 2012. Phillips said he doesn’t create wedding cakes for same-sex couples because it would violate his religious beliefs.
The government agreed with Phillips that his cakes are a form of expression, and he cannot be compelled to use his talents for something in which he does not believe.
“Forcing Phillips to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs invades his First Amendment rights,” Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall wrote in the brief.
[The spurned couple, the baker and the long wait for the Supreme Court]
The DOJ’s decision to support Phillips is the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken to rescind Obama administration positions favorable to gay rights and to advance new policies on the issue.
But Louise Melling, the deputy legal counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the couple, said she was taken aback by the filing.
“Even in an administration that has already made its hostility” toward the gay community clear, Melling said, “I find this nothing short of shocking.”
Since taking office, President Trump has moved to block transgender Americans from serving in the military and his Department of Education has done away with guidance to schools on how they should accommodate transgender students.
The DOJ also has taken the stance that gay workers are not entitled to job protections under federal anti-discrimination laws. Since 2015, the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission has taken the opposite stance, saying Title VII, the civil-rights statute that covers workers, protects against bias based on sexual orientation.
Federal courts are split on that issue, and the Supreme Court this term might take up the issue.
Indeed, lawyers for Jameka Evans, who claims she was fired by Georgia Regional Hospital because of her sexual orientation and “nonconformity with gender norms of appearance and demeanor,” on Thursday asked justices to take her case.
Citing a 1979 precedent, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected her protection claims.
Taking that case, along with Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, would make the coming Supreme Court term the most important for gay rights issues since the justices voted 5 to 4 in 2015 to find a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry.
The case of Phillips, a baker in the Denver suburbs, is similar to lawsuits brought elsewhere involving florists, calligraphers and others who say providing services to same-sex weddings would violate their religious beliefs. But these objectors have found little success in the courts, which have ruled that businesses serving the public must comply with state anti-discrimination laws.
Mullins and Craig visited Masterpiece Cakeshop in July 2012, along with Craig’s mother, to order a cake for their upcoming wedding reception. Mullins and Craig planned to marry in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriages were legal at the time, and then hold a reception in Colorado.
But Phillips refused to discuss the issue, saying his religious beliefs would not allow him to have anything to do with same-sex marriage. He said other bakeries would accommodate them.
The civil rights commission and a Colorado court rejected Phillips’ argument that forcing him to create a cake violated his First Amendment rights of freedom of expression and exercise of religion.
The court said the baker “does not convey a message supporting same-sex marriages merely by abiding by the law.”
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