Ah, the confusion that reigns when folks talk about church and state . . . SCOTUS rules in favor of religious freedom on one day, and the next day — the very next day! — religious conservatives come out screaming about the threat to religious freedom.

No one could have anticipated . . .

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request by Protect Marriage Washington that the state be blocked from releasing further copies of Referendum 71 petitions while PMW appeals an earlier Federal District Court decision that ordered their release.

Wonder how these two will decide? The suspense is killing me.

In 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun famously announced his opposition to the death penalty: “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” It cannot be administered fairly, he said, and “the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error” ensures that some innocent defendants will be killed.

The circus around Troy Davis’ execution tells me that we are continuing to tinker with the machinery of death. We are diminished as a society as a result.

Lost in the dust of the national debt this week was a Texas execution. While every execution is an egregious violation of human rights, this was distinguished in it blatant disregard for not only human life but for the rule of law.

Earlier, we learned that (thanks to Antonin Scalia) the word “suspicion” no longer means what it used to mean.

Now we learn that “protected” doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

As Josh Gerstein reports, the judge in the Thomas Drake case has agreed to let the government protect unclassified information using the Classified Information Procedures Act. But as Drake’s lawyers make clear, the process of substitution is making unclassified information look classified.

SCOTUS has just ruled unanimously that John Ashcroft can’t be sued by Abdullah al-Kidd for using a material witness warrant to incarcerate him. The eight justices (Elena Kagan recused herself) all agree there was no law explicitly prohibiting this kind of abuse of material witness warrants, so Ashcroft has immunity from suit.

When facing endless “war,” be it a war on drugs or a war on terror, such niceties as constitutional rights always end up a causality of these nebulous conflicts. After all, when eternally battling with a generalized evil that will never cease to exist, the trampling of a few personal freedoms can be framed as an acceptable price. The latest example of this trend can be seen with this horrible new Supreme Court ruling, which basically shreds our Fourth Amendment rights.

The lone dissent was from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who realized this ruling just gave police carte blanche to routinely ignore the Fourth Amendment in drug cases. Police can use almost any noise they hear to claim they have “good reason” to believe evidence is being destroyed, and if the history of how police have bent and broken the rules to fight the war on drugs is any guide, they will.

In effect, SCOTUS’ decision not to take this case leaves in place state secrets precedent that allows the government to commit grave crimes, but hide behind state secrets.