noteworthy wrote:
With regard to the Boy Scouts angle, see BSA Legal:

Those lawsuits seek to use the Establishment Clause to sever government relationships with Scouting merely because Boy Scouts pledge a nonsectarian promise to do their “duty to God.”

I think its unlikely that the ACLU would be fucking with the Boy Scouts if they hadn't kicked out all the gay people. These lawsuits certainly aren't winning the ACLU any friends. They're doing this because they don't like bigotry, even really popular bigotry. To this, BSA Legal says:

Q. Don't Boy Scouts discriminate against gays and atheists?

A. Boy Scouts of America is one of the most diverse youth groups in the country, serving boys of every ethnicity, religion, and economic circumstance and having programs for older teens of both sexes. That Boy Scouts also has traditional values, like requiring youth to do their "duty to God" and be "morally straight" is nothing to be ashamed of and should not be controversial. No court case has ever held that Boy Scouts discriminates unlawfully, and it is unfortunate here that anyone would characterized Boy Scouts' constitutionally protected right to hold traditional values as "discriminatory." That is just name-calling.

Don't they realize how stupid that sounds? It can be both legal and discriminatory, and, in fact, it is. The BSA wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to discriminate without being called discriminatory. They also want to be a private organization that has the right to discriminate while being a quasi public organization that is associated with the school system and receives government funds. The ACLU is making them choose one or the other. I really have no sympathy for conservative whining about this. If they want to discriminate against people they can do it with their own money.

In Redlands, California, the city council reluctantly capitulated to ACLU's demands and agreed to change their official seal. But Redlands didn't have the municipal funds to revise police and firefighter badges that contained the old seal so, as reported by the Sacramento Bee, `rather than face the likelihood of costly litigation,' Redlands residents now `see blue tape covering the cross on city trucks, while some firefighters have taken drills to `obliterate it' from their badges.'

The city seal suits in California don't make much sense to me. See my comments here and be sure to click through to see the new LA County seal. There you can see that this anachronistic seal was adopted during the late 50's establishment frenzy (IMHO the grapes were much better), but at the same time the irony of the Goddess Pomona did not escape the LA Government. I AM sympathetic to the idea that there might be a problem here, but this law is absolutely not the appropriate way to resolve it.

RE: Legislating Violations of the Constitution