Joel Mathis

There's a lot to unpack in George Will's column today about Vanderbilt University's decision to withhold recognition from the Christian Legal Society, a campus group that (naturally, given its orientation) wants to ensure that only Christians can be in its leadership. I think Will goes wrong by starting to compare apples to oranges. Will must be quoted at length: In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organized Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to bar participation by a group of Irish American gays, lesbians and bisexuals eager to express pride in their sexual orientations. The court said the parade was an expressive event, so the First Amendment protected it from being compelled by state anti-discrimination law to transmit an ideological message its organizers did not wish to express. In 2000, the court overturned the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the state law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation requir

George Will thinks the GOP can capture some of the Latino vote by ... making Puerto Rico a state . He uses his Sunday column to profile Luis Fortuno, the Republican governor of Puerto Rico: Conservatives need a strategy for addressing the immigration issue without alienating America's largest and most rapidly growing minority. Conservatives believe the southern border must be secured before there can be "comprehensive" immigration reform that resolves the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants. But this policy risks making Republicans seem hostile to Hispanics. Fortuno wants Republicans to couple insistence on border enforcement with support for Puerto Rican statehood. This, he says, would resonate deeply among Hispanics nationwide. But why would that be the case? Latinos aren't abandoning the Republican Party over concerns about the citizenship of other Latinos 1,000 miles away from U.S. shores. They're abandoning the GOP because they don't like ho

Let's talk about the filibuster. Back up: There's no discussion of the U.S. Senate or the filibuster by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 22. Hamilton's wrapping up a long discussion of why the Article of Confederation are a bad way to run the United States -- and while he touches on a few topics here, he spends most of this essay talking about one particular evil: Under the Articles, it's all too easy for a minority of states with a minority of the U.S. population to obstruct the will of the majority. And what becomes clear is this: If the pre-Constitution U.S. government was unworkable because of such problems, well then: Today's U.S. government is unworkable. Under the Articles, see, each state -- no matter how thickly or thinly populated -- had an equal voice in the national governance. What's more, it took the consent of two-thirds of the states to pass major legislation: In an era where the United States comprised just 13 states, that meant that five