HIT & RUN BLOG

Igor Mojzes / DreamstimeNo, this isn't a Clickhole story; if you're a white man in Stephanie McKellop's history class, you might be called out, but you probably won't be called on.

McKellop, a graduate instructor at the University of Pennsylvania who describes herself as a "queer disabled feminist," recently tweeted, "I will always call on my Black women students first. Other POC get second tier priority. WW [white women] come next. And, if I have to, white men." McKellop eventually deleted the tweet, but not before the internet immortalized it.

Bret Weinstein, the former Evergreen State College professor who was hounded by student-activists for criticizing their protest tactics, described McKellop's teaching method as "racism," and "vile." The usual conservative news sites have piled on.

Inside Higher Ed ran a news story suggesting that McKellop's teaching method isn't exactly discrimination—it's "progressive stacking," a widely accepted teaching tool:

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said progressive stacking has been around at least since she was in graduate school in the 1990s. She still uses it informally, to right her own tendency to call on men more frequently than women.

"If I have a class of 40 students, since Hunter is predominantly young women, I may have four or five young men in class," Daniels said. "There's still implicit bias, where we value men's voices more than women's voices, or men's voices are deeper and carry more in a class. So I'm always trying to overcome my own bias to pick on men in class more than the women."

As to whether purposely asking a woman to answer a question over a man was a kind of discrimination, Daniels said, "That gets it the wrong way around. This is a way of dealing with discrimination that we as professors can introduce into the classroom. It's a good strategy, if you can do it."

It seems more like a way of practicing discrimination. Even if you think social inequalities make it impossible to be racist against white people, McKellop's contention that "other POC get second tier priority" is absurdly offensive on its own.

If professors have biases against marginalized students, they should strive to overcome them by calling on more students of color, and encouraging students of color to participate. If McKellop had simply said, I go out of my way to call on students who are less likely to participate, in order to make sure a more diverse range of students are receiving equal attention in class, there would be no problem. Instead, McKellop admitted to practicing active discrimination against students on the basis of their skin color.

McKellop has claimed her classes were cancelled for the week, she could be kicked out of her program, and the university is investigating her. Inside Higher Ed's sympathetic report was forced to concede that at least some of this isn't true: a spokesperson for the university said she has not been removed from her program. Administrators are indeed investigating the matter, however.

McKellop shouldn't be punished for expressing an opinion on Twitter. I'm no fan of lynch mobs against professors, and no one should ever be subjected to harassment or threats for saying the wrong thing—whether the "wrong thing" is politically correct or politically incorrect. But Penn has every right to make sure its instructors are not engaged in overt racial discrimination with respect to how they treat their students. Perhaps the dean of McKellop's department should remind her that she can't just ignore the white guys in her classroom.

While the United States has benefited greatly from free trade and immigration, President Trump's attempt to raise barriers to people and services is a danger not just to Central America but to the entire world, says executive president of Guatemala's Universidad Francisco Marroquín (UFM).

Calzada sat down for with Reason's Nick Gillespie at Freedom Fest 2017 to talk about the impact of trade restrictions on Latin America and the changing role of students and higher education in bringing capitalism to the region.

Watch above or click here for full transcript and downloadable versions.

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Joanna AndreassonWe recently got married. Well, technically, we got married twice.

One fine day this spring, we put on nice clothes and publicly performed the rites and rituals recognized by our families and community as a wedding ceremony. As part of the day's events, we signed a Ketubah, the traditional Jewish wedding contract. Historically, the Ketubah included the groom's promise to provide "food, clothing, the necessities of life, and conjugal needs" for the bride, along with a statement of the dowry the bride brought to the marriage. Modern versions are often more egalitarian. Ours included a mutual promise to "work for one another," "live with one another," and "build together a household of integrity." Ketubot are typically beautifully calligraphed works of art, and we spent a lot of time choosing the right text and design for ours. It was witnessed by our rabbi and by two beloved friends. It hangs in our bedroom as a reminder of the commitment we have made to each other.

We also got married in the eyes of the law. Our state marriage license was printed at the city-county building on cheap paper after the clerk checked our IDs, filled our names into the anonymous blanks in the same text every other couple has to use, and gave us a pamphlet about syphilis. We had no say in the wording or the witnesses. We keep that license in the safe deposit box at the bank with our mortgage and the titles to our cars.

The contrast in the thinking behind our two marriage documents, and in how we have treated them now that we have them, captures the difference between thinking of marriage as a mutual contract and thinking of it as a license from the state. It's the difference between a relationship that requires consent and one that requires permission, write Steve Horwitz and Sara Skwire.

Ye Liew / DreamstimeFood policy expert Baylen Linnekin examines the tendency by government nannies to control how food is marketed rather than educating the public on treating claims more skeptically:

I happened upon a story about this week's season debut of Tricks of the Restaurant Trade, a show from Britain's Channel 4 that uncovers artifices restaurants use to attract customers and maximize profits, and educates customers about how not to get snookered.

The show, which debuted last year, explores "how consumers can get the best experience when dining out."

"Every restaurant uses glowing adjectives and enticing descriptions to encourage their customers to buy more of its food," The Daily Mail reported this week, in a piece on the debut of the show's current season. "But if you see the words 'hand-made,' 'home-cooked,' or 'fresh,' then don't fall for the claims hook, line and sinker as the food may not live up to its label."

• Yonhap News/YNA/NewscomOther countries warn tourists going to America about our mass shootings.

• The fallout from Trump's comments to the family of a fallen solider continues.

• At least 39 killed in suicide bombing attacks on a Mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan.

• Steve Mnuchin says pass a tax bill OR ELSE.

• North Korea talks behind the United States' back in letter to Australia.

CDPFive Cleveland police officers have gotten their jobs back. The arbitrator who reinstated them did not dispute the irresponsible behavior that had led them to be fired from the force, but he decided the officers had been "good cops" before the incident and therefore should not have their careers ruined.

The incident involved a 23-minute-long chase in 2012 that began when some cops misidentified the backfire from a car's engine as gun shots. (No gun or contraband was found in or near the vehicle.) Sixty-two marked and unmarked police vehicles joined the pursuit, which ended with 13 officers firing 137 rounds into the car. The driver, Timothy Russell, and his passenger, Malissa Williams, were both killed.

Sixty-three cops were suspended, for a maximum suspension of 10 days. Of the 13 officers directly involved in the shooting at the end of the chase, six were fired and five were suspended for 21 days. Only one, Michael Brelo, faced criminal charges. He fired 49 rounds into the car, including at least 15 after Russell and Williams were "no longer a threat." At one point, he jumped on the hood of the vehicle to keep shooting. He was acquitted after a judge decided he could not determine whether Brelo was the only one who fatally shot Russell and Williams.

Brelo was the only of the fired cops who did not get his job back.

It's unclear whether the City of Cleveland will challenge the arbitrator's decision, although the mayor has expressed disappointment in it. "We believe that the City's decision to terminate the other five officers was justified and should have been upheld," he said in a statement. "We acknowledge that the arbitrator concluded that those officers committed serious policy violations; however, we are reviewing our options regarding the officers whose terminations were not upheld."

What's clear is that this kind of arrangement is untenable. Police reform will be unachievable as long as a city's elected leadership is not the final arbiter on disciplining and dismissing police officers.

Police misbehavior will continue as long as union contracts and laws like the "Law Enforcement Officers' Bill of Rights" make the police a privileged class. Getting rid of those protections is not sufficient on its own to reduce police violence, but real change will be impossible unless that reform happens first.

Consolidated News Photos/NewscomThe future of free trade in North America is up in the air as the Trump administration's talks with Mexico and Canada continue to stumble.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer recently announced negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement would be pushed back into spring of 2018. But unofficial negotiations are already very much underway—and happening out in the open.

President Donald Trump has threatened to withdraw from the deal if Canada and Mexico aren't more conciliatory. This week, the Trump administration reiterated its hopes that a renegotiated NAFTA deal would require a higher percentage of automobiles' content are made in America. Mexican officials rejected the proposal, leading some to speculate if the president is willing to make good on his promises terminate the trade agreement. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are trying to restrain Trump's eagerness to dump NAFTA, warning that it would cause economic troubles at home and unnecessary friction with America's neighbors.

Automobiles are at the center of the current spat. Under NAFTA rules, 62.5 percent of a car's component parts must come from Canada, Mexico, or the United States—if not, tariffs are triggered to protect North American production. The Trump administration wants the requirement bumped up to 85 percent, with 50 percent of the total originating in America.

The Mexican auto lobby called the proposal "unacceptable", claiming that the rule change would violate World Trade Organization rules.

Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican Ambassador and a consultant for both U.S. and Mexican companies, told Yahoo Finance that Mexican businesses are preparing for a world without NAFTA, citing President Trump's anti-Mexican and anti-trade statements as the writing on the wall.

"Psychologically, Mexico has already accepted that NAFTA is coming to an end." Guajardo said.

The U.S. might be moving in the same direction. Lighthizer, recently claimed that withdrawing from the deal is something that he and the president "think about all the time," even though the administration has no specific NAFTA plan in place.

On the campaign trail, Trump denounced the trade deal with Canada and Mexico and threatened to terminate it if better conditions weren't met. He tweeted his grievances this past August, referring to NAFTA as "the worst trade deal ever made" and said termination was on the table.

As cracks in the trade deal grow, some congressional Republicans want to keep Trump and Mexican officials from tearing it all down. The collapse of NAFTA would cause economic pain, they warn.

In an interview with the Independent Journal Review, five Republican senators expressed concern over the prospect of pulling out of NAFTA. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called the prospect of American withdrawal a "disaster." Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., remarked it would be "devastating" to both the American companies and workers.

"Economic protectionism hurts Americans, and we'd object to any move that would increase trade barriers and reduce the ability of Americans to buy and sell goods freely," A spokesman for Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., told Reason.

According to a study from ImpactEcon, an economic consulting company, American withdrawal from the trade deal with Canada and Mexico the reimposition of tariffs could cost an estimated 1.2 million jobs, hitting low-skilled labor hard.

Legal arguments are already being drawn up to block any attempt by the Trump administration to get rid of the trade agreement. But even if Congress is willing to assert itself, and Republicans are prepared to withstand Trump's bluster, their legal case is questionable.

Whether the president is willing to go through with it is anyone's guess. Trump tends to view renegotiation of America's trade agreements through a personal lens of deal-making prowess, with an interest in keeping the players off-balance.

When discussing KORUS, the U.S. trade agreement with South Korea, Trump told Lighthizer in order to get concessions, the South Koreans need to know he's willing to tear up the agreement.

"You tell them, 'This guy's so crazy he could pull out any minute,'" Trump went on to tell his staff. "And by the way, I might. You guys all need to know I might."

If Trump follows this pattern, the only thing certain regarding NAFTA is uncertainty.

This post has been updated to correct the attribution of a quote from Rep. Justin Amash's spokesman.

'Nova: Killer Volcanoes'Television critic Glenn Garvin, recovering from both the parade of fall premieres and Hurricane Irma, takes a breather to watch Nova: Killer Volcanoes:

After two wretchedly solid months of hurricanes, everybody who lives on the U.S. coast anywhere east of New Mexico will welcome a chance to wallow in somebody else's misery at the hands of nature. Which makes Killer Volcanoes, an episode of the PBS science series Nova, perfectly timed. The hell with tropical depressions and vortex fixes! We salute you, magma chambers and explosive caldera eruptions!

Admittedly, I may be showing signs of post-Irma stress disorder. But Killer Volcanoes is an interesting piece of work, the tale of a hunt for the source of a monstrous 13th-century eruption so cataclysmic it would eventually claim the lives of about a fifth the population of a European capital half a world away.

Fifty years ago tomorrow, thousands of antiwar protesters marched on the Pentagon. Armed troops formed a barrier outside the building; hippies stuck flowers in their weapons. Demonstrators dressed as cheerleaders chanted "Beat Army! Beat Army!" Other protesters tried to storm the structure, with a handful managing to get inside. And some of the political pranksters who would later form the Yippies led a ritual to exorcise the demons from the Pentagon and then levitate it into the air.

Abbie Hoffman claimed in Revolution for the Hell of It that his crew had come out to measure the building some time before:

Icarus Films"67-68-69-70-"

"What do you think you guys are doing?

"Measuring the Pentagon. We have to see how many people we need to form a ring around it."

"You're what!"

"It's very simple. You see, the Pentagon is a symbol of evil in most religions. You're religious aren't you?"

"Unh."

"Well, the only way to exorcise the evil spirits here is to form a circle around the Pentagon. 87-88-89..."

The two scouts are soon surrounded by a corps of guards, FBI agents, soldiers and some mighty impressive brass.

"112-113-114-"

"Are you guys serious? It's against the law to measure the Pentagon."

"Are you guys serious? Show us the law. 237-238-239-240. That does it. Colonel, how much is 240 times 5?"

I suspect the dialogue didn't go exactly like that, but it's a funny story anyway. When the day of the demonstration arrived, the levitators chanted "Out, demons, out!" but did not in fact form a ring around the building, prompting Norman Mailer to declare that "exorcism without encirclement was like culinary art without a fire."

The protest was captured in The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, a short documentary by the French directors Chris Marker and François Reichenbach. (Marker is probably best known for La Jetee, the science-fiction film that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys.) Antiwar veterans marching in formation, Castroites carrying "Avenge Che!" signs, Nazi counterdemonstrators, a preacher in a hydraulic crane denouncing communism: They're all here. And of course there's footage of the hippies trying to levitate the building—though not, alas, of the building actually leaving the ground. I guess the camera must have been pointed in a different direction when that happened.

Marker later reused some of that footage in A Grin Without a Cat, his mammoth 1977 documentary about the global New Left and its times. Besides the bigger canvas, there was a substantial change in tone between the two pictures. The Sixth Side of the Pentagon was made by a couple of radical partisans who believed the march had marked a shift from "protest" to "resistance." A Grin Without a Cat was made by a guy who still dreamed of a utopian society but had seen a lot of defeats and betrayals in the last 10 years.

Bonus links: For a Washington Post story on the anniversary, go here. For an oral history of the exorcism of the Pentagon, with appearances by everyone from Kenneth Anger to the Fugs, go here. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another Friday A/V Club with Yippies in it, go here.

After the rise of the Tea Party in 2009 as a grassroots expression of revulsion at government bailouts, spending, and Obamacare; after a series of insurgent Tea Party primary victories in 2010 over big-spending incumbents and hand-picked establishmentarians; after Republicans re-took the House that November thanks in part to that new jolt of fiscally conservative energy; after the House majority from 2011-14 successfully used its power of the purse to force debate and at least some temporary agreements on the debt ceiling, long-term entitlements, and year-on-year spending, and then after Republicans re-took the Senate and eventually the White House…after all this activity, when it finally came time for the GOP to stand up and demonstrate its values of fiscal stewardship and limited government, you could count the number of Republicans voting to restrain government spending on exactly one finger:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), was the only Republican no-vote in yesterday's 51-49 Senate approval of a $4 trillion budget resolution for fiscal year 2018. The resolution, more of a vague blueprint for the next decade, includes $43 billion next year for "Overseas Contingency Operations" (OCOs), a notorious budgeting gimmick that has been responsible for more than $1.7 trillion in off-budget spending this century. Quite unlike the deficit-neutral House budget resolution that passed two weeks ago, the Senate version assumes $1.5 trillion in new debt, and does not make the House's $203 billion in domestic spending cuts (the Senate's final tally is closer to $0).

So how did the fire-breathing fiscal conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus react? By agreeing to not even bother going to conference committee to reconcile the two different budgets, so as not to slow the grand prize of tax cuts by even a couple of weeks.

Another step toward reducing the tax burden on all Americans and growing our economy. Let's get #TaxReform done. https://t.co/sX9huBAf7a

— Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) October 20, 2017

When given the chance to take seriously government over-spending, and the growth-stunting debt overhang that comes with it, only one Republican is on record yelling "Stop." As Ed Kilgore aptly noted in New York magazine, "all the GOP deficit-hawkery that reigned during the Obama presidency and early in the Trump presidency vanished literally overnight."

Not only that, the budget resolution's existing "cap" on defense spending is by all reported accounts a fiction:

Flynt/DreamstimeAs more consumers use credit cards and payment apps, many businesses have decided to stop accepting cash entirely. If you think that sounds unobjectionable, you must not be Alderman Edward Burke.

Burke, a stalwart of Chicago politics who was first elected to the city's Board of Aldermen in 1969, has introduced an ordinance that would prohibit restaurants and retail outlets from refusing to accept cash. Federal reserve notes, Burke explained to Chicago's NBC affiliate, are "legal tender for all debts public or private. So follow the law."

If it were actually the law that businesses have to accept cash, of course, there would be no need for Burke's ordinance, which threatens businesses with $2,500 daily fines and revocation of their business licenses. For the record, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's website says that "private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash." The City of Chicago itself requires residents to pay with credit cards, checks, or money orders for booted vehicles. The city's buses don't accept half-dollar coins, which were legal tender the last time I checked.

Burke argues that the processing fees for credit cards get rolled into the final price of products, which consumers then have to pay. But processing cash comes with costs as well, notes John Gordon of Pacific Management Consulting Group, a restaurant consulting firm.

Cash "has to handled," he says. "It has to be stored in a POS [Point of Sale] system It has to be counted at least every shift. At the end of the day it has to counted and tallied into a sales report." All that costs time and money.

And unlike card purchases, which are in the ether as soon as they're processed, cash has to be either deposited at a bank or picked up by an expensive armored car service. "You can just see in the value chain all these costs loaded onto cash," says Gordon.

And so some businesses are going cashless. The Chicago-based chain Argo Tea converted six of its locations into cashless cafés earlier this year. Their website says that ditching paper transactions "increases our speed of service, allowing us to take your order faster and get everyone through the line and on their way with their custom-made drinks and food in less time."

For Argo, there is also a safety component to switching to card only transactions. "A cash-free store also reduces the chances of robbery, keeping our employees safe," explains an FAQ on their website.

For Burke says that businesses that go fully digital are displaying "an elitist attitude that doesn't really reflect what Chicago is about." Something that could also be construed as elitist would be for a politician to decide that he knows how to better run someone else's business. Chicago is home to thousands upon thousands of retail outlets serving customers of all incomes and tastes. The owners of those businesses are in the best position to determine if not accepting cash, or for that matter going cash-only, is the right move for them.

0x0000orgFormer presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush gave a pair of unrelated but thematically linked speeches yesterday that were widely understood to be rebukes of Trumpism. Unfortunately, the speeches also trotted out some tired clichés about division in American politics, with Bush calling out Russia for taking advantage of those divisions.

"America is experiencing the sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country's divisions," Bush said at a Bush Institute summit in New York City. "According to our intelligence services, the Russian government has made a project of turning Americans against each other."

Let's be clear: Americans are already and always turned against each other. In a democratic society we can be divided because we have agency. (There's a lot of political unity in places like Russia.) Free speech is messy by design, and what keeps our divisive politics from being destructive is the limits we've placed on government. The more powerful the government, the more dangerous those divisions actually become.

Obama played some of the same notes. "What we can't have is the same old politics of division that we have seen so many times before that dates back centuries," Obama said at a campaign rally for Phil Murphy, the former Goldman Sachs executive running for governor in New Jersey. "Some of the politics we see now, we thought we put that to bed. That has folks looking 50 years back. It's the 21st century, not the 19th century. Come on!"

PixabayAt least Obama did not describe a mythical American past when politics was more cordial, as some advocates of less divisiveness in U.S. politics do.

Bush went further, deploring how American discourse had been "degraded by casual cruelty."

"It can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity," Bush said. "Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions."

This is true, but it's also unabashedly American. And while we can call on each other to do better, there are 320 million people in the United States; it's absurd to expect them to agree on much of anything, and it would be destructive to try to paper over all their differences.

It wasn't Russians who demanded Obama's birth certificate and it wasn't Russians who compared Bush to a chimpanzee. It wasn't Russians who said you were either with us or against us, nor was it Russians who compared Congressional Republicans to terrorists or warned black people Republicans would put them back in chains. "We" did that on our own.

The obsession with Russia's influence on American politics and the divisions in it could be a lot more damaging to our democratic norms than any Facebook ads some Russians might purchase.

Domina Elle/TwitterA federal court heard arguments yesterday challenging California's criminalization of prostitution, in a case that could have implications for sex work laws across the nation.

Brought by the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education, and Research Project (ESPLERP), the constitutional challenge claims that California's prostitution laws violate residents' right to privacy, free speech, and free association.

"Our hope is to see this bad law struck down," said ESPLERP President Maxine Doogan, "so that consenting adults who choose to be involved in prostitution are simply treated as private citizens again, and are afforded all the privacy and constitutional rights thereof."

During oral arguments before Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges Thursday, ESPLERP attorney Louis Sirkin stressed that the case "is not about sex trafficking, it's not about the abuse of women, and it's not about the abuse of minors. It is about consenting adults that voluntary want to work in the sex for hire industry."

Dozens of civil rights, public health, and LGBTQ groups have filed briefs in support of ESPLERP's challenge, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern and Northern California, the California Women's Law Center, the anti–sex trafficking group Children of the Night, the First Amendment Lawyers Association, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and Lambda Legal.

"Lambda Legal's landmark Supreme Court victory in Lawrence v. Texas, the case that struck down laws that criminalized sex between same-sex partners, underscored that our right to liberty protects our decisions about adult, consensual sexual intimacy," says Kara Ingelhart, a Lambda Legal law fellow. "It is merely logical that Lawrence extend to the adult, consensual sexual intimacy that occurs between sex workers and their clients; the fact that money is exchanged shouldn't matter."

The Ninth Circuit judges seemed at least somewhat sympathetic to that view. "Why should it be illegal to sell something that you can give away for free?" Judge Consuelo Callahan asked the state's attorney, Sharon O'Grady. She replied that it should be illegal because the legislature declared it so.

Judge Carlos Bea suggested that the state's arguments for why it could ban prostitution also would allow California to ban one-night stands.

But overall, it might be "a tough panel for petitioners," notes lawyer Amanda Goad, who livetweeted the oral arguments yesterday. Callahan and the other two judges are conservative appointees of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

Judge Callahan overtly skeptical from the very beginning of Sirkin's argument -- not a surprise.

— Amanda C. Goad (@AGoadEsq) October 19, 2017

J.Callahan making generalizations about sex workers as drug addicts. I didn't think we would get there so fast! #sigh #SexWorkIsWork

— Amanda C. Goad (@AGoadEsq) October 19, 2017

Much of the court's focus Thursday was on whether a ban on prostitution implicates adults' sexual liberty and privacy or their right to form intimate relationships as they see fit. The U.S. District Court that heard ESPLERP's challenge last year contended that only "intimate personal relationships," not purely sexual ones, were protected from state interference per the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in Lawrence.

Sirkin pointed out Thursday that, in fact, the men who had been arrested in Lawrence were not in an ongoing relationship. He said that the fundamental right implicated here, as in Lawrence, concerns sexual privacy.

O'Grady concedes "you might have an as-applied challenge" if sex work happening "in the privacy of your own home." This is great!

— Amanda C. Goad (@AGoadEsq) October 19, 2017

Judge Callahan agreed that a ruling for the right to engage in prostitution seemed like "a natural extension of Supreme Court precedent."

At one point, the discussion veered into whether sex workers and their customers could be friends, with the state contending that friends don't pay each other for sex. But judges suggested that a relationship that started off as purely transactional and sexual could develop into true friendship and affection.

Ultimately, much of the case will come down to whether the lower court was right to apply a rational basis standard in judging California's prostitution law. Under the rational basis standard, a law is constitutional so long as it is "rationally related" to a "legitimate government interest." ESPLERP and its supporters argue that the court was wrong to apply this standard and should have applied the heightened scrutiny standard used in Lawrence.

Judge Bea suggested that the case might need remanded to the district court for another judicial review or even a trial in which the state would have to prove a compelling need for its prostitution ban.

Casper Police booking photoAn apparently transgender woman in Wyoming has been convicted of molesting a 10-year-old girl in a bathroom. Casper resident Michelle Martinez—whose legal name is still Miguel Alberto Martinez, so she went on trial under that name—was convicted of two charges of sexual abuse of a child and faces up to 70 years in prison.

According to the Casper Star Tribune, Martinez knew the victim and lured her into a bathroom to assault her. Nurses examined the girl after the assault and found medical evidence of the attack. Martinez and her family maintain her innocence and plan to appeal.

So now we have an actual case of a transgender woman assaulting a little girl in a bathroom. So does that mean the right-wing culture warriors were right to worry about the trans infiltration of American ladies' rooms? Not if you look at the particulars of the case.

First of all, this wasn't a stranger lurking in a public bathroom looking to prey on a random child. As is often the case when children are molested, the victim knew her attacker, and the restroom in question was in somebody's home. This crime, as serious and awful it is, sharply diverges from the bathroom-panic narrative of the stalker in a restroom laying in wait for prey. No law gender-policing bathroom use would have meant anything in this case.

Second, existing law on the abuse of children is clearly adequate to tackle this sort of situation. If Martinez gets the maximum penalty, she's clearly not going to be in a position ever to attack another child. What would an additional law restricting restroom access have accomplished here?

Think of the demands for more gun control that frequently come in the wake of a high-profile shooting. When gun foes propose new restrictions that would not have done anything to prevent the crime in question, people who actually understand firearms and the laws that regulate them are quick to point out (accurately!) that such laws would not have stopped the shooting, and to list the consequences a poorly-thought-out gun law would have for law-abiding citizens.

The same logical consideration applies here. There's no evidence that yet another law would have prevented this assault from happening. There's no evidence that existing law is unable to deal with the extremely rare cases when a transgender sexual assault of children does happen. No changes in the law are necessary.

Institute for JusticeYesterday Gerardo Serrano was reunited with his 2014 Ford F-250 pickup truck, which was arrested by Customs and Border Protection officers two years ago in connection with international arms smuggling. The smuggling involved five handgun rounds that Serrano forgot to remove from the truck's center console before embarking on a trip to visit his cousin in Mexico. The truck was never formally charged with a crime, and neither was Serrano, as is typical in civil forfeiture cases. After the Institute for Justice filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Serrano and other similarly situated vehicle owners last month, I.J. says in a press release, CBP lawyers suddenly told him "he could pick up his truck whenever he wanted."

CBP's capitulation is yet another example of how standing up to asset-seizing bullies can pay off, especially if you have the Institute for Justice in your corner. But I.J. is not done with CBP. "The government cannot illegally seize and keep someone's property for two years, and then give it back and pretend like no harm was done," says I.J. attorney Robert Everett Johnson. "We will continue to fight to see that Gerardo is made whole, and to make sure this never happens again."

Serrano still has not been compensated for the costs imposed by the seizure of his truck. He continued to make monthly $672 car payments even though he could no longer use the truck, paid $700 a year to insure it and $1,000 to keep it registered in his home state of Kentucky, and spent thousands of dollars on rental cars. Then there is the matter of the $3,805 bond (10 percent of the truck's value) that he had to pay so he could challenge the seizure in court. Serrano never got his day in court, but the government still has his money. If I.J. had not represented him pro bono, Serrano probably also would have had to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars.

The I.J. lawsuit focuses on the lack of due process for property owners like Serrano, who lose the use of their vehicles for extended periods of time while their forfeiture cases stall. In Serrano's case, CBP never even got around to filing a forfeiture complaint. In the Western District of Texas, I.J. says, the average time between a CBP vehicle seizure and the filing of a forfeiture complant is 150 days.

"No judge would have approved the seizure of Gerardo's truck," says I.J. attorney Anya Bidwell. "And that's precisely why Customs and Border Protection is giving it back. We're just saying the agency should have to explain themselves to a judge promptly after it first takes the property."

Serrano is happy about the semi-victory but wants to see more evidence that CBP has seen the error of its car-stealing ways. "I'm thrilled to have my truck back," Serrano says. "But I'd like somebody to apologize for taking it in the first place."