News bits: TST wins PA lawsuit: Secularism wins or loses?; The evidence game in Gaza; Etc.

The LehighValleyNews.com reports a settlement between The Satanic Temple and the

Saucon Valley School District over denied access to a middle school for After School Satan Club activities:

In what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling a "victory for free speech and religious liberty", the Satanic Temple will collect $200,000 from a school district that previously refused to allow the "After School Satan Club" to meet on school grounds.

According to court documents, the ACLU representing the Satanic Temple, convinced a judge that the group was previously wrongly blocked from holding their After School Satan Club meetings at Saucon Valley Middle School. The ruling includes mention that the school district "likely violated" the First Amendment rights of the group members.

The issue at the core of the Satanic Temple's argument was that they are a religious group just like any other, so they argued they should have the same rights.

The $200,000 is for TST's costs and legal fees. Apparently no punitive damages were awarded.

What makes me nervous about this is that any religion is allowed access to public facilities on any constitutional basis. My preference is to deny all religions any special access to any public or taxpayer facility as a violation of the Establishment Clause. By using free speech as a shield to further force encroachment of religion into government and society, the Establishment Clause is seriously neutered, seriously undermining secular democracy. If people want freedom of religious speech, they can do it in their own damned religious facilities. American are already heavily subsidized churches and church property and income with massive tax breaks. The forced taxpayer subsidy is running at about $100 billion/year.

Maybe my analysis is wrong and this constitutes an actual victory for secular democracy. It just doesn't feel that way to me. It feels like a victory for Christian theocracy and its endlessly greedy corruption (raiding public resources), bigotry, intolerance and closed-mindedness.

I should probably look into this more to see if I'm right or wrong. But at present, what the TST is doing seems to be about the last resort for secularism in the face of a frightful free speech shield that protects religious encroachment everywhere.

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The NYT asks the obvious question (bravo MSM!), how long can it possibly take to prove that Hamas operated a major command center under a hospital in Gaza?:

Israel Says Hospital Held Hamas Command Center: 

How Long Could It Take for Proof?

Israel is trying to produce solid evidence for its assertion that Hamas has been using tunnels under Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a command center. But an Israeli military-led tour of the hospital grounds with journalists Thursday night showed directly only a shaft in the ground with a staircase, which did not settle the issue.  

Palestinian officials and doctors at Al-Shifa have denied that the hospital has been used by Hamas’s military.

The NYT article says that military experts say that it could take days, weeks or months for Israel to make a definitive case, or solid proof might never come. One can argue that sounds like BS. Sounds like BS to me. If a major underground military facility cannot be shown to exist in about a few days or maybe a week, then it very likely doesn’t exist. Unless and until definitive proof arises that clearly shows one did exist. While we wait the matter becomes, was the attack on the hospital an honest mistake based on bad intel, or was it just war crimes as usual?  

Israel will no doubt continue to say it’s looking for the command center, while waiting for attention to turn away. The whole stinking mess will fade out of memory and mind. Then the whole thing just goes away. And that’s typical for the miserable story of the endless misery related to Israel and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire where people called Palestinians used to live. (There never was a nation called Palestine)  

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Fun facts: Wikipedia writes about International recognition of the State of Palestine:

The State of Palestine has been accepted as an observer state of the United Nations General Assembly in November 2012. As of 2 June 2023, 139 of the 193 United Nations (UN) member states have recognized the State of Palestine (Israel is recognized by 165).

The State of Palestine had been officially proclaimed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on 15 November 1988, claiming sovereignty over the internationally recognized Palestinian territories: the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. By the end of 1988, the proclaimed Palestinian state was recognized by 78 countries.

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A threat analysis: An 8 minute MSNBC segment, Donald Trump is the greatest threat the world faces, by Ali Velshi did an analysis of the scope of threat the DJT poses to America and the rest of the world. I assess the risk factors about the same way, mostly for the same reasons.