Douglas Laycock is a professor of law at the University of Virginia. His efforts to reason legally with unreasonable lawyers are the primary barrier standing between Attorney General Eric Holder's garrote, and religious organizations' right to receive federal grant money even though they hire only co-relgionists. Groups on the left like neither this right, nor the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel's 1997 opinion that affirmed it. In their estimation, OLC's opinion should be withdrawn, and the law should require Catholic Charities, for instance, to hire candidates from Act Up, Planned Parenthood and the Muslim Brotherhood if it wants to serve the needy with federal money. Noman wonders what the needy think about that. Noman also wonders why money is funneled to the needy through federal grants in the first place. This wouldn't be an issue if the federal government stayed out of the money-funneling and condition-imposing businesses, and left more money in private pockets from which citizens could dispense beneficence according to their own lights. That would end the legal quagmire, and allow well intentioned people to help others without having to bow to the left's sacred cows. Why should they have to? This episode underscores an unsavory and all too familiar feature of contemporary governance. The left agitates to expand federal control over ever-increasing sectors of life, and then agitates to prejudice "incorrect" groups from participating in those sectors unless they capitulate to the left's will-to-power. All the while we are to believe that we are ruled by law, not men. Noman says that we'd all be freer and more civil if the federal government had less of our money to engineer society with.
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