Vox: Governors are starting to close their borders. The implications are staggering

As the Supreme Court recognized more than 170 years ago, “we are one people with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own states.” The right of all US citizens to travel freely among the states, the Court later explained in United States v. Guest (1966), “was conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger union the Constitution created.” [...]

Thus, there are two potential reasons why Abbott’s order may be legitimate. The first is that it applies to Texans and non-Texans alike — a Houston resident who returns home from a trip to Newark will spend two weeks in isolation, just like a New York resident who travels to Dallas to visit a family member. The second is that Abbott has a “substantial reason” for imposing this order. He believes that it will reduce the number of people who enter Texas carrying a terrible disease. [...]

The premise of Edwards — indeed, the premise of the post-New Deal order — is that the federal government would provide a baseline of health, prosperity, and security to the nation as a whole. In return, the states would give up their role as the sole providers of “assistance to the needy,” and with it their power to close their borders to poor Americans.

read the article

Vox: The gun solution we're not talking about

It seems like after every mass shooting, politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun buyers. But background checks don't actually do a great job of keeping dangerous people from getting guns. What does? A licensing system, where before you can buy a gun, you need a license from the state.

CityLab: Where Hate Groups Are Concentrated in the U.S.

The geography of organized hate in America is at once significantly concentrated and considerably spread out. On the one hand, hate groups are found in slightly more than 10 percent of U.S. counties (340 of 3,142), according to the study. But on the other, hate groups span the entire country, and can be found in every single state. While the heartland—stretching from the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—has among the highest levels of hate groups, the East and West Coasts have a high density of these groups as well, as the map below shows.

The study finds that, not surprisingly, the geography of organized hate is shaped by factors like race and ethnicity, education, poverty, religion, and political conservatism. Organized hate is concentrated in places that are poorer, less educated, less diverse, and whiter, more religious, and more conservative. But the precise extent to which these factors affect hate differs somewhat in different parts of the country. The maps below chart the connection between hate groups and these variables for the 340 counties that are home to hate groups. [...]

The study shows that while organized hate groups are concentrated in U.S. counties, no geographic region is immune to hate. Indeed, hate in America has a long, distressing history that cuts across America’s major geographic regions. The Midwest was a hotbed of white supremacy before the Civil War and is home to the Michigan Militia. The South and Southwest have long been centers for the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups. The Northwest saw a striking rise in white-supremacist groups in the 1980s. And the Northeast has had its share of organized hate as well: In the ‘30s and ‘40s, a wave of anti-Semitic and racially motivated violence hit what we now think of progressive states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York.

read the article

Vox: We aren’t having an evidence-based debate about guns

“There’s some evidence that certain types of gun laws, like universal background checks, may be useful,” David Hemenway, a Harvard University professor who has written extensively about injury prevention and guns, told me. “There’s no evidence at all about raising the age to 21. There’s certainly no evidence about arming teachers. There’s evidence [that] arming more people is typically good for the gun industry and bad for society.”

What we do know is that fewer guns likely lead to fewer deaths, as Vox’s German Lopez has explained at length. So improved background checks and higher age limits could reasonably be expected to help. But these are largely inferences from other countries with stronger gun laws rather than rigorously researched theories that have been tested in America. (We do have a few non-government studies, from Connecticut and Missouri, that suggest background checks help reduce gun deaths.)  [...]

We don’t know much beyond that. Congress has made it effectively impossible for federally funded researchers to study gun violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are the gold standards for public health research in the United States. But they are effectively barred from studying a problem that kills more than 35,000 people in a year.

read the article

The Atlantic: More and More States Are Outlawing Gay-Conversion Therapy

In the U.S., state governments are beginning to outlaw conversion therapy in growing numbers. California became the first to do so in 2012. Eight other states have banned it in some form since. In 2017 alone, Nevada, New Mexico, and Connecticut have signed their own bans into law. And two weeks ago, a long-anticipated bill passed the Rhode Island Senate. [...]

While one can imagine a clear moral argument against this practice, the ruling in the JONAH case stemmed from the simple fact that it does not work. Research supports this point. A decade after the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer published a controversial and refuted study in 2003 of 200 men and women who claimed to have changed their sexual orientation to “predominantly heterosexual” after some form of “reparative therapy,” he apologized, saying there was no way to verify his participants’ responses. [...]

During his presidency, Barack Obama called for an end to “therapies” that aim to change sexual orientation or gender identity, but a bill introduced to ban conversion therapy at the federal level stalled in Congress last year. The 2016 GOP platform drew the ire of activists as well as the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay conservative group, for including “the right of parents to consent to medical treatment for their minor children,” which some both in and outside of the party interpreted as a tacit endorsement of “conversion therapy.” And, according to McCoy, the understanding of conversion therapy as a threat to children has helped marshal Republican support for these bills at a state level. [...]

Still, the laws in many states are limited. Most states that have enacted bans restrict the actions of licensed mental-health practitioners like psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and are focused on minors. These laws don’t affect unlicensed practitioners or adults who seek their services. This will be the case for Rhode Island in the very likely event that the newly passed bill is signed into law. In contrast, New Jersey’s JONAH case declared conversion therapy completely illegal in the state on the basis of consumer fraud. Even an adult who wants to undergo treatment with a life coach, a clergy member, or other provider not subject to the rules of a licensing board can’t do so legally, because of the lack of evidence that conversion therapy works.

read the article