“Aid for Morality Positions” unconstitutional say two federal judges
Almost lost in the news this week was a story in the Washington Post (reproduced in the San Francisco Chronicle):
Two federal judges in the past two weeks have ruled unconstitutional the government’s policy of forcing U.S. health groups to denounce prostitution as a condition for receiving funds for international AIDS work.
Both judges said the requirement violated the First Amendment right to free speech.
The most recent ruling, issued Thursday in Washington by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, found that the regulation “casts too wide a net and is not narrowly tailored,” forcing aid organizations to “parrot the government’s policies” and preventing them from using even privately raised funds to assist sex workers with AIDS prevention.
On May 9, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero issued a similar ruling in New York. The government’s “somewhat cavalier take-it-or-leave-it answer to an infringement of speech — which can more or less be characterized as ‘if you don’t like it, lump it’ — is simply not in keeping with the expectations our society derives from First Amendment freedoms,” he wrote.
… The New York case was brought by three health organizations, while the Washington case was brought by DKT International, a not-for-profit organization that works in 11 countries.
Its representative in Vietnam refused to sign papers certifying that DKT “has a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking,” because it is involved in a program to distribute condoms to prostitutes and other sex workers in Vietnam.
Good for these two judges! This administration has been trying to impose its morality across the world, and it’s about time that someone stood up to them in the name of free speech.
