Dear Readers,

Last week we wrote that Santa Clara professor Steve Diamond’s grounding in reality was so tenuous, and his comments so far into outer space that he must be approaching escape velocity. This was mistaken, and for that mistake, we apologize. [See: Santa Clara Prof Just Making Up Tuition Facts and Santa Clara Prof Steve Diamond Approaches Escape Velocity]

The truth is that Steve Diamond occupies an independent subspace bubble. While it appeared that Steve Diamond was traveling at an extremely high velocity, he in fact has no speed at all,* and it is his private space bubble that is traveling so fast.

This might be confusing to those readers who are not familiar with the theory of faster-than-light travel, but don’t worry, all you really need to know is that Steve Diamond is not traveling away from our reality, but has instead become detached from it.

*Because motion is a relativistic concept, and Steve is the only occupant of this subspace reality, he has no movement within it.

Now we’d like to go into more detail about just how Steve has managed to leave the plane of existence the rest of us occupy. This is by no means a full accounting of his ground breaking work in astrophysics and aerospace engineering, but it hits most of the good points.

First, he thinks that we’re on some sort of witch hunt. The comment that gave rise to this belief is this:

Steve Diamond isn't just flying into outer space, he's approaching escape velocity. And Santa Clara lets this guy teach business law and corporate finance. Lucky for him, he has tenure, but if we were SCU students, we'd under-enroll his classes until he was forced out.

He referred to this comment as a witch hunt twice on Faculty Lounge, and once again on his own blog. However, the comment he objected to referred to him specifically, and no others. A witch hunt is an attempt to persecute an entire group. Also, we are rather fond of wizards, witches, and all magical sorts here and would never want to hunt them. Quite the contrary, we only hunt non-magical squibs like Steve Diamond.

Next, Steve thinks that he should be protected from criticism at Con Daily because of the principle of academic freedom.

I am protected by the principles of academic freedom embodied in the 1940 statements of the American Association of University Professors, of which I have been a proud member since I joined the Santa Clara faculty.

Well whoopadeefreakingdoo! We’re protected by the principles of freewheeling uppity law bloggers embodied in the 2011 statements of the Constitutional Daily Association of Constitutional Daily Contributors, of which we have been proud members since we started Constitutional Daily.

Or, to put in another way: the AAUP’s principles have no jurisdiction here. We’re not a university, and we don’t have a contract with you. But, just in case they were relevant, let’s take a look at what the AAUP says about academic freedom in the 1940 Statement:

College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

They specify that it’s freedom from institutional discipline. That means your university shouldn’t punish you for your views. Doesn’t mean third parties can’t criticize you, or that students can’t vote with their feet. And then there’s all that other stuff that comes after it. You have comported yourself with not one shred of the dignity the AAUP hoped professors would aspire to.

But wait, Steve has more to say about academic freedom.

So there are two simple steps here: one, tenure is important to academic freedom, and two, academic freedom is a basic civil liberty established over many centuries as part of the general universal right to free speech.

Academic freedom …is a basic …CIVIL LIBERTY.

There are very good arguments to be made in favor of academic freedom, and there are good arguments to be made that the freedom of speech is a basic civil liberty, but it’s absurd to argue that academic freedom is a basic civil liberty. He might as well be arguing that the failure to award a professor a summer research stipend is a human rights violation. Someone call the United Nations, Professor Stephen wasn’t given enough research assistants!

Academic freedom is a good and a privilege, but it is not a basic civil liberty and it’s not part of “the general universal right to free speech.” The fact that the AAUP only tries to apply to professors should clue you in. Freedom of speech is a right the people hold against their government. Academic freedom is a right professors hold against their institutions. You don’t even have to take Con Law (did you take Con Law) to figure out the difference.

The last thing we want to address is Steve’s bizarre objections to the use of sticker prices when discussing law school tuition:

Do you think it is misleading to post nominal tuition numbers in red on your [LST’s] website when the actual cost of law school is impacted by so many other factors?

In fact, the prominence given to the nominal number on the LST site raises an important question: are they using a misleadingly alarming number to drive traffic to their site?

What’s going on here is pretty obvious. The original claim Steve made that we latched on to was that the faculty at Santa Clara decided not to raise tuition. We said this was false, because Santa Clara’s tuition (the nominal, sticker price) had continued to go up. Steve responded by saying that there were measures which would have raised tuition further, but were blocked by the faculty senate. We didn’t buy his explanation. A claim that you’ve not raised tuition, to a reasonable reader, means the sticker price hasn’t gone up, not that it’s gone up but by less than it could have. Under this reading, every single school has blocked tuition increases, either by voting down some measures that would raise tuition, or be nipping it in the bud and never letting such a measure even come to a vote. Of course, that reading is stupid, and no reasonable person would ever read it that way.

Steve knows, or ought to know, how his remark would be interpreted, and in the light of that interpretation, his claim about SCU not raising tuition is false. We’re standing by that.

Rather than backing off the issue, Steve is doubling down by trying to discredit all use of sticker price, with his eyes now set on LST, acting as though the organization is up to no good by using this number. Yet, to anyone still occupying the same reality as the rest of us, the reasons for using it are quite obvious:

1. It’s the data that’s available. Some information about tuition awards is out there, but the numbers are inexact, such as number receiving “half to full” awards. That’s a huge range, and using that data to figure out average tuition paid would involve a lot of guess work. LST goes with the number that is known for certain, because it’s published on the school’s website. That’s right, it’s the rate that every law school, including Santa Clara, uses to talk about its tuition.

2. It’s what a lot of people pay. At Santa Clara, 54% of students pay full freight. Nationwide the number is roughly half. That does mean that roughly half of students pay some other amount. Trouble is that the other amount is not one single amount. It can range from discounts that combined over three years are less than $10,000, all the way up to scholarship packages that not only cover tuition but put money back into the pockets of students. So, half of students are paying a price spread across a huge spectrum of discounts, and half are paying exactly sticker price. Pretty obvious what number you use, especially when you consider…

3. It’s easy to apply a discount to the non-discounted rate. It’s going to cost you $45,000 a year, and you’ve received an award of $10,000 a year. Even a 0L can do the math. But using a different rate is a bit harder. You’ve received an award of $10,000 a year, and the average tuition paid at your school is $25,500. That’s a difficult starting point. And in fact, it’s a completely useless starting point, because schools don’t tell students that they’re paying the average rate, they just give the award amount.

I do think however that the obsession with nominal tuition numbers is not helpful, a point I have now made here and on ConstitutionalDaily exhaustively. That this blatantly obvious and rational conclusion is ignored by LST and others suggests that there is another agenda here. Kyle and LST have still not made their annual reports or Form 990s available so that they too can be checked for accuracy.

That’s some real sharp thinking there, Steve. LST uses the sticker price, not for any of the obvious reasons, but because there is some hidden agenda. Just what do you think that agenda is? And of even greater concern, how has LST managed to infiltrate every single law administration and convince them to post the sticker price on their websites? And how did LST manage to sneak the requirement to post tuition rates into the ABA accreditation standards?

This is some scary shit, bro, these guys are everywhere. Now we understand why you were so eager to escape into your subspace bubble and leave this reality behind.

God speed to you, sir.

Santa Clara students taking a class from Steve Diamond this semester, you’re still in the drop-add period. Despite Steve’s belief that you’d be violating his inalienable rights endowed to him by his creator, you are in fact free to take classes from another professor who shows more intellectual promise.

See also: Various comments on Faculty Lounge, Steve's blogging on the subject, Steve trying to defend himself on JDUnderground where he gets pummeled by someone posting as "bangbus."

Yesterday we wrote about how Santa Clara University law professor Steve Diamond was defending his school with some extremely dubious facts. Here are the relevant claims he made in a comment on the Faculty Lounge:

At SCU we have already committed, and have been committed for several decades, to all of the things you suggest - lower salaries, more teaching, more administrative work by faculty and lower tuition than is the norm at schools like Stanford. [...]

We constantly debate those choices and try to find the right balance - which has included in the last few years decisions to freeze salaries, not raise tuition and increase administrative work for faculty.

SCU's sticker price is cheaper than Stanford, by just over $5,000, though SCU is still well north of the $40k mark. But, we pointed out that Stanford grants far more generous scholarships, making the average cost at Stanford in the ball park of $2,000 cheaper than SCU per year.

Steve Diamond responded to this analysis:

[I]n addition to the actual real dollars, not "nominal," ten percent differential with Stanford which adds up over three years, the point being made was that the Stanford tuition pays a much smaller percentage of the actual cost of Stanford because of their substantial endowment and other resources, the benefit of their chosen strategy to serve a certain market in comparison with SCU's. SCU must meet a larger share of its cost from tuition.

This is harder to follow than Erie Doctrine analysis. We'll start with the easy part though, that SCU's cheaper tuition is cumulative over the three years, so instead of being $5k cheaper, it's more like $15k. Except that scholarships are also cumulative. Stanford's median award is $26,000, and that's per year, not divided over 3 years. We don't have Stanford's scholarship retention rate, but generally speaking, elite schools tend to not cut off very many people. On the other hand, 60% of Santa Clara students receiving scholarships have their awards reduced or eliminated. So, over a three year period, Stanford's $2k differential stacks up to $6k, plus an additional difference from scholarship retention.

In other words, professor Diamond, when you multiply a negative number (the tuition differential) by a positive number (year of law school), what you get is a bigger negative number. We know, the maths are hard.

And now for the confusing part of his response:

the point being made was that the Stanford tuition pays a much smaller percentage of the actual cost of Stanford because of their substantial endowment and other resources

Um, no. The point being made was:

lower tuition than is the norm at schools like Stanford

But even with Stanford's tuition making up a smaller portion of its revenues, just what is the point? I suppose you could criticize Stanford for not using its endowment and alumni contributions to lower tuition, but that's not really the point you made. What you pointed out is that when you go to Stanford, other people help subsidize your education. You get more bang for your tuition buck.

Finally, we want to turn to one other comment Diamond made in his response. He originally stated that the faculty at SCU had decided "in the last few years" to not raise tuition. We pointed out that tuition has been raised every year since 2007. (We've since found more data showing it's been raised every year since 2005.) Diamonds response was:

The SCU faculty did vote to block a proposed tuition increase recently. Nothing was made up.

There are two readings of this. First, maybe he means that the faculty voted to block tuition hikes, but were overruled, and the hikes went through. If that's the case, his original defense of SCU should have noted that the block of a tuition hike was ineffective. The second reading is that SCU's faculty has blocked a tuition hike for the 2013-14 school year. The data just aren't yet available for that, so we don't know. (We asked Diamond to specify for what year(s) tuition increases were blocked, but have not heard back.)

Since we don't have next year's tuition, let's look back at that claim that Santa Clara has for decades been committed to providing a cheaper education than at schools like Stanford. The recession began with the collapse of the housing and finance industries in 2007. In early 2009 the hit caught up to the legal industry, and we saw the Lathaming. So the first chance schools had to adjust tuition in response to the crippled legal economy would have been for the 2009-2010 school year.

Between 2009-10 and 2012-23, Stanford raised its tuition by $4,749, or 10.76%.

For the same period, Santa Clara saw greater increases both in nominal dollars ($5,640) and in tuition percentage (14.83%).

It would seem that instead of being committed to providing a lower cost education, Santa Clara is trying to catch up to Stanford.

All that aside, it is possible Steve Diamond believes in earnest that what he claimed was right. He could have been thinking in terms of nominal tuition rates, and maybe the faculty has blocked a tuition increase in 2013-14. We think he's in outer space, but it's possible that he's just in a low orbit.

Except when he tried to throw a punch at Law School Transparency:

My guess is that LST is really interested in making money not in any serious change, hence its interest in brand recognition. No doubt it will be offering law school applicants some kind of software package that will only add to the cost of going to law school.

In Steve Diamond's world, Santa Clara, which has raised tuition every single year, is committed to not raising tuition, and Law School Transparency, which has never charged for access to its product, is only interested in getting money from its users.

Steve Diamond isn't just flying into outer space, he's approaching escape velocity. And Santa Clara lets this guy teach business law and corporate finance. Lucky for him, he has tenure, but if we were SCU students, we'd under-enroll his classes until he was forced out.

Pennsylvania’s superior court has ruled that a murder-suicide occurring in a home is not a material defect requisite of disclosure in that home’s sale. Or, in other words, while a murder-suicide occurring in a house might be “psychological damage” to the property or its reputation, realtors don’t have to disclose psychological damages.

This case arose when a man in West Chester, PA, allegedly shot his wife and then killed himself in their home.  At a real estate auction, a family purchased the home. After that, the family and their realtor, Re/Max, listed the house for sale and confirmed with both the Pennsylvania Real Estate Commission and the Pennsylvania Association of Realtors that they were not obligated to report the murder-suicide to buyers. They sold the house to a man who brought suit, apparently unaware of the alleged murder-suicide prior to purchase.

We’d love to have some sympathy for the guy, but, West Chester is a town of less than 20,000 people. Probably safe to say this story got a solid amount of local news coverage. If the buyer is a local, it’s hard to have much sympathy for him.

But, the murder-suicide was 7 years ago, and maybe he’s not from around there. He just lucked in to the bloody mess, and to make matters worse, his lawsuit is going to have a bit of a Streisand effect. Now everyone has been reminded of what happened in the home he purchased, making the stigma that much worse.

Most states don’t require this type of disclosure. Alaska requires sellers to report a murder or suicide occurring on the property within the preceding three years, if the seller is aware of said death. So, a smart seller could just avoid the requirement by waiting four years? Alaska also requires disclosure of any human burial sites on the property. There’s no time cap on that one, but who’s going to admit to knowing of human remains on the property? Doesn’t that mean the seller either bought the house, human burial site included, or buried someone themselves? Yikes.

California doesn’t require disclosure of any deaths occurring on the property if the death occurred more than three years prior to the property’s transfer, and hey, fun fact, it Cali also doesn’t require disclosure that an occupant of the property had AIDS. But, California also does not protect the broker, owner, or agent from any misrepresentations they make if a buyer asks a direct question about deaths occurring on the property.

Which leads us back to Pennsylvania. What happens there, now that a death on the property isn’t a material defect? If the buyer specifically asks, how can and should the seller respond? Is Pennsylvania going to take a page out of California’s book and not protect a seller who misrepresents? Can they refuse to answer? Can they say “not that’ I’m aware of” and be okay? What if it’s a murder and the alleged murderer has yet to be convicted? It’s a death in the house, and it may be known to be a homicide, but murder has some more elements to it. Maybe the house should get the presumption of innocence.

If the right not to disclose a murder becomes well known among house buyers, they can simply do an end-run around the rule by asking a direct question. “Do you know of any murders or suicides that occurred in this house?” Assuming the realtor won’t just lie, he would be pressed to say “I’m not going to answer that.” In a court of law, no inferences can be made by exercising the right to not answer a question, but the real estate business isn’t a court, and buyers can assume the obvious. In order to give an effective right not to disclose a murder or suicide, there’d need to be the right to lie, limited to an “I don’t know.”

If the seller refuses to answer, can the buyer interpret that refusal as a confirmation that something awful did happen there? In which case, the realtor revealed the answer anyway. Buyers are allowed to make obvious deductions; buyers aren’t a court of law; they don’t have to respect a right to not answer.

Over at the Faculty Lounge there has been a great deal of debate over a new article by Law School Transparency proposing alternative models for legal education, and some debate over the professorial response to that article. The best action though has been in the comments, with Steve Diamond, a professor at Santa Clara, debating with some anonymous commenters. Diamond has not been winning the blow-by-blow, and his last comment had to venture into making up facts out of the air:

At SCU we have already committed, and have been committed for several decades, to all of the things you suggest - lower salaries, more teaching, more administrative work by faculty and lower tuition than is the norm at schools like Stanford. [...]

We constantly debate those choices and try to find the right balance - which has included in the last few years decisions to freeze salaries, not raise tuition and increase administrative work for faculty.

Stanford tuition in 2012-13: $48,870

Santa Clara tuition in 2012-13: $43,680

Okay, so Santa Clara does have the lower nominal tuition, and by more than $5,000, though it's certainly silly to say that $43,000 a year for law school is low. But that's just the nominal tuition. At Stanford, 61.6% of students receive some scholarship, 33.1% receive scholarships of half or more, and 2% receive full or greater scholarship packages. The median award at Stanford is $26,027.

Santa Clara, as you might imagine, is much stingier when it comes to scholarships. 46% receive some scholarship, but only 3.3% receive an award of half tuition or greater, and 2.1% receive an award of full tuition or greater. The median award at Santa Clara is $10,000.

Stanford beats Santa Clara in the half-to-full scholarship range by nearly 30 percentage points. Let's do some back of the envelope math here...

$48,870 / 2 = $24,435 ...That's the lowest amount a half-or-more award can be.

$24,435 x 0.3 = $7,331 ...That's bigger than the gap between nominal tuitions, so in reality, Stanford has the lower real tuition rate. Where SCU performs better is the tuition range. While the average bill at Stanford is lower, Stanford's highest is higher than SCU's.

Let's look at the other claim Diamond makes though, that SCU has chosen not to raise tuition.

2012-13: $43,680

2011-12: $41,790

2010-11: $39,360

2009-10: $38,040

2008-09: $36,750

2007-08: $35,250

Uh huh ...yeah, that's just um... what's the word?

False.

Con Dailers rejoice, we've just squeaked past the 3 million hit mark. See:

Okay, the back end of the site isn't that exciting.

And what's that "of unlimited" bit about? It's about us counting web traffic the hard way, ad impressions, which for us mostly just means it's not counting traffic from mobile devices, because the mobile version doesn't load our dummy ad we use for tracking traffic.

...That's all. Go back to your stupid job, knowing that you're less relevant than we are.

Back in May, Rutgers-Camden School of Law send out a recruiting letter to students who had done well on the GMAT, but had not (necessarily) taken the LSAT. So, you know, people who are less likely to be familiar with the legal economy than your typical prospective law student. Claims made in the recruiting letter ranged from the misleading to the down right false. When asked to explain the statements, Dean Solomon famelariously said:

I don’t know how to respond. If you have a hundred people, would four of them be misled? Would one be misled? Would 98 be misled? It was a piece that was designed to get people to think about something they hadn’t thought about. This wasn’t the only information they could get about it.

In case you're ever faced with a similar situation, when someone asks if a statement you have made is misleading, the answer is "No," not "I don't know how to respond."

After a bit of back and forth and a FOIA request, Law School Transparency has gotten to the bottom of one of the most dubious claims the recruiting letter made. As a reminder, here's the statement:

Our average starting salary for a 2011 graduate who enters private practice is in excess of $74,000, with many top students accepting positions with firms paying in excess of $130,000.

1 student was in a job earning exactly $130,000. 2 were in clerkships with offers to work at firms after the clerkship ended, and those jobs were for more than $130,000, and another student had a post-clerkship offer for $130,000. So depending on how you count, the number of Camden students earning in excess of $130,000 was either 0 or 2. Or, we can be really generous and include those earning exactly $130,000, and the numbers become either 1 or 4.

But no way you look at the numbers makes 4 out of 242 "many top students." That's the kind of reasoning that only exists on the LSAT.

So, Law School Transparency has filed an official complaint with the ABA. Not that anyone really expects the ABA to do much, after they fined Illinois less than $50,000 per offense for using false LSAT/GPA data. But the official complaint will mean that the ABA will have to go on the record as saying it just doesn't care about regulating the industry it is tasked with regulating. The entire job of policing law schools has basically fallen on the shoulders of three unpaid volunteers.

Meanwhile the ABA is saying that it's the job of lawyers to stop prison rape. Because hey, if you can't do your own job, why not ask other people to do something that's totally not their job.

California Senator Diane Feinstein is going after the guns:

On the first day of the new Congress, I intend to introduce a bill stopping the sale, transfer, importation and manufacturing of assault weapons as well as large ammunition magazines, strips and drums that hold more than 10 rounds. I am in the process of gathering support for the bill in the Senate and House.

I have been working with my staff for over a year on this legislation. It will be carefully focused on the most dangerous guns that have killed so many people over the years while protecting the rights of gun owners by exempting hundreds of weapons that fall outside the bill’s scope. We must take these dangerous weapons of war off our streets.

Anyone who listens to a non-yelling news source probably knows all the key points of the assault weapon and high capacity magazine debate. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Feinstein got the message because her bill makes the same boneheaded mistake as the 1994 assault weapons ban: it grandfathers in weapons already owned.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if it looks like the bill is going to pass that people will begin stockpiling weapons to make sure they get grandfathered in. Worse, if the grandfathering works like the 1994 bill, the weapon won't even need to be possessed by the consumer yet, it can still be held by the manufacturer or a retailer. Before the 1994 passed, the manufacture of assault rifles went through the roof.

Despite what you've heard about American manufacturing, our capabilities are far beyond what they were in 1994 (the jobs aren't here, but the technology is far better). If the bill passes, again we're just going to see a huge spike in production and new assault rifles will still be available from retailers for years to come.

This isn't a "it won't work, so do nothing" argument, but the opposite. If you want to get rid of assault rifles and high capacity magazines, then don't put such a huge and obvious hole in the law. Don't grandfather any of them in, and initiate a buyback for assault rifles already legally owned.

It's Christmas Eve, and in a few hours a red-clad beast man will be flying through the skies, entering the homes of families around the world, and delivering toys to all the children, because Santa's Naughty/Nice curve is pretty lax. It's literally easier to fail a class at a T14 law school than to end up on Santa's naughty list.

With all these home entries going on, it seems like Santa is running the risk of committing all sorts of crimes, the most obvious is Trespass. That's an easy one, but what about Breaking and Entering?

Consider the typical Sandy Claws home entry:

Santa lands his sleigh on the roof of a house, gets out with a sack of toys slung over his shoulder, and then slips down the chimney. Do any of these situations constitute a break:

1) Entering through an open chimney and fire place

2) Turning a flue damper

3) Opening a fireplace grate (door style)

4) Moving a fireplace screen

If there is a break, do any of these situations give rise to a trespassory entry:

1) The family believes in Santa, and has left out cookies and milk in anticipation of his arrival

2) The parents do not believe in Santa, but the minor children do, and (with the permission of the parents) have left out milk and cookies

3) No one in the family believes in Santa, and no one has left out milk and cookies

4) The family believes in Santa, but is celebrating Christmas elsewhere

5) The family is Jewish

If there is a B&E, the next question is Burglary. Assuming the jurisdiction requires a B&E of the dwelling of another at night time for the purpose of committing a felony therein, will there be a Burglary?

We can assume all the elements except intent to commit a felony as a gimme. Are there any actions which Santa intends to take which would constitute a felony? Here's a few fact patterns to consider:

1) The parents do not believe in Santa, but the minor children do, and (with the permission of the parents) have left out milk and cookies. Santa consumes the milk and cookies.

2) The parents do not believe in Santa, but the minor children do, though no milk and cookies have been left out. Santa goes into the fridge and helps himself to milk and cookies.

3) Santa kisses Mommy with her informed consent.

4) Santa kisses Mommy, knowing that Mommy is under the mistaken belief that Santa is her husband in disguise.

Does the analysis in any of the above scenarios change if rather than Santa Claus entering the home, Santa has been kidnapped and replaced by Jack Skellington wearing a Santa Costume?

Folks, the War on Christmas has heated up this year. Or, perhaps it'd be more accurate to say it's gone cold. The White House still has their traditional Christmas tree, and a Santa's village, but this year they have discontinued the national yule log. It has been replaced by a woman in a Santa hat who will tell you how to file a complaint.

It's not really a single log, of course. But for fifty years the White House has lit a large fire pit, fed by hazardous trees removed from national parks. But this year the layout of the Christmas decorations has changed, and the fire pit didn't make it into the new design.

First Obama ends the War in Iraq, then he ends the national yule log. Is no time-honored American tradition safe?

[Washington Post]

Earlier, Not an Elle wrote about how ridiculous it was for parents to get up in arms about Yoga being taught in a California elementary school. Sure, Yoga has strong ties to Hinduism, but there's nothing particularly religious about the actual stretching exercises. It's not like teaching Yoga is seriously being used as a back door in to Hinduism any more than teaching charity would be a back door into converting students into Christianity.

Yet, I'm still getting a bad feeling about this, and one of the parents gets at what that bad feeling is:

They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions. They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching. [NYT]

It's that other stuff beyond just stretching. Now, it's pretty reasonable to ask "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?" But what might be troubling about this is the how to part. How to find peace and comfort has traditionally been the realm of religion. Christians believe that peace comes from accepting Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior and living your life in a way that gives glory to God. Jews believe that there is no peace and it's their lot in life to suffer ...for the glory of God.

Where this all gets weird though is when we start adding in things like New Age and replacing religion with "spirituality." There's no deity involved, and it's not a religion. But it's totally a religion. Or rather, these philosophies and practices fill the same role in people's lives that religion traditionally has, and they often invoke the devoutness and prosthelytizing that comes with a religion. The hippies have slid under the First Amendment radar because their religion isn't a religion.

And maybe you think that's good enough to get a First Amendment pass. But if so, you're going to have people like Bill O'Reilly coming along and arguing that Christianity isn't a religion, it's a philosophy. ...Okay, he' wrong, but there definitely is a Christian philosophy that is different from the religion. Where Papa Bear went wrong is that Christianity is the religion, Christian Philosophy is the philosophy.

What if we start teaching students that human beings are, by their nature, wicked creatures, and to find peace and comfort you must atone for your wickedness daily? That's not religion, that's just Judeo-Christian philosophy. What if we teach kids that the only path for personal improvement and advancement as a species is conflict and destruction? It's not religion, it's Z'ha'dum Spirituality.

Except that it is religion, or at least something with the exact right size and shape to fit into our religion box, and to be enough like religion that maybe we shouldn't let the state be teaching it.