The White House recently sent out a directive requiring organizations that get money from the Federal Government to scrub their websites of any reference to such terms as “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion”. Some Universities and other organizations have responded by rushing to follow that directive.<\/p>\n
But here’s the problem. If organizations follow those directives, they may be breaking the law.<\/p>\n
The executive branch of the government does not have the right to create laws. That right is reserved for Congress.<\/p>\n
And the executive branch does is not who decides how to interpret the law. That right is reserved for the courts.<\/p>\n
So if the executive branch issues some random directive — say, requiring every American citizen to go next door and shoot their neighbor in the name of national security — you can’t immediately know whether following that directive is a legal act.<\/p>\n
Suppose you respond by going next door, pointing a gun at your neighbor’s head, and pulling the trigger. According to the executive branch which issued that directive, you were simply being a patriotic American, and in fact were upholding national security.<\/p>\n
But the courts may end up deciding that half of Americans murdering the other half is not a legal act. In which case your patriotic act of obedience to the executive branch was a crime.<\/p>\n
This would be the case even if you point out, as per the White House directive, that you were simply acting in the name of national security.<\/p>\n
The principle is the same when it comes to scrubbing words from websites just because the White House doesn’t like them. No matter what you claim to be your motive, the courts may end up deciding that you were simply breaking the law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The White House recently sent out a directive requiring organizations that get money from the Federal Government to scrub their websites of any reference to such terms as “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion”. Some Universities and other organizations have responded by rushing to follow that directive. But here’s the problem. If organizations follow those directives, they … Continue reading “Legalities”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27258"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27259,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27258\/revisions\/27259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}