For decades, federal bureaucrats have told faith-based charities the same thing: your money is welcome, your services are welcome, but keep your faith out of it or keep your hand out of the till. Last week, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel finally said what conservatives have argued for a generation. That policy was never legal in the first place.

There is something almost quaint about watching a young journalist become a minor sensation for stating facts that a community college economics professor would have taught for free in 1975. Emma Camp, a University of Virginia graduate now writing for the Wall Street Journal's Free Expression section after cutting her teeth at Reason, has built a following this year by doing exactly that. 

This column is not a verdict on Lindsay Clancy. That is not our job, and it was never going to be settled by a Tuesday deadline for a column deadline. What is worth examining, closely and without the squeamishness that has come to define public conversation about crime and mental illness, is why an American jury in the year 2026 finds it so difficult to look at the strangulation of three children and render a clean moral judgment either way. That difficulty did not begin in a Plymouth County jury room. It began in the classroom, the therapist's office, and the op-ed page, decades before these particular twelve citizens were ever summoned.

Denmark granted asylum to 864 people in 2024. That is the lowest total in four decades outside the COVID lockdown year of 2020, and it happened under a Social Democratic government, the same political family American progressives cite as proof that generous welfare states and open borders can coexist. Denmark's left concluded they cannot, and built a policy around that conclusion years ago.