"I don't expect you to because it's very hard and would require mindreading you don't have the capacity for, but I'm not sure I understand why this would be against your Constitution. I was at the time I came to this planet on my way to a convention to advise on the creation of a constitution for my own country and I expect it is being written now without me, and expect that it bans this alongside other forms of espionage for the country's enemies, if that is the sort of thing a constitution would refer to at all in the first place."

"Many of the people who founded the United States were people who came from countries that banned their religious practices, and they wanted it to be hard for the government they were founding to do that. We have laws about espionage, but if we tried to use them to shut down religious services, we would be taken to court and lose. Possibly if we explained the entire context to the court we would not lose, but if we did that in a normal court everyone would know about it. We have some secret courts, but if a secret court said we could shut down religious services under the espionage act for secret reasons, people would be very upset and would worry we would ban religions they've practiced their whole lives next."

"But presumably the religious practices of the people who founded the United States were... Earth religions."

"The law has been interpreted as permitting the worship of entities not conceived of at the time of writing."

"And the interpretation as well as the writing is now permanent?"

"The writing requires a very large majority of legislators to change, it isn't actually permanent. Interpretations do change but it's unwise to count on them changing in our favor here. Especially given that Earthlings have already developed religions which allegedly derive from aliens."

"Do they?"

"To the best of my knowledge, no."

"Well. In fact gods exist including very dangerous ones and I do not wish, and do not believe anyone here should wish, for the dangerous ones to have more visibility here. It sounds like... people here may have become very attached to rules which make sense where no religion is in fact dangerous. They might be excellent rules in that circumstance and I regret that it has come so close to changing."

"It is possible that we do not have dangerous gods but we do not legislate with the idea that Earth religions are never dangerous."

"...what do you do about the dangerous religions, then?"

"That is a complicated question but the short answer is that we respond when members commit crimes."

"But for - procedural reasons - the crime cannot be mental actions alone? Is there anything else you cannot declare a crime?"

"We have a lot of restrictions on making just saying things or publishing things a crime – telling other people to commit specific crimes and some kinds of lying can be illegal, and if you work somewhere with secrets and then share the secrets you learned from working there that can be illegal, but we can't ban things like criticizing the President or saying that in general it would be good if more people stole things. We can't restrict people gathering in public or weapon ownership arbitrarily. We can't order people to host soldiers in their houses but that doesn't come up much. We can't require people to testify against themselves in court. We can't ban people from voting because of their race or sex."

"If there were somehow presumably unbeknownst to you be a leak, would it be feasible to ban certain symbols? In case of empowered cultists."

"Are these symbols something that can be drawn on a piece of paper?"

"I have not actually tried casting from a drawn symbol but I would not care to bet anyone's life that they could not be used in that form. Evil clerics channel negative energy and at the same range I can heal they can kill; if they get a lucky hit in a crowd they can drop dozens of normal people this way."

"I would like you to try casting and channeling from a drawn symbol if you are willing. We can put restrictions on some government facilities that we can't put everywhere, and there are lots of private businesses that draw in crowds that also can put restrictions on what people in the crowds can bring. But if we end up in a scenario where a schoolkid can go from having a pencil and a blank piece of paper to killing their entire class in the span of a minute, that is going to be a tremendous problem with no obvious solution even ignoring the Constitution."

"Which is why not making anyone able to reach out to these entities and get such powers is so important. I just wanted that to be extremely clear, so that if there is some technicality I do not cover, we are at least on the same page that this is very much a serious situation."

"That makes sense. I think we should have some more technical aspects of the conversation with several other people and with you running Comprehend Languages, though, because there's a type of independent-minded person who goes 'ah, surely what the government really means by this order is to have someone tell Select Artigas the data is gone, but have the option to get the data back without Select Artigas's involvement' and running those people through a Zone will help. Part of why I expect things have actually been deleted is because the claim that you have and will use truth magic has been made repeatedly."

"Yes, I do, I have it prepared today. Should more of those people be in this conversation?"

"Perhaps, but there's a lot of people and I am not sure a Comprehend will cover you having this argument with all of them. I suppose I could summarize the situation as 'a leak might let a kid kill their class by drawing a picture', that might be clarifying."

"Children are unpopular cleric picks but yes."

"It's a scenario that's convenient to present because taking schools paperless would be extremely expensive and students sometimes attempt to bring in weapons and murder their classmates. I can go with a different one if you'd rather."

"I suppose your education stretching into what I'm accustomed to calling adulthood means that it is not actually even that unlikely."