Daily Archives: April 15, 2008

Turkey’s Office of Religious Affairs has announced that Muslims may forsake Islam for another religion.

Catholic Insight magazine has paid $6,000 in legal fees fighting a human rights “hate” complaint, yet no hearing date is in sight.

“I so subscribe to his notion that there are — there’s right and wrong in life, that moral relativism has a danger of undermining the capacity to have more hopeful and free societies, that I want to honor his convictions, as well.”

A second bioethics watchdog has told LifeNews.com that claims the new announcement of a supposedly easier method of human cloning is hogwash.

He says respect for marriage is essential if the world wants to achieve peace.

Religion Clause Blog reports that a Kentucky Court has given a mom sole custody to make educational decisions for her son to attend a Catholic school.

. . . the Pope and the president will continue the discussions that they have been having about the role of faith and reason in advancing their shared goals . . .

Same sex couples could ‘create’ their own biological babies, and a person could even be both mother and father, if fertility scientists get the go ahead.

Citizens crowded into Carlton City Hall on Monday night to decry a local bar’s plans to start offering nude dancing or other forms of adult entertainment . . .

Barely two years out of the jungle, former Maoist guerrillas were poised on Monday to lead Nepal’s new government, as initial election results signaled that voters had chosen to remove most of their veteran politicians from office and seek a radical break with the past.

HuckPac.com has issued this press release that begins: “Former Governor Mike Huckabee (AR) has started Huck PAC, a Political Action Committee to raise funds for Republican candidates and continue promoting the principles and ideas of conservative, smaller and more responsible …

. . . a Christian man in Algeria was convicted for proselytism on April 2. Just last week, he was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence. It’s just part of an ongoing crackdown on 26 of the 50 Protestant churches in Algeria, reports MNN.

The former Christian Dalits from the town of Tirunelveli were reconverted by the Hindu Monks Tamil Nadu Council, according to The Times of India . . . The HMK plans to re-convert another 20,000 Christians in Villupuram district in southern India, according to AsiaNews . . .

The AP reports on the Boston Globe: A federal commission said Tuesday that North Korean refugees suspected of meeting with religious groups in China are often marked for harsh interrogation, torture and long detention without trial after Beijing forces them …

A court case sparked by the town’s battle to keep an adult sex toy, video and “romance shop” from opening in a middle-class neighborhood played out Monday with dry legal arguments in state Supreme Court.

. . . many leaders and activists don’t want the Florida Senate measure to pass because it doesn’t contain language that would ban discrimination based on gender identity and expression.

A middle school principal says he made ‘‘an error in judgment’’ last week by not more fully discussing a teacher’s plan to tell seventh-grade students her sexual orientation during health classes.

Gov. Jim Doyle signed a bill Monday that ensures virtual schools qualify for state aid but caps enrollment and subjects those schools to a program audit.

“Gay couples who still live in the state where they got hitched can split up with little difficulty; . . . But gay couples who have moved to another state are running into trouble . . . ”

Westmoreland County borough will let a church use a public park for a National Day of Prayer observance after a Christian legal group [ie. ACLJ] threatened to sue if the church was denied equal access.

OneNewsNow reports: Pro-family attorney Pat Trueman says it’s outrageous that a Pennsylvania college professor will spend only 30 days in jail after being sentenced on three counts of possessing child pornography . . . He argues that the college professor’s …

. . . we hold . . . a reasonable observer would conclude that Borden was Endorsing religion when he engaged in these acts.

The New Mexico Human Rights Commission has released an opinion in the Elane Photography case. In this case, a lesbian couple sought to have their same sex “wedding” photographed. Elane Photography refused to photograph it based on religious objections. The …

The schools’ principals asked that MissionAmerica.com, a Christian group, remove the school names after pressure from the family members of some students . . .

The Kansas state agency that regulates doctors is getting bashed from two state pro-life group that say it made the wrong decision to close a probe on an abortion practitioner.

Taking the life of cohabitation for a test drive before committing to a marriage has become enormously popular. And yet, with the failure of so many cohabiting relationships, and the swollen divorce rates of couples who cohabit before marriage, such a widespread cultural practice deserves critical examination.

A sermon last Friday by a prominent Muslim cleric and Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament openly declared that “the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital,” would soon be conquered by Islam.

This guide begins by outlining major beginning-of-life issues, then divides sources into two categories – national sources and organizations.

If there are blogs or web sites that you think we should watch on a daily basis, please let us know by posting a comment below that includes a short introduction and link to the site.

Some Christian leaders are arguing for a moratorium on Muslims for several reasons: connections with terrorism, the undermining of a Christian nation and identity, and the lack of real social integration, and so on.

Bill Muehlenberg’ has this post on the Culture Watch blog. He discusses the lunacy of recent media reports about a “pregnant man.” Related: Pregnant woman thinks she’s a man and the call for sanity Crazy pregnant woman thinks she’s a …

But an e-newsletter sent out by The Alaska Family Council states the organization has received concerns that Day of Silence is portraying people who oppose homosexuality as “hate-filled bigots.”

The implications of this case are crucial in protecting states’ rights against same-sex “marriage” or same-sex civil unions.

The number of abortions in the U.S. fell 24 percent in 14 years as pregnancies among young women declined, a U.S. study found.

IT IS TIME to stop playing games with judicial nominees.

While virtually the entire legal academy has eschewed the notion for some time, one can still find those outside academia who claim that ours “is a government of laws, not men.”

Judge Ginsburg, seemingly in his element addressing Harvard Law students, took the opportunity to combine a history lesson with the views of a respected federal jurist as he described how the field law and economics has progressed from its earliest days at the University of Chicago Law School . . .

. . . Madison, to a greater degree than any other Founder, explicitly considered the legislative chaplaincy in light of the Establishment Clause and principles of religious liberty.

The Roberts Court has yet to take up the confusion that inhabits religion-clause jurisprudence.

The limits of the government’s power to restrict a woman’s right to an abortion were once again tested in Gonzales v. Carhart.

This broader reading, taking into account empirical research that gives a better idea of individual decision-making, suggests that states’ informed consent statutes have the potential to be an impermissible burden on the exercise of a woman’s autonomous decision-making about an abortion precisely because they bias a woman’s free choice, not inform it.

. . . my aim is to invite closer attention to the architectural framework of civil society and the state, and to the role of public-private partnerships in carrying out what I have elsewhere called a formative project of fostering self-government.

In 2007 and early 2008, Gibson Dunn had four Supreme Court victories and a solid collection of wins in other federal and state appellate courts.

Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers more than $112 billion a year, according to a study commissioned by four groups advocating more government action to bolster marriages . . .

SCOTUS Blog has this post describing a Title VII Petition for Cert. that is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The issue in this case is whether quasi-religious organizations qualify for the religious exemption from religious discrimination claims. Related post: …