Daily Archives: April 25, 2008

Christians and proponents of federal abstinence programs cried foul over what they claimed was a biased attempt to write off federal abstinence until marriage programs as ineffective and damaging to the health of youth.

The 27-branch Sacramento Public Library board has deadlocked 7-7 on a proposal to abandon the policy of allowing all kinds of pornography at computer internet terminals.

All of this, of course, is law blinking reality. Of course an aborted black human fetus has a racial identity. Of course an aborted human baby was either male or female — a boy or a girl.

This was a bold step for a network at a time when most LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) ground is broken on cable. With two cable networks — Here! and Logo — providing dedicated gay content, and numerous other cable networks featuring LGBT characters in original miniseries, documentaries and dramas, the LGBT experience is being portrayed with more complexity than ever.

A group called the Insurrectionalist Federation has claimed responsibility for an attack on the University of Los Andes in Santiago, Chile in which a homemade explosive device was detonated in one of the bathrooms.

Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal says a provincially funded Christian group violated the rights of a worker who had to quit her job after revealing she was gay.

Americans For Truth (AFTAH) President Peter LaBarbera today called on schools, the media and opinion-makers to “break the silence” regarding the serious health risks of homosexual behavior, and said Americans deserve an official government investigation into the matter.

A court Thursday blocked the city of Chicago’s attempt to stop a lawsuit filed by an ADF-allied attorney representing Beth-El All Nations Church.

An Obama adviser [Larry Lessig] denies he had blasphemous intent by including in his lectures a video of a ‘gay’ Jesus Christ sashaying nearly naked down a city street to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” only to get run over by a bus.

A campaign is being launched to help stamp out homophobia in British football.

Justin is a campaign against homophobia in football that aims to, “vindicate the memory of Justin Fashanu, the world’s first openly gay professional footballer.”

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—The highest court of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is reviewing the case of a longtime minister found guilty of violating church law for officiating at the weddings of two lesbian couples.

The government of Poland was pressed on the issue of abortion and sexual orientation by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last week. The grilling came during something called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a process mandated by the UN General Assembly.

Yesterday, Rep. Chris Smith introduced the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act, H.R. 5910, to ban the creation of part-human, part-animal hybrid beings.

From LifeNews: South Dakota voters will have a second chance to consider an abortion ban as State Election Supervisor Kea Warne says the Yote Yes for Life group sponsoring the measure got enough signatures to qualify it for the ballot. …

High school students in a Toledo suburb were threatened with having to skip prom and other senior graduation events if they didn’t remove their pro-life T-shirts. A group of students had planned to draw attention to the destruction of human life in abortion until school officials got upset.

Laura María Agustín’s provocative new book . . . really does what it says on the back cover: ‘[It] explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.’

Via How Appealing, a FindLaw essay by Vikram Amar and Alan Brownstein on the question, “Does a Minority Religion Have a Right to Join Majority Religions in Placing Its Own Monument in a Public Park?”

“The California marriage amendment will allow the people of California, not politicians or courts, to decide the meaning of marriage and place that meaning inside the Constitution,” Joseph Infranco, an attorney for Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona group helping the initiative campaign, said as he delivered about 44,000 petitions to Sacramento County’s registrar of voters office.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chair of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, said he plans to introduce the hate crimes bill as an amendment to the fiscal year 2009 Defense Authorization Act, either in committee next week or on the Senate floor in late May.

Although the building, which was a disused kindergarten when the church acquired it ten years ago, has been extensively renovated by the church, the authorities are not offering either compensation or another building.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is admittedly a conservative and a law-and-order guy. But he’s not biased –

From the Feminist Daily News Wire: Hundreds of Chileans announced that they will leave the Catholic Church on April 29, in protest of the Vatican involvement with a court’s anti-contraception ruling. Chile’s Constitutional Court outlawed President Michelle Bachelet‘s free emergency …

Emerging Issues in Embryo Donation and adoption will be the centerpiece of a first of its kind conference next month in Washington D.C.

For many Italian Catholics, and perhaps Catholics in other European countries as well, the death penalty is what abortion is for many Catholics in the United States – the defining moral issue of the time.

Research indicates that lesbian and gay kids want to be married with children by the time they’re in their 30’s. In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, social scientists have found that many lesbian and gay youth have expectations of spending their adult life in a long-term relationship raising children.

There is a mountain of media out there promoting a phony philosophy about the joys of casual, risky sexual experimentation; one need look no further than the junk advice featured in magazines like Cosmopolitan to see just how pernicious it is.

Both the LA Times and Reuters reported that abstinence-only education has received “$1.3 billion” in federal funds since the late 1990s, but they failed to put the number in context.

Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal is following the controversy surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas’ commencement address at the University of Georgia

Little, however, is said about China’s religious persecution, especially of Christians. Yet it is on par with, if not worse than, the harsh and oppressive treatment of demonstrators in Tibet that has received widespread news coverage and caused public outrage.

An Egyptian convert contrasted the love shown by Christians “with the unloving treatment of Muslim students and faculty he encountered at a university in Medina.”

David Gibbs of the Christian Law Association talks marriage and the Constitution on the CLA’s radio program.

In the current issue of The New Statesman, a prominent intellectual journal in Great Britain, she argues again that political policies must be free from religious influence. The background is a new controversy there over the potential creation of human-animal hybrid embryos.

This week’s federal court ruling denying a request by strip club owners to block enforcement of a new county ordinance governing them is set to take effect Wednesday.

Underwood and a growing number of other young, left-leaning believers are entering the political arena as campaign aides, lobbyists, grass-root activists and engaged voters. They are trying to expand the focus of faith-based politics beyond the religious right’s hot-button issues of abortion and gay marriage.

“If you’re not going to be educated that day, why let them go to school?” said Bill Brooks, executive director of the N.C. Family Policy Council, one of the groups encouraging parents to consider taking their children out of school today.

Pastor Ken Hutcherson said on 710 KIRO’s Dori Monson Show that the “Day of Silence,” in support of gay and lesbian rights, is being forced on students at Mt. Si High School in Snoqualmie.

The State of Israel has agreed for the first time to register an overseas adoption by a gay couple and to grant the child Israeli citizenship.