Daily Archives: August 11, 2008

Higher-education lawyers who have spent the week parsing Monday’s appeals-court ruling in a Temple University free-speech case say the decision may make it harder for colleges to prohibit discrimination and harassment while promoting the open exchange of ideas.

Lawyers for the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom filed a suit on behalf of Rock of Life after the university insisted the student group relocate its pro-life displays to less prominent areas of campus.

San Diego is quickly earning a reputation as the ground zero of the Christian marriage movement.

Wisconsin State Attorney General, J.B. Van Hollen, said his office has identified approximately 15,000 computers in the state that are being used by sexual predators to exchange child porn and sexually explicit chat rooms.

Commissioners Court on Monday revised some of the items it would like in a sexually-oriented-business ordinance for unincorporated areas of the county.

Eugene Volokh has this post about the effect of strict liability laws on certain protected constitutional rights

Backers of same-sex marriage in New Jersey believe they have the wind at their backs. They are confident the state will replace civil unions for gay couples with full civil-marriage rights.

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.

a California federal district court upheld the University of California’s refusal to recognized certain high school courses offered by Christian schools in making admissions decisions

History teachers tell students that slavery ended in the U.S. in 1865, but sources tell WTOP that a “hidden epidemic” of child sex-slavery persists in this area and nationwide.

And at the same time that the German government is persecuting home-schoolers in Germany, including Americans who want to homeschool there, Berlin is encouraging its diplomats abroad, including its diplomats in Washington, to home school their children with a state homeschooling curriculum.

Soon thereafter, word of the raid made its way to the great defender of Santeria in the United States. That would be Ernesto Pichardo — high priest, physical extension of the fire spirit Shango and co-founder of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, the first incorporated Santeria church in the nation.

But the rising decibel level is deepening fault lines between a government drive to modernize and a wave of rigorous political Islam.

NBC first dropped the ball in a discussion of abstinence. One of the biggest criticisms of the The Baby Borrowers was that it sent a mixed message. On one hand, it claimed to show teens how difficult parenting is, but on the other hand it essentially condoned premarital sex by allowing the unsupervised teen couples to share beds during the series.

According to received wisdom, an Islamic faith that once tolerantly coexisted with Jews and Christians has been traumatized by the twentieth century and its destructive ideologies (such as fascism, communism, and nationalism), by the depredations of European colonialism and imperialism, and by the displacements wrought by globalization.

Most of the closures stem from enforcement of Ordinance 06-03, a law restricting non-Muslims from worshiping.

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, asking the court to consider whether a fifth-grade student’s religious expression on a classroom project may be categorically identified as “offensive” and therefore legitimately censored by Michigan school officials.

At 2:30 PM Arizona time, ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson will debate Tempe University professor Dr. Mark Lamont Hill on the Fox News Channel about the recent win at the 3rd Circuit regarding Temple’s speech code.

Protesters forced lawyers in Malaysia to abandon a conference on religious conversion Saturday, decrying it as an effort to challenge the official status of Islam in this Muslim-majority country.

“You know, it just goes to show that God is universal, and God is love, and no state, man or woman should fear the influence of loving religion.”

Can it be that John McCain and Barack Obama are more concerned about offending avid consumers of hardcore pornography than they are about the harms that obscenity is causing to our nation and to its communities, families and children?

The editors of the paper write as if the May 15, 2008 decision of the California Supreme Court is unassailable, unchangeable, and irreversible.

In short, the crime of the Supreme Court since the 1930’s, so says this book, has been its refusal to lock in the laissez faire constitutional philosophy that reigned supreme in the decades leading up the New Deal. And that, of course, is the Constitution in Exile line pure and simple.

The ACLU charged that Judge DeWeese’s display of the poster – which graphically compares and contrasts the Ten Commandments with Seven Humanist Principles – violated a 2002 injunction barring him from displaying a poster consisting solely of the Ten Commandments under the caption “Rule of Law.”

The Bush Administration has consistently supported the unborn. However, the issue I asked to be addressed in this regulation is not abortion or contraceptives, but the legal right medical practitioners have to practice according to their conscience

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit Monday in defense of a Texas law requiring students to observe one minute of silence following the Pledge of Allegiance.

Today, a federal court ruled in favor of Child Evangelism Fellowship of Virginia (CEF), granting an injunction against the Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools.

Attorney David Hacker is with the Alliance Defense Fund. He says DeJohn knew about Temple’s ‘Speech Code,’ which, he says, “is a harassment policy that is so vaguely worded and so broad in its language that, really, university administrators were able to punish any sort of speech that they deemed offensive.

State legislators will be asked to consider a bill that would require computer repair technicians to report to police any content they find on a customer’s computer that might involve child pornography or abuse.

University of Maryland-Baltimore County officials agreed Friday to modify their unconstitutional “speech code” and “speech zone” policies that restricted a pro-life student group from sharing its message on campus.

Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an Illinois state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion

Obama’s approach to education is part of a much broader pattern that characterizes his political career.

Other recent bans -and attempted bans – have challenged . . . and (this is true) the use of sexually-discriminating terms such as “Mom” and “Dad” in school classrooms.

Without a recovery of authentic and authoritative faith and the commitment to live by self-restraint for the greater good, they taught, life and liberty would not be secure, nor would humankind’s future.

It is still too early to have reliable evidence on the effects on children of being raised by gay parents, but I suspect these effects will be more negative than positive, in part because even married gay couples are likely to dissolve their match at relatively high rates.

For Planned Parenthood and the anything-goes ethos it represents, young people are always going to have sex.