Daily Archives: November 17, 2008

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said today that his office is ready, if the Legislature agrees, to take a more active role in fighting human trafficking, a fast-growing crime heavily practiced in Texas.

A French appeals court on Monday reinstated the marriage of a Muslim man who had sought an annulment because his bride lied about being a virgin.

A Pendleton man who claimed to have been stabbed when he tried to defend a woman in a northeast Bend street-corner fight made up the tale and instead was injured while breaking into a nearby adult video and novelties store, police said Monday.

The ACLU asked a federal court on Monday to order the Bush administration to release documents outlining policy limiting refugee and undocumented teenagers’ access to abortion. The request comes after a Virginia-based Catholic Social Services helped a foreign teenager get an abortion.

Thus in parts of Hollywood and West Los Angeles, where afternoon commutes can be hellish on the best of days, drivers unfortunate enough to be caught in any of these protests have found themselves helplessly delayed as marchers flooded into the streets, even as dozens of LAPD officers looked on from nearby waiting for orders that never came.

The nuns who run the hospice in which Eluana Englaro has been living for 14 years have refused to carry out the court order to remove her food and hydration tube.

This article provides information about the Church’s involvement with the passage of the Proposition and its aftermath. There have been more than 40 states that have put in place protections of marriage as being between a man and a woman.

This potential change underscores the stem cell research race in the name of science and cures globally, including two recent reports in England and Iran. Universally, two prime debatable issues in the mix are ethics and measurable results.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is expressing concern that the next president will lift the ban on government funding of stem cell research.

The Philippines’ influential Catholic bishops on Friday attacked a new a bill promoting family planning in the Philippines, calling for drastic changes before it is passed into law.

As Sweden moves closer to a same-sex marriage law, Left Party leader Lars Ohly wants to include a provision to force pastors to wed gay couples. [...]

Local authorities with particularly high rates of teenage pregnancy, including Bristol, Manchester and Nottingham, were told it was “essential” to increase the uptake of long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) amongst young girls.

Groups that oppose gay marriage say the state is trying to force people to accept behavior they believe is unnatural and unacceptable. But there are signs that the number of people opposed to same-sex marriage is waning in Massachusetts.

Amendment 2, the opponents argued, therefore denied gays and lesbians the equal protection of the laws, which is a guarantee of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“Filth” recounts the story of a British precursor of the Parents Television Council, the present-day American social conservative group that helped orchestrate the Bush administration’s war on profanity.

Proponents of an Illinois constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to heterosexuals, buoyed by voter approval in three states on Nov. 4, say they’re gearing up to try again in 2010.

Protesters have massed outside Mormon temples nationwide. For every donation to a fund to overturn Proposition 8, a postcard is sent to the president of the Mormon Church. Supporters of gay marriage have proposed a boycott of Utah businesses, and someone burned a Book of Mormon outside a temple near Denver.

“That’s the kind of justice that I’m looking for,” he went on. “Somebody who respects the law, doesn’t think that they should be making the law, but also has a sense of what’s happening in the real world and recognizes that one of the roles of the courts is to protect people who don’t have a voice.”

Six global ecumenical bodies have called on African leaders to protect the rights of Zimbabweans to life, dignity and democracy.

Christian groups who feel that Christmas is slowly disappearing from the public square have launched a campaign against retailers who ban “Christmas” references from their holiday advertising.

The survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that significantly fewer voters who attended religious services said that they received information about political parties and candidates at their place of worship during the 2008 election cycle.

If economic or business conservatives thinks they can win Midwestern, western, Southern and border states without Evangelicals, Southern Baptists, culturally conservative Catholics and advocates for the nuclear family as the first of all social institutions, they are kidding themselves.

The point is that the pro-life position on Roe is one that is unpopular only because voters think that overturning Roe would mean eliminating abortion rights altogether, whereas in reality it would make possible exactly the sorts of compromises that most voters claim to want.

Nearly three years since the opening of an adult products store on Worth Road enraged area residents, the Bath town board is ready to pass a law regulating the location of adult oriented businesses in the municipality.

One W. Brown Deer Road retailer has managed to stay in business despite a campaign to shut it down.

The dispute developed after the minister selected new leadership for the congregation. A Tennessee state appellate court affirmed the trial court’s jurisdiction to decide who should control church funds and property and held that it acted properly in ordering a vote of the membership on that issue.

A 12-year-old New York boy with brain cancer has died after his family battled a hospital to keep him on a ventilator.

Sharp said the Amish would file an appeal on grounds that the safety-emblem law violates their religious freedom and that they were discriminated against because only the Amish have been cited in recent years in Graves County — despite evidence of farm machinery traveling the roads without safety emblems.

Attorneys are getting set to square off before the California Supreme Court to protect traditional marriage.

California voters may have to face the issue of gay marriage again on the 2010 ballot if the state Supreme Court decides to uphold the passage of Proposition 8.

Three pro-life organizations filed a brief Friday with the European Court of Human Rights in defense of Ireland’s ban on abortion. In September, the court granted the Family Research Council, represented by Alliance Defense Fund attorneys, the opportunity to defend the ban jointly with two other pro-life organizations.

In a thorough and thoughtful article, Excluding Religion, Prof. Nelson Tebbe asks “whether the government may select religious entities for exclusion from its support programs?” and concludes that, sometimes, it may. “The government,” he contends, “need not remain neutral toward religion in its support programs[.]”

The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Texas v. Medellin appears to represent a formalist turn in the Court’s approach to foreign relations cases.

By focusing on the death penalty, abortion, and same-sex unions, I aim to provide new perspectives not only on moral controversies that implicate one or more constitutionally entrenched human rights, but also on the fundamental question of the Supreme Court’s proper role in adjudicating such controversies.

This paper considers Justice Breyer’s dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller – in which the Court established an individual right to bear arms – as a species of progressive jurisprudence.

This article applies the insights provided by these works to a case study of some of the language in Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007). The study considers whether both the theory and content of this language were largely the work of one of the crop of clerks who worked for the Justice during the October ’06 Term.

More and more legal disputes about church and state in the coming years will involve conditions on government benefits – social services grants, educational vouchers, tax exemptions – that conflict with the tenets or practices of religious organizations that would otherwise be eligible for the benefits.