Daily Archives: February 9, 2009

AZ Republic: “Phoenix police asked for help in locating a man involved with a strip-club shooting that left one man dead in December.”

Erin Brown and Matt Philbin write at The Culture and Media Institute: Popular author Steven Kotler has declared that responsible adults should stop having children in order to save the planet. Those who are having kids, are being selfish and …

http://www.mainemarriageinitiative.com Maine Marriage Initiative was established with the goal of informing Maine people about the consequences of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Maine Marriage Initiative is a coalition of concerned Maine citizens committed to preserving traditional marriage in the state. …

Albert Mohler has posted the transcript of his interview with Hugh Hewitt.

AP: “Gov. Ted Strickland’s budget bill will contain a statewide ban on corporal punishment in schools, a change that would take the decision on whether to allow spanking and other forms of physical discipline out of the hands of local …

Eugene Volokh writes at the Volokh Conspiracy on a new Diversity pledge that has been adopted by the University of Virginia Student Bar Association which provides in part: Every person has worth as an individual. Every person is entitled to …

History shows us two important things: (1) that civil unions are wholly unacceptable to those who demand them; and (2) that the existence of civil unions has twice led to the imposition of same-sex “marriage” via judicial fiat . . .

LifeSiteNews: “A radical, feminist-inspired ‘gender mainstreaming’ bill has been voted out of the Philippine Senate and is now before the Bicameral Conference Committee, which will likely meet next week in order to reconcile the upper and lower house versions of …

LifeSiteNews: . . . The announcement was made by Italy’s Health Minister on the floor of the Italian Senate, which was debating a bill that would have saved Englaro’s life. Although no cause of death has been announced, earlier news …

Debra J. Saunders writes at Townhall: This is not going to be a column that dumps on the misguided and clearly troubled Nadya Suleman — the 33-year-old unemployed single Whittier mother of six who gave birth to octuplets last month …

LifeSiteNews: “The Alberta government has announced the appointment of retired Calgary judge David Blair Mason, Q.C. as Chief Commissioner of the Alberta Human Rights Commission . . . Blackett indicated that one of the priorities for the new commissioner is …

Dale O’Lear writes at Mercator.Net: “There is currently a debate as to whether or not ‘transsexual’ children as young as 11 years of age should be administered drugs which suppress puberty. These children are profoundly unhappy with the sex with …

AZ Republic: “Despite the dreary weather, about 10 gay couples made the trip to Phoenix City Hall Monday morning to be among the first to register with the city as domestic partners.”

Needing a two-thirds majority to pass and go to the Senate, the amendment received 25 votes for it and 35 votes against.

The technological change here is evident to everyone: as a result of widely available high-powered computing, expanded cable television, and the development of the internet, pornographic images and videos are readily accessible in almost every home and now indeed on almost every cell phone and portable device. The numbers are alarming, with estimates that as much as 35% of all content on the internet is pornographic; that two-thirds of college-age men view pornography with some regularity; that a majority of high school students visit pornographic websites, some trading obscene images of themselves electronically.

The Daily Cardinal: “The Madison Surgery Center’s six-member board of directors voted unanimously Friday to open a new second-trimester abortion clinic . . . Matt Bowman, legal counsel for the anti-abortion Alliance Defense Fund, said ADF is prepared to take …

LifeSiteNews: . . . the sweep led to the arrest of 31 child sex offenders between the age of 14 and 60, as well as the rescue of two young victims, a 4-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl . . . …

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which opponents say could destroy American sovereignty by imposing international rulings on American law, could reach the Senate within 60 days.

Legal Times: . . . During a two-hour confirmation hearing last week, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Ogden about his work on cases involving abortion, the death penalty, foreign law and obscenity, repeatedly asking whether he personally holds …

Roger Scruton writes at Public Discourse: President Obama’s choice of David Ogden for Deputy Attorney General is not of concern to Americans only. The world-wide explosion of pornographic material, and its exploitation through the internet, is to a great extent …

ADF attorney Steven Aden appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition (Feb. 4th) to discuss this issue: “Can religious groups that take taxpayer money refuse to employ people based on their sexual orientation and religious beliefs?”

Quoteing ADF attorney Matt Bowman, Law Prof. Rob Vischer writes at the Mirror of Justice Blog: Catholic “moderates” on abortion reject the analogy between abortion and slavery or the Holocaust(or other massive 20th century genocides), but they often fail to …

Boston Globe: “A sharply divided Supreme Judicial Court said yesterday that a 14-year-old boy accused of statutory rape may have been a victim of gender discrimination because authorities charged him and not the three underage girls with whom he allegedly …

How Appealing highlights and links to several articles contained in the Harvard Political Review focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Catholic Culture: “Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pennsylvania, has chastised the state’s Senator Robert Casey for voting against a proposal that would have barred US taxpayer support for abortion advocacy in other countries. The bishop warned Casey that his vote …

WorldNetDaily reports: In a move with major political implications for voting, districting and representation in future elections, the Obama administration has demanded oversight of the 2010 U.S. census. The move has Republicans crying foul, alleging that transferring the power of …

Marie Jon writes at Renew America: For nearly a century, our public school textbooks have been more than suggesting that humans are related to specific members of the animal kingdom. In fact, Darwinism insists on such teaching. The untruthfulness of …

Fox News: “Michael Steele, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, has asked the entire staff to resign, FOX News has confirmed . . . “

Janet M. LaRue writes at Townhall: It’s been a taxing two weeks for President Obama and his nominees. And there’s another nominee with bigger disqualifiers than unpaid taxes. Imagine. A veteran pornography defense attorney takes a top spot at the …

The euthanasia movement assumes that people with disabilities are less valuable than you and me (well, maybe less than you, I am not sure what they think of me). Lauren Richardson’s family, and Lauren herself, have come to experience the value of a human life even in the midst of struggle. No political special interest should be allowed to use the law to kill people it thinks are subhuman.

WorldNetDaily: “A mother and father in New York were subjected by their school district’s attorney to a faith ‘sincerity test,’ which ultimately ruled their beliefs were too questionable to qualify for a religious exemption to mandatory student immunization. . .”

. . . in the 20th Congressional District, which first sent Ms. Gillibrand to Washington in 2006, many are taking it as an abandonment of the principles that persuaded them to support a Democrat in this predominantly Republican area . . .

“New York Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith said Saturday that his Democratic conference lacks enough votes to legalize gay marriage this year, but he’s committed to passing a gay marriage bill soon . . .”

One News Now: “Nebraska’s lawmakers are considering an addition to the state’s pro-life ultrasound law. If passed, it would be one of the toughest laws in the country, according to Julie Albin of Nebraska Right to Life . . . “

San Diego Union Tribune: A federal judge ruled yesterday that a nondiscrimination policy at San Diego State and Long Beach State universities required for formal campus recognition does not infringe on the rights of religious groups that demand fidelity to …

LA Times:  “If President Obama wants to deliver on the bipartisanship he has promised, he might focus on a process that in recent years has produced the political equivalent of the Hatfield-McCoy feud . . . “

Rod Dreher has this post on BeliefNet. He writes: Tamera Jo Freeman was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Denver in 2007 when her two children began to quarrel over the window shade and then spilled a Bloody Mary into …

One News Now: “The Senate rejected an amendment offered by Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) that would have stripped language from the stimulus bill that would force colleges and universities to throw religious clubs off campus if the schools receive …

How Appealing: “A New Haven-based federal judge’s ruling against a high school student for language used in her blog has led to a vow for court appeals. Meanwhile, a state legislator has introduced a bill to protect students’ free speech …

The Guardian: The Italian government has been plunged into a constitutional crisis over the fate of a 38-year-old woman who has been in a coma for the past 17 years. Eluana Englaro was left in a vegetative state after a …

SCOTUS Blog has posted the latest edition of their Supreme Court petitions to watch for the February 20th conference.  This one may be of particular interest to ADF Alliance Alert readers: Docket: 08-472 Title: Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, et …

Liberty Counsel: “Today Liberty Counsel sent a letter to the Florida Bar Association demanding that it stay out of the homosexual adoption controversy and pointing out that the First Amendment requires that the mandatory bar association remain neutral on controversial …

WKOWTV.com: The ACLU of Wisconsin is defending a Beaver Dam teacher who was put on administrative leave after she posted a questionable photo on her Facebook page . . . A Beaver Dam Middle School teacher, Betsy Ramsdale, should not …

CNN: “As many state and local officials clamor for their share of the billions of dollars in federal aid in the stimulus bill under consideration in Washington, South Carolina’s Republican governor is sounding a note of dissent about federal efforts …

Bloomberg: “The stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the government’s commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages . . . “

This is the beginning of an exploration of before as the thesis ‘before’ (temporally) and ‘be-fore’ (spatially) difference. In its double sense, before opens up a space of pre-difference, of origin and of forgotten memory, as well as a space of desire, objective, illusion of teleology, unity, completion. Applied to the two domains of Human Rights and Sex/Gender, the space of ‘before’ yields two slightly different vistas: in human rights, a premodern, functionally undifferentiated society which had to invent human rights as its safeguards of functional differentiation. In the feminist debate on Sex/Gender, ‘before’ brings a self-referential construction: that of ipseity, as the form of identity beyond comparison that does not play with id but with ipsum. Ipseity is inoperable but not useless. It is inoperable because it cannot be observed from anywhere without suffering rupture. It is not useless because it offers a ground for the reconceptualisation of difference, both through awe and desire.

To find adequate answers to a changing reality heavily influenced by advances in technology, medical professionals have developed and adopted an array of terms that have brought new concepts into the profession. “Dignity,” “vegetative state,” “futility,” “double effect,” and “brain death” have become indispensable words in the medical setting. In the following discussion, the attention is on terminology. If we believe in phenomenology, the assumption is that we should closely reflect on the words we use in all spheres of life, especially in those that concern life and death. This article calls for a sincere discussion about these terms and concepts. The thesis put forward is that the language in the medical setting serves primarily the physicians, at times at the expense of the patients’ best interests. This language and the concepts it describes have generated an unhealthy atmosphere for patients, which might lead to undesirable actions at the end of patients’ lives.

I am going to show how the ECJ has reacted to the centrifugal judicial forces which would threaten the interpretive monopoly of the master of treaties. As we will see, the change of the perspective (from that viewpoint of the political sources of law to that of the cultural sources of law) implies a different evaluation of the current phase of EU integration and this factor allows us to overcome (partially at least) the sense of disappointment which seems to characterize the main literature currently.

In Part I, this Article presents the first published, worldwide survey of international practice in interpreting and applying various international human rights norms to the issue of sexual freedom, with a special emphasis on the rights to privacy, family life, and freedom from arbitrary discrimination based on sexual orientation. Although progress toward general recognition of such rights by international authorities and states has been extremely rapid over a very short period, such recognition continues to vary geographically and according to the subject matter. For example, some rights, such as the right to consensual, adult, private intercourse have achieved more widespread recognition than others, such as equal rights to nondiscrimination in employment or equal access to marriage. The respective roles of legislative and judicial reforms in these developments are explored in this part as well. In Part II, the Article analyzes the rationales adopted by state elites for accepting or denying equal rights to sexual minorities and discerns a trend toward a complex approach of sometimes applying libertarian theories of human rights law, sometimes applying increasingly nuanced nondiscrimination norms, and sometimes using both approaches at once. Countervailing pressures, especially widespread religious opposition to the recognition of equal human rights, as well as the problems of using libertarian theories, are explored. The Article further discusses the limits of the role that international human rights law has played in the evolution of state practice on this subject and explains how international human rights law is balanced unstably between the incomplete application of human rights to sexual minorities and the disadvantages of logical and theoretical inconsistency in human rights doctrine. It concludes by observing how the case of evolving human rights in this field illustrates the potential power of ideational norms in shaping state expectations and behavior.

This article will proceed as follows. Part II will briefly examine the Commerce Clause jurisprudence of Justice Thomas, the one who is most likely to hold that the PBABA is not a proper exercise of Congress’s commerce power. While commentators have discussed how the holdings of Lopez and Morrison would apply to the PBABA, Part II will supplement that commentary by exploring how Justice Thomas would approach the issue. Part III will analyze the question of whether the PBABA could be justified as an exercise of Congress’s enforcement power under the Fourteenth Amendment. It will examine specifically the history and original understanding of the enforcement power of the Equal Protection Clause, and conclude, nevertheless, that the PBABA cannot long survive as it is worded today.

This Article examines both intentional tort claims and ordinary negligence claims in the context of preimplantation genetic choices.

My article seeks to explore men’s identity as its own topic, specifically in its relation to the Constitution. I begin my exploration with early modern England, for the American colonists would have to grapple with the ideas that arose during this time. My argument proceeds as follows. Prominent conceptions of male identity in early modern England made constitutional democracy, as the eighteenth century Americans understood it, philosophically unrealistic. Thomas Hobbes represented one view, Robert Filmer the other. Hobbes argued that men’s violent hypermasculinity made them ineligible for the disciplined and mature enterprise of self-government; he believed that only an absolute monarch could control men for purposes of collective peace. Filmer also argued that men were generally incompetent for self-government. But unlike Hobbes, he argued that men were psychologically infantile and thus insufficiently manly for self-government. Filmer insisted that only the king had the requisite manliness of a powerful father and that men required the former’s love and guidance while they owed him complete obedience.