Daily Archives: August 25, 2009

Denver Post: “The principal at Denver’s West High School started and then abandoned an effort to replace Planned Parenthood sex education with a religious-themed abstinence-only program. Jorge Loera, the first-year principal at West, told district officials Monday that although he doesn’t agree with teaching teens about contraception, he will continue the partnership the school has had with Planned Parenthood.”

John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council: “The decision by Judge Lederman is classic, text-book, judicial activism. Instead of interpreting and enforcing the plain language of the statute, which has been held constitutional by federal courts, she openly and brazenly defied the rule of law. She ignored the will of the people as expressed through the legislature and inserted her own personal opinion. Instead of exercising her proper judicial role as a restrained academic interpreter of existing law, she became a social change agent and usurped her limited role.”

Washington Times: “Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Tuesday that President Obama will get a strong health care reform bill, but he predicted Republicans would not support the measure regardless of its provisions . . . ‘Were going to pass a bill, and the bill is going to have a public option,’ Mr. Dean told The Washington Times in an interview Tuesday.”

LifeSiteNews: “A federal court Monday threw out a lawsuit filed against the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman . . . ‘Marriage is not just any two people in a committed relationship. Americans understand and believe that there’s more to a marriage than that. Therefore we are pleased that this challenge to the federal law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been dismissed,’ said ADF Senior Counsel Brian Raum. ‘If another lawsuit is filed against the federal DOMA, we are confident that it will be found to be constitutional.’”

CBS 5: “Former San Francisco supervisor and gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk is among 13 new inductees to the California Hall of Fame, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced Tuesday.”

Baptist Press: “A lawsuit seeking to overturn Wisconsin’s same-sex domestic partnerships law as unconstitutional received a boost Aug. 21 when the state’s attorney general announced that he, too, believes the law conflicts with Wisconsin’s constitutional marriage amendment . . . The Alliance Defense Fund and its allied attorneys filed the suit on behalf of Wisconsin Family Action, the primary sponsor of the 2006 amendment. The high court has not said whether it will hear the case.”

Baptist Press: “Christians in the central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan have been told not to meet for worship without registration, but government officials are making it nearly impossible for churches to receive approval.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcijeEtf-wA&feature=player_embedded

CNA: “The archbishop’s comments came on the first anniversary of the attacks carried out against Christians by Hindu extremists in the state of Orissa, leaving 70 people dead and hundreds of Christian homes destroyed.”

Forum 18: “Members of the New Life Full Gospel congregation in the capital Minsk refused to accept the latest official demands to give up the place of worship they bought back in 2002, the church’s lawyer Sergei Lukanin told Forum 18 News Service. Court executors delivered an order to vacate the building by 20 August, but church members have held a series of prayer meetings to defend their building.”

“British couples are travelling to America to enable them to select the sex of their children . . . The UK bans the use of PGD to test for sex, although it is permitted to detect genetic diseases . . . ”

ACLJ: “On Friday, the circuit court sitting in Springfield, Ill. issued a preliminary injunction in the case of two pharmacy owners, Luke VanderBleek and Glenn Kosirog. Both men have been fighting to protect their conscience rights. The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), focusing on constitutional law, is representing the pharmacists in the case of Morr-Fitz, Inc. v. Blagojevich . . . ”

Bloomberg: “The Federal Reserve must for the first time identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.”

At issue on appeal is whether images automatically downloaded from the internet and stored in the ‘temporary internet files’ folder of a computer’s hard drive can contribute to a conviction for ‘voluntary’ possession of child pornography . . .

The Copenhagen Post: “A majority of Copenhagen City Councillors are backing a proposal to allow homosexual couples to be declared ‘married’ when they enter civil unions at City Hall. Culture and Leisure Deputy Mayor Pia Allerslev, the proposal’s sponsor, said the change was a matter of language. She was not seeking to change legal marriage rights for homosexuals.”

Pink News: “Lambda Legal, a group that pursues litigation in support of LGBT rights, has called on the US government to end a ban on people living with HIV from travelling to or taking up residence in the country.”

KNDO: “The Christmas tree can stay, but no more Nativity scene. That’s the word from Washington’s Capitol, where protests erupted last winter over competing private holiday displays.”

CBS11TV.com: “A North Texas city’s prayer practices are being challenged. The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a four-page letter to the mayor of North Richland Hills demanding the council stop using Christian prayers during meetings.” (video at the link)

Washington Secretary of State: “The cumulative total is now nearly 104,000 checked signatures and just over 12,000 rejected for one reason or another. The overall error rate is 11.72 percent, barely up from 11.68 percent, which we reported Friday. In order to make the November statewide ballot, the referendum’s overall rejection rate must not go over 12.4 percent.”

The Desert Sun: “The California Senate today endorsed a resolution calling on the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ the Pentagon policy that bans gays and lesbians from serving in the armed forces.”

Liberty Counsel: “Earlier today, Liberty Counsel appeared in court to defend Lisa Miller from a complaint filed by the ACLU of Virginia on behalf of Janet Jenkins. The ACLU asked the judge to order Lisa to jail for not delivering her own daughter, Isabella, to Vermont for unsupervised visitation with Janet. The ACLU also requested Lisa to pay attorneys fees and costs. No jail time was ordered and the court rejected the ACLU’s request for money.”

Decider New York City: “Along with his boyfriend, Bryan Petroff, Quint started working up unique toppings, and came up with the name to tweak expectations. ‘Making kids say or think of the word “gay”’ without it having a playground-insult connotation, I thought, would be a good thing,’ he says.”

NJ.com: “Both sides — those who say they want to ‘protect marriage’ as it is, and those who call for ‘marriage equality’ — are recruiting and mobilizing volunteers to pressure lawmakers. A bill that would allow gay marriage is expected to be debated in Trenton during the lame-duck period between the Nov. 3 election and start of a new legislative session in January . . . ” Len Deo of the New Jersey Family Policy Council is quoted.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on ramped up effort “to persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign a bill to establish a Harvey Milk Day in California schools, similar to existing days honoring John Muir and the California poppy.”

Cardinal Newman Society: “Georgetown University, a Jesuit, Catholic institution in Washington, D.C., plans to bestow upon AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, despite his organization’s advocacy for homosexual “marriage” and laws mandating employee insurance coverage for contraceptives.”

Christian Post: “A Coptic priest who renovated his home to accommodate Christian ceremonies in his churchless village is not afraid of the death threat Fatwa issued against him, he declared. The Rev. Estefanos Shehata of the village Upper Ezbet Dawoud Youself, about 124 miles south of Cairo, is fed up with the unfair treatment of Coptic Christians in Egypt.”

CNA: “Bishop John M. D’Arcy, whose diocese encompasses the University of Notre Dame, is not letting the issues raised by the university’s honoring of President Obama lie dormant. Instead, the Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend has penned a poignant article for the upcoming edition of America magazine that calls on the renowned university to evaluate the consequences of its failure to respect the authority of the bishops.”

One News Now (AP): “The president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says at least two-thirds of Southern Baptist youths are leaving the church between adolescence and adulthood

CNSNews: “The report, called International Guidelines on Sexual Education, was released in June in conjunction with the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), an organization which works for universal access to ‘reproductive health care.’”

The Guidelines

ABP: “The bill establishes a statewide Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force in the attorney general’s office, creates a human trafficking training component for law-enforcement officers, starts a program to connect services to trafficking victims and begins a grant program for groups that provide assistance to domestic trafficking victims.”

North Carolina Family Policy Council: “1. Early sexual activity has a myriad of negative consequences for adolescents that go beyond sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and teen pregnancy, which condoms cannot protect against . . . 2. Postponing sexual activity—even for a few years—is associated with fewer lifetime sexual partners and healthier lifetime outcomes for men and women . . . 5. Since AUM education was implemented in the mid-1990s, teen sexual activity has declined sharply nationwide, along with significant declines in the teen pregnancy rate, the teen birth rate (until 2006), and the teen abortion rate. . . .”

North Carolina Family Policy Council: “A new government study found that the Gardasil vaccine—which helps to protect against genital warts and certain cancers that are caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV)—results in higher, but expected, instances of fainting and blood clotting than similar vaccines . . . The North Carolina General Assembly recently amended the state’s sex education curriculum for 7-9th graders to ‘include information about the effects of contracting the Human Papilloma Virus, including sterility and cervical cancer.’”

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys have received a positive response to a letter they sent to the town of Elk River urging it to stop its discriminatory policies restricting the use of its public library and park for religious purposes.

Christian Post: “A federal judge on Monday threw out a lawsuit filed against the Defense of Marriage Act, saying that the suit had been improperly filed in state court before it was transferred to his jurisdiction . . . Though the gay Southern California couple that filed the lawsuit last December will likely refile, Brian Raum, senior counsel for Alliance Defense Fund, hailed Monday’s ruling. ‘[W]e are pleased that this challenge to the federal law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been dismissed,’ said Raum.”

Catholic News Agency: “A federal court has upheld portions of South Dakota’s informed consent law which require doctors to tell women considering an abortion that they are terminating a human life . . . ADF Senior Legal Counsel Steven H. Aden commented on the court ruling, saying ‘A woman’s life is worth more than Planned Parenthood’s bottom line, so we’re pleased the abortion industry failed in its attempt to strike down this law. We agree with the decision of the court to allow South Dakota women to be informed of the indisputable fact that her baby is a human being.’”

On Top Magazine: “The Obama administration has prevailed in its attempt to dismiss a challenge to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the Los Angeles Times reported . . . The Christian-based Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which as intervenor in Smelt is also defending DOMA, promoted the argument that there is a government interest in ‘responsible procreation’ . . . ‘It is very disappointing that the [Justice Department] has rejected the idea that kids do best in homes with a married mother and father,’ ADF attorney Brian Raum told Baptist Press.”

Evangelical Examiner: “The Alliance Defense Fund has announced that La Crosse, Wisconsin City Council has adopted an invocations policy after receiving legal counsel from ADF attorneys that will allow the council to continue opening public meetings with prayer . . . ‘America’s founders opened public meetings with prayer. Public officials today should be allowed to do the same,’ said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson. ‘The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s demands that any trace of religion be wiped from the public square simply do not comport with the law or this nation’s history.’”

Houston Chronicle (AP): “U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled the case — the first of several pending challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act — must be refiled in federal court . . . Brian Raum, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group that has joined the government in defending the federal marriage law, said Carter was right to dismiss the case on procedural grounds. The federal government cannot be sued in state courts, Raum said.”

LifeSiteNews: “Armed with sound legal principles and plenty of chutzpah, the Wisconsin Attorney General has told state lawmakers that he will not defend the state’s domestic partnership law for homosexual couples against a legal challenge . . . ‘We’re very hopeful and optimistic that the Wisconsin Supreme Court will take note of what the Attorney General said in his statement and they will use that as a favorable factor in determining whether to take this case,’ ADF Litigation Counsel Jim Campbell told LifeSiteNews.com.”

body that polices compliance with the European Social Charter, a human rights document binding on all states within the Council of Europe, has deemed a pro-abstinence sex education program used in many Croatian schools to be acceptable.

Pacific Justice Institute: “The Pacific Justice Institute (PJI) is launching its new Center for Public Policy (CPP), a 501(c)(4) organization, this week in an effort to assist California legislators to enact laws benefiting all Californians.”

AP: “Delaware’s governor is looking at ways his state can preserve its plan to balance the books by offering sports wagering now that a court has ruled its proposal violates a 1992 federal ban on such bets.”

WSJ: “Denis Hughes, president of the New York state branch of the AFL-CIO, had been serving as acting chairman of the New York Fed board since May, when Stephen Friedman stepped down from the position.”

National Right to Work: Union Boss Takeover of American Government Continues: AFL-CIO Official Named Head of NY Federal Reserve

PFOX: “In a precedent setting case, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia has ruled that former homosexuals are a protected class that must be recognized under sexual orientation non-discrimination laws. The Court held that, under the D.C. Human Rights Act, sexual orientation does not require immutable characteristics.”

Making Snow in the Desert: Defining a Substantial Burden under RFRA
Jonathan Knapp, 36 Ecology L.Q. 259 (2009)

“Despite RFRA’s lofty goal of repairing the damage to religious liberty caused by the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Employment Division v. Smith, as the Act is purposely ambiguous concerning the meaning to be supplied to all of its critical terms, such as what types of governmental action “substantially burden” the free exercise of religion, Congress simply returned a number of intractable issues to the courts. This lack of formal guidance in RFRA has resulted in pervasive confusion over how the term “substantial burden” should be defined and analyzed, conflict between appellate courts, and ultimately, profound limitation of the statute’s success.”

Parental Rights and the State Regulation of Religious Schools
Matthew Steilen, 2009 B.Y.U. Educ. & L.J. 269

“In Wisconsin v. Yoder, the United States Supreme Court invalidated convictions of several Amish parents for removing their children from school in violation of state mandatory attendance laws. In reaching its decision, the Court argued that protecting the Amish parents’ decisions fit into a long-standing American tradition of giving parents control over the upbringing of their children. Yet the Supreme Court mischaracterized the history of parental rights and state interests in education. Contemporary historical research shows that parents have long ceded a large measure of control to the state in the education of their children. Still, very little has been written about this scholarship in legal journals. This article attempts to remedy this deficiency. It isolates and explores three key periods in the development of state-administered public schools, paying special attention to early public funding of religious schools, the Protestant character of the common schools, and Catholic resistance to the use of the King James Bible in common schools. In so doing, this article argues for a “republican” interpretation of early educational practices. Drawing on that interpretation, the article joins a debate between Noah Feldman, Martha Nussbaum, and others about the nature of American religious liberties, and argues that their views are not able to fully acknowledge the history of Protestant evangelizing in public schools.”

Toward an Integrated Disparate Treatment and Accommodation Framework for Title VII Religion Cases
Roberto L. Corrada, 77 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1411 (2009)

“This Article explores the interrelationship between accommodation and discrimination in Title VII religion cases. This Article begins with discussion and analysis of three typical Title VII mixed disparate treatment/ accommodation cases, demonstrating how malleable and ill-defined the lines between Title VII disparate treatment and accommodation cases can be. These cases show that it is likely that a good number of Title VII religion cases straddle the two frameworks, and that some number of those cases that do straddle the line are unnecessarily pigeonholed into one framework or another.”

Constitutionality of Home Education: How the Supreme Court and American History Endorse Parental Choice
Chad Olsen, 2009 B.Y.U. Educ. & L.J. 399

“The year 2008 frightened many homeschooling parents. A California Court of Appeals case, In re Rachel L., appeared to close the door on many parents’ assumed right to home school their children. The court said, ‘[P]arents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,’ and added that non-credentialed parents may not home school their children . . . Part II of this article provides the background information relevant to understanding the court’s rehearing decision in Jonathan. This includes information about Rachel and the concurrent publicity. Part III then analyzes Jonathan and its implications. Following this analysis, Part IV examines Supreme Court precedent that is relevant to home education. Next, Part V gives a historical perspective on home education in the United States.”

“Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota v. Rounds: The Journey to Protect Women’s Mental Health with Relevant, Truthful and Not Misleading Information in Informed Consent Abortion Statutes”
Kathleen G. Chewning, 3 Charleston L. Rev. 601 (2009)

“Finally in Part III, this Note addresses Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota v. Rounds and its potential far-reaching effects on the future of informed consent abortion regulation.”