Daily Archives: March 31, 2010

New Jersey Newsroom: “Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund representing New Jersey legislators filed a motion to intervene Monday to defend against a recently filed motion in what seemed to be a long-ago-resolved lawsuit that seeks to force the Legislature to redefine marriage . . . ‘There’s more to marriage than just any two people in a committed relationship,’ said Alliance Defense Fund’s Senior Legal Counsel Austin R. Nimocks.”

Charisma: “A Protestant prisoner of conscience who had called for democratic freedoms in Vietnam was released earlier this month after serving a three-year sentence for ‘propagandizing to destroy the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’ . . . While Christians in several parts of Vietnam are still subject to abuse from local officials, the country’s national authorities have continued to allow high-profile Christian events.”

“. . . The prosecution was brought against them after a female Muslim guest accused the couple of insulting her during a debate about religion.”

“An MP who criticised the Islamic burka during a Parliamentary debate has been subjected to a police investigation after a complaint from an equality group . . . ”

“The accusation was that he had used ‘homophobic remarks’ that were ‘aggravated by religious prejudice.’”

New Europe: “It’s been said that you don’t want to see laws or sausages being made because the process is rather ugly, but now the European Union says it will let citizens sign online petitions asking for new laws to be drafted, but only under certain conditions and with a line of safety features – and they still might be advisory only. Some states in the United States have similar methods.”

The Christian Institute: “Over 2,000 people have signed a letter to The Sunday Telegraph calling on Parliament to ‘decisively’ oppose Government plans contained in the Children, Schools and Families Bill.”

WCCO: “The business licenses for four massage parlors in Bloomington, two of which had been accused of being involved with prostitution, have been pulled.”

AP: “A committee on Wednesday rejected a resolution to impeach the state attorney general over his opinion that gay marriages legally performed elsewhere must be recognized in Maryland. The state House Judiciary Committee, by a 14-6 vote, turned down the measure introduced by Delegate Don Dwyer, R-Anne Arundel, earlier in the day to the state’s House of Delegates.”

Sydney Star Observer: “The National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP) is to face a High Court challenge. Parent Ron Williams believes the NSCP breaches Section 116 of the Constitution which states, ‘the Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.’”

Network World: “Mobile phones should be fitted with porn filters to stop children accessing inappropriate content from their handsets, says Professor Tanya Byron. The government’s internet safety advisor said phones that use a Wi-Fi connection to access the web posed the biggest threat, as kids can bypass any parental control set up on the phone.”

Daily Caller: “A Christian nurse was ‘forced to choose between her job and her faith’ after being ordered to remove her crucifix at a hospital where Muslim staff wore headscarves unchallenged, a tribunal heard yesterday.”

News4jax.com: “The owners of Inserection, a Southside adult novelty and video store, said the city should pay them $170,000 for trying to shut the business down three years ago. In 2007, police arrested numerous customers for having sex in the booths at the store and also arrested the manager for operating the video booths. Police told the store to close the peepshows . . . ”

“[Religious nonprofits] can hire and fire employees based on their religion or sexual orientation . . . Civil rights groups like the ACLU, and some religious groups like the United Methodist Church, want to see those exemptions outlawed.”

New Europe: “European Commission officials reacted cautiously to news that Belgium’s Interior Affairs Committee has unanimously backed a bill that will outlaw the wearing of the burqa and over face coverings from streets, parks and public places.”

Tennessean: “A Democratic senator opposed to a measure that would require abortion clinics in Tennessee to post anti-coercion signs said Wednesday the legislation is intimidating . . . Read SB3812/HB3301 at http://capitol.tn.gov?”

ADF President and General Counsel Alan Sears writes at the ADF website, “Inside the Issues”: “Just two weeks ago, I told you about Julian Raven, an Elmira, New York man who, along with his wife and several friends, was arrested in a city park when they quietly lay down to silently pray for, and amid, a crowd of people celebrating homosexual behavior . . . ”

WJHG.com (NBC): “A bill to protect students who prayer at school functions like football games is gaining traction in the state House. This comes after complaints about a new Santa Rosa County policy that keeps teachers from participating in student-led prayer.”

AFP: “Candid but demure, an online sex shop for Muslims has been launched in the Netherlands to tap into a demand for erotica that does not offend Sharia law.”

AP: ” . . . Bills filed in the Florida Senate by Aronberg (SB 2560) and in the House (HB 1335) by Rep. Joseph Abruzzo, D-Wellington, take a somewhat parental approach. The measures would specifically address sexting by minors and apply an escalating series of punishments that the sponsors say will make enforcement more likely.”

WSLS10 (includes video): “Cuccinelli has grabbed the national spotlight in his two months at Attorney General, which is usually a lower profile state government position. That attention came with his recommendation to the state’s public universities and colleges to remove anti-discrimination clauses about sexual orientation. A move that quickly sparked a wave of anger across the Commonwealth, and spread across the country . . . ‘They (colleges) went beyond their state law authority. Everyone has the potential for protection under the Equal Protection Clause of the federal Constitution, but that’s not a specially protected class,’ Cuccinelli said.”

State Journal-Register Editorial: “On June 1, 1995, Gov. Jim Edgar signed into law a bill requiring that girls under age 18 notify a parent or guardian before having an abortion in Illinois . . . Later that same day, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court in Chicago alleging that the new law violated the affected girls’ right to privacy and was therefore unconstitutional. And so began what has become a nearly 15-year odyssey for Illinois’ parental notification law . . . We are hopeful that a ruling Monday by Cook County Circuit Judge Daniel Riley signals a new and more productive turn in this extended courtroom serial. After 15 years of litigation and technical arguments, it’s time this law had a chance to work.” | For more coverage of the bill and its history see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/wordpress/tag/state-illinois+topic-parental-rights/

Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Richmond politicians rallied tonight around the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts, a south Richmond project struggling to attain its goal of becoming the state’s only elementary charter school.”

LifeNews: “The House approved [HB 2215] 83-36, one vote shy of a veto proof majority and now the bill goes to Governor Parkinson, who may veto it.”

“. . . . the process then becomes the punishment regardless of the ruling. Years and years of fighting a malicious accusation.’”

LifeNews: “A Nebraska bill that could set a national precedent for banning late-term abortions based on the concept of fetal pain has received its first approval vote from the unicameral state legislature. Nebraska lawmakers voted 38-5 for [Legislative Bill 1103] so it would advance to the second round of debate.”

Evangeline Jones writes at Life News: “Recent analyses of large medical databases that link to death certificates (“record linkage studies”) show that pregnancy-associated deaths are between two and four times higher for women who abort than for women who deliver.”

LifeNews: “Harper was initially reluctant to include contraception in the centerpiece plan Canada is advocating, but he has ruled out including abortion. That met with opposition from Clinton, a longtime abortion advocate and the top international official in the administration of pro-abortion President Barack Obama . . . ”

NY Times: “In what appeared to be a coordinated assault, the e-mail accounts of more than a dozen rights advocates, academics and journalists who cover China have been compromised by unknown intruders. A Chinese human rights organization also said that hackers had disabled its Web site for five days in a row . . . the victims of the most recent intrusions included a law professor in the United States . . . ”

Wall Street Journal: “The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.’s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government’s Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure.”

Washington Post (AP): “In a guide to the election, Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols urges voters to back lawmakers who ‘support marriage as a key building-block of a stable society’ and who oppose abortion and euthanasia.”

Liberty Legal Institute: “A Romanian Orthodox church is wrongfully being taxed by Dallas County, which may cause the church to fold forever, just in time for Easter! Outrageously, the Dallas County Appraisal District denied the congregation a tax-exempt status and has assessed a tax of 30 percent of the church’s annual budget — a church whose members are immigrants and refugees who came to the United States in search of freedom . . . ”

Liberty Legal Institute

Reuters: “A conference in Mardin in southeastern Turkey declared the fatwa by 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya rules out militant violence and the medieval Muslim division of the world into a ‘house of Islam’ and ‘house of unbelief’ no longer applies.”

Liberty Counsel: “The ACLU has been hiding a critical secret in its continuing attempts to criminalize prayer in the schools of Santa Rosa County: It has been litigating to salvage an unconstitutional Consent Decree without clients that have a legal interest in its actions. The two anonymous plaintiffs, on whose behalf the ACLU brought the infamous lawsuit that resulted in two contempt trials for prayer, have long since graduated from the school district they sued . . . ”

NY Times: “Don H. Dwyer Jr., a Republican member of the House of Delegates, plans to bring impeachment charges on the House floor on Wednesday against the state’s attorney general, Douglas F. Gansler . . . ”

Reuters: “The Army secretary said on Wednesday he would not discharge gay personnel who admitted their sexual orientation to him, despite the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ stance that remains official military policy.”

NJ Ledger Star: “A company should not have read e-mails a former employee wrote to her lawyer from a private, password-protected web account, even though she sent them from her employer’s computer, according to a state Supreme Court ruling today that attorneys said could influence workplace privacy rules across the country . . . ”

Stengart v. Loving Care Agency, Inc. No. A-16-09 (NJ, March 30, 2010)

Hat tip: How Appealing

CBS: “Constance McMillen has (finally) been invited to the private senior prom meant to replace the one that was canceled by the school board in her small Mississippi town.”

LifeNews: “The Duke University Women’s Center has issued a letter of apology after it denied the campus pro-life student group space for an event on motherhood. The center abruptly canceled a Duke Students for Life event on the day of the meeting because it was engaging in pro-life activities elsewhere on campus.” | Related: FIRE: Duke Keeps Pro-Life Group Out of Women’s Center During ‘Week for Life’ | Rick Garnett: Oh, Duke . . . why do you make it so hard? | Eugene Volokh: Pro-Life Speech “Upsetting” and “Not OK” for the Duke University Women’s Center

OneNewsNow: “A college student in New York is now free to distribute a pro-life publication . . . ‘[S]tudent Joseph Hayon was distributing The Advocate to his peers, and the administration ordered him to cease distributing the magazine, telling him he could no longer distribute it,’ [Live Action president Lila Rose] reports . . . Hayon contacted Alliance Defense Fund, which in turn wrote to the school, explaining how that stance represented viewpoint discrimination. The result is that Hayon is now permitted to resume distribution.”

OneNewsNow: “Gilbert, Arizona, is trying to straighten out its zoning laws for the sake of house churches . . . Alliance Defense Fund wrote a letter to the city, outlining the churches’ constitutional rights. Meanwhile, Mayor Lewis had a chance to attend a church service at the home targeted by the city . . . [Mayor Lewis] says the code will be changed, which will allow house churches to hold services, Bible studies, or prayer meetings without concern of government intervention.”

The Ashland City Times: “Cheatham County educators are invited to attend a teleconference that organizers say will focus on the constitutional rights of religious persons in public schools . . . The Cheatham County Ministerial Alliance, Family Action Council of Tennessee and Alliance Defense Fund are sponsoring the conference.”

LifeNews: “An Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) allied attorney secured an agreed-upon court order Friday that extends care for a 40-year-old woman on dialysis at Ruby Memorial Hospital after the hospital originally said it would end treatment on March 27 against the wishes of the woman’s family.”

AP: “Three individuals have been identified so far among six heads and numerous other human body parts found in a truck at a Kansas medical waste facility, including at least one man who was to have been cremated, a coroner said Tuesday.”

AP: “It’s fine to criticize the health law and the way Democrats pushed it through Congress without a single GOP vote, these party leaders say. But focusing on its outright repeal carries two big risks.”

AP: “Rural traditions of abandoning dead infants may have played a role in the case of 21 babies’ bodies found along a river in eastern China, apparently dumped by hospital mortuary workers.”

“Ms. Feldblum is on record as stating that ‘private beliefs’ that do not affirm homosexual behavior should not be tolerated in American society . . .”

“What might Americans think if they knew the ES cell research ‘decades away’ secret?”

lliance Defense Fund attorneys will participate in two law school debates next week sponsored by campus chapters of The Federalist Society on the subject of the U.S. Supreme Court case Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

Modifying the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to Create a Constitutional Statutory Protection for Religious Landowners
Sara Witt, 59 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 767 (2009)

“Part I will provide background regarding Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence, RLUIPA’s legislative history, and Congress’s enforcement power, one basis Congress claimed as giving it authority to enact RLUIPA and its unconstitutional predecessor, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Part II will argue that enactment of RLUIPA was outside Congress’s Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power. Specifically, it will consider whether RLUIPA codifies Supreme Court precedent and whether the Act is ‘congruent and proportional’ to the harm it seeks to remedy. Part II will ultimately conclude that neither of these tests is met. Part III will argue that some statutory protection is necessary for those seeking to use land for religious purposes and will suggest how RLUIPA may be modified so as to provide this protection while remaining within the confines of the enforcement power.”

The Minimally Conscious Person: A Case Study in Dignity and Personhood and the Standard of Review for Withdrawal of Treatment
Jeffrey B. Hammond, 55 Wayne L. Rev. 821 (2009)

“To date, most American courts that have considered family members’ requests to remove life-sustaining treatment for minimally conscious patients have denied such requests, reasoning that no surrogate has demonstrated by ‘clear and convincing evidence’ that patient would want to be die by removal of his medically supplied nutrition and hydration. The thesis of this Article is that the four courts that have *828 considered removal of life-sustaining treatment for MCS patients have heretofore been correctly decided. I argue that when the clear and convincing evidentiary standard is coupled with the ‘subjective’ substantive evidentiary standard—requiring proof that that the patient foresaw himself being beset with MCS and then wanted his feeding tube removed—it will be very hard indeed for a court to allow the patient’s tube to be removed.”