Daily Archives: April 20, 2010

Baptist Press: “In the same way America’s views on abortion were transformed by the debate over partial-birth abortion, a first-of-its-kind Nebraska law spotlighting unborn child pain could further change hearts and minds and eventually lead to a gutting of Roe v. Wade and its companion cases, pro-life leaders say . . . ‘It is one of the first attempts to circumscribe the otherwise illimitable scope of the Doe v. Bolton health exception,’ Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, told BP. ‘It asserts the interest of the state not to allow the Bolton health exception to become the exception that swallows the rule.’”

ADF attorney Jordan Lorence appeared on the Janet Mefferd Show to discuss Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

The MP3 runs approximately 14 minutes.

ADF attorney Mike Johnson appeared on the radio with Roland Letner to discuss the recent court decision holding that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional.

The MP3 runs approximately 23 minutes.

Bluegrass Politics: “A potential compromise that would allow charter schools in Kentucky is gaining momentum in the Capitol, and could even help resolve an impasse over the state budget.”

The Daily News Transcript: “Social conservatives – abortion foes, gay marriage opponents, transgender rights critics – may sit out the 2010 election, a Massachusetts hard-line conservative activist said Tuesday, arguing that no statewide candidates for office have championed their views.”

Gerald J. Russello writing in the National Catholic Register: “[S]ecular bureaucracies can be relied on to interpret rules to favor their own mission, rather than respect the rights of religious institutions. The Charity Commission could have exempted religious institutions from the Equality Act, but doing so would have permitted them to operate according to their own beliefs . . . [T]he presence of an independent judiciary, when presented with the right arguments, can preserve the freedom of religious institutions to act according to their beliefs. That independence has been less evident among some American judges, who have sometimes been too easy in accepting an argument based on a specious notion of equality or rights. This Catholic Care decision, however, may provide some additional support for those arguing for religious freedom here as well.” | For more information on the Catholic Care case, see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/tag/country-united-kingdom+topic-adoption+global-religious-freedom/

AP: “The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said Tuesday that Muslims who work at the Pentagon objected to evangelist Franklin Graham’s planned appearance . . . ”

Knows News: “There was a tent-revival feel in the atmosphere Monday evening as an estimated 500 people heeded the call to gather at the historic Sevier County Courthouse to show their disdain for a threatened lawsuit aimed at ending the County Commission practice of reciting the Lord’s Prayer to open its regular meetings . . Legal counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, according to published reports, sees litigation against the Lord’s Prayer at commission meeting as almost inevitable . . . ”

ADF attorney Steven H. Aden appeared on the Bob Dutko Show to discuss this: ADF providing support to lawsuit defending law that prohibits federal funding of embryo destruction | The mp3 runs just under 6 and a half minutes.

First Amendment Center (AP): “A conservative Montana group [contends] its exclusion from a state employee charitable-donation program is discriminatory because it’s based on the group’s religious views . . .’Government officials are denying state employees the opportunity to give to one group, while allowing them to contribute to groups with other views and activities that the state is more fond of,’ said [Nate Kellum], senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund.” | ADF News Release

Christian Today: “The Christian Institute has launched an online election briefing to help Christians understand the policy positions of the main parties and cast an informed vote in the upcoming general election.” | www.christian.org.uk/election

Nepal News: “For the first time in Nepal’s history, its minority Christian community Tuesday joined the socio-political process, beginning a ‘vigil’ to ensure that the new constitution would be enacted in time and guarantee religious freedom to all.”

Cohabitation, Marriage, and Child Outcomes
The Institute for Fiscal Studies, Alissa Goodman and Ellen Greaves, April 2010

“We have shown that the children of married parents do better than the children of cohabiting parents in a number of dimensions, particularly on measures of social and emotional development at the ages of 3 and 5. But we have also shown that parents who are married differ from those who are cohabiting in very substantial ways, particularly relating to their ethnicity, education and socio-economic status, and their history of relationship stability and the quality of their relationship even when the child is at a very young age. Once we take these factors into account, there are no longer any statistically significant differences in these child outcomes between children of married and cohabiting parents. However, much of the gap in educational and social and emotional outcomes between the children of cohabiting and married parents appears to be due to differential selection into marriage compared with cohabitation on the basis of parental education and socio-economic status.”

Latin American Herald Tribune: “A judge on Friday voided the marriage last week of two women in this capital, the first union of its kind in Argentina, judicial officials said. Argentine Norma Castillo and Uruguay’s Ramona Arevalo, who are both 67 and have been a couple for the past three decades, married on April 9 after getting the go-ahead from Judge Elena Liberatori.”

Jakarta Globe: “Today seven countries, five US states and several Latin American cities have legalized same-sex marriage. The Netherlands ushered the way in 2001, the first nation to permit same-sex couples to marry legally. This historic decision marked a turning point, with demands for equality reverberating across borders. Barriers fell as Belgium (2003), Canada and Spain (2005), South Africa (2006), Norway and Sweden (2009) each approved legislation.”

Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission: “Fan Yafeng, a Chinese human rights lawyer and religious liberty advocate, has received the 2009 John Leland Religious Liberty Award for his defense of persecuted Christians in China. Richard Land, president of Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, presented the award during an April 14 ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.”

CNN: “The hook-up culture on campuses may seem more pervasive than ever, especially as media outlets, books and documentaries rush to dissect the subject, but some college women and men are saying no. Some, like Boyle, experimented with hooking up and quit. Though she is Catholic, she says her reason for disengaging herself from the hook-up culture had more to do with the unhappiness she experienced afterward. Others influenced by religion have abstained from casual physical activity from the moment they set foot on campus.”

The Christian Institute: “The number of NHS trusts planning to or already offering early term abortions in GP surgeries has tripled in the past year, and pro-lifers fear this will fuel a surge in abortions. A publication for doctors, GP magazine, has revealed that 17 health trusts are either offering or are planning to offer abortions for women up to nine weeks pregnant.”

The Christian Institute: “One in three constituencies will now be holding church hustings ahead of the upcoming General Election. More than 220 churches have now signed up to hold hustings, meaning that hundreds of parliamentary candidates will be grilled over their stances on a variety of moral and religious issues.”

The Christian Institute: “The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is examining the ethical issues surrounding donations of organs and other ‘body parts’, including embryo donation, in a public consultation, preceding any official change.”

The Christian Institute: “Several high street stores have pledged to review their product lines after they were accused of stocking clothes that sexualised children.”

AP: “President Barack Obama has begun conversations with potential Supreme Court nominees . . . ”

Reuters: “Online retailer Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit in a federal court to block the North Carolina state government’s demand it disclose all transaction details, including names and addresses, involving state residents, court documents show . . . ”

Ottawa Citizen: “The European Union has declared travelling a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayers’ dollars for those too poor to afford their own trips.”

IndyChannel.com: “Eric Workman, 18, a top-ranked senior at Greenwood High School, and the American Civil Liberties Unionof Indiana have asked a federal judge to stop a student-led prayer that the senior class voted to approve, claiming the prayer and class vote unconstitutionally subjects students to religious practice.”

A federal judge held that the ordinance against religious bell sounds–which offered an exemption for ice cream trucks, but not for church bells–violated the Constitution.

CNA: “The Virginia Catholic Conference (VCC) has urged the passage of a proposed budget amendment to restrict state funding of abortions, saying it is an “unprecedented opportunity” to eliminate the vast majority of state-funded abortions.”

Virginia Catholic Conference: Governor McDonnell proposes pro-life budget amendment; Virginia bishops call for critical action; General Assembly to vote on April 21!

Medical News Today: “According to a NARAL survey conducted earlier this year and released exclusively to Newsweek, 51% of voters younger than age 30 who oppose abortion rights consider it a “very important” voting issue, compared with 26% of their peers who support abortion rights. The survey, which included 700 young voters, showed that many young people do not ‘view abortion as an imperiled right in need of defenders’ and that they ‘are more likely than their boomer parents to see abortion as a moral issue,’ according to Kliff.”

Boston Globe: “At issue is a bill that would make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of ‘gender identity or expression.’ Social conservatives have dubbed it the ‘bathroom bill,’’ contending it would sanction unisex bathrooms and locker rooms.”

The Washington Post carries this profile of HRC and its leader, Joe Salmonese.

WECT News 6: “The suggestion by a Brunswick County commissioner that the board replace the traditional prayer with a moment of silence to start its meetings generated a lot of noise – even from folks outside that county . . . ”

Lambda Legal: “Now, lesbian women and non-gay women who have the same medical condition resulting in infertility will have the same insurance coverage. Prior to this recent clarification, insurance coverage was often denied unless a woman could prove that she had unprotected heterosexual sex for a year – effectively barring coverage for lesbian women.”

OnTop Magazine (“gay advocacy website”): “Openly gay state Senator Richard Tisei will be on the Massachusetts GOP gubernatorial ticket as Charles D. Baker Jr.’s running mate, the Boston Globe reported.”

Business Week: “A ruling party lawmaker and his second wife pleaded guilty Tuesday to entering into a polygamous marriage without official consent amid a debate in Malaysia over Islamic morality among politicians.”

Al Jazeera: “An Indonesian court has ruled to uphold a 1965 blasphemy law that allows for criminal penalties and bans on people or groups that ‘distort’ the central tenets of six officially recognised religions . . . The law carries a maximum punishment of five years for beliefs that deviate from the orthodox versions of six sanctioned faiths – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Confucianism.”

AP: “The scandal erupted when Brazilian television network SBT last month broadcast a tape of Barbosa in bed with a 19-year-old that was widely distributed on the Internet.”

BBC: “Authorities in the western Indian state of Gujarat say they have recovered more than a dozen human foetuses from a rubbish bin in the city of Ahmedabad.”

LifeSiteNews: “A must-read paper produced by Human Life International Research Director Brian Clowes has closed the book on the question of whether homosexuality in the priesthood is a root cause of the clerical sexual abuse crisis. Citing numerous research studies, Clowes demonstrates that homosexuality is strongly linked to sexual abuse of minors, and that celibacy is definitely not a cause of pedophilia.”

Seacoast Online: “With five towns still left to vote in May (including North Hampton), 61 towns to date have approved the question and 33 defeated it. Another 33 towns tabled the measure. In some towns it was hotly debated; in others it passed with little or no discussion.”

The Times and Democrat: “A business owner is requesting waiver of Orangeburg County’s zoning ordinance prohibiting sexually oriented businesses from opening within 1,500 feet of each other.”

LifeNews: “Lawmakers in Nebraska put their state on the pro-life map by passing a first-of-its kind piece of legislation that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on the notion that unborn children feel pain. The legislation will likely be headed for court, but that’s exactly what pro-life groups are after.”

Marc A. Thiessen writes at the Washington Post: “. . . regardless of the legal outcome, a national discussion on the topic of ‘fetal pain’ can only help the pro-life movement.”

MyStateLine.com: “The debate over abortion in Mexico has become more heated after a ten-year-old girl became pregnant after allegedly being raped by her stepfather. While abortion is legal in Mexico City, the practice is prohibited or restricted outside the capital in the country’s states . . . ”

LifeNews: “The Oklahoma state Senate on Monday approved a package of five different pro-life bills limiting abortions, including a measure that would allow women to see an ultrasound of their unborn children prior to getting an abortion. The ultrasound measure now heads to Governor Brad Henry . . . ”

Richard M. Esenberg writing at the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog: “Hastings says that the educational purpose of their forum requires, not only diversity among groups, but within groups. I don’t believe the latter. Hastings student groups often have charters that require voting members to adhere to the ideals of organizations. (One, La Raza, even had racial requirements.) Although the parties have stipulated that this is Hastings policy, it seems clearly to have been an expedience contrived for litigation, suggesting that it is hardly essential to the law school’s educational mission. The former is belied by the fact that the policy discriminates against groups organized to advance a particular point of view (one might call them ‘creedal groups’). It seems weak tea to say that Hastings permits student groups to express all manners of views but won’t allow them to exercise associational freedom in the task of advancing those viewpoints.”

LifeNews: “The government of Kenya, apparently with the help of the Obama administration, is rolling out a national educational campaign designed to persuade people to vote for the new pro-abortion constitution this summer. Meanwhile, governmental leaders are attacking church leaders for condemning abortion.”

Eugene Volokh writes at the Volokh Conspiracy: “The Miami Herald reported last week that Miami-Dade Transit was removing the ads, because of objections from Muslims, including the South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But when I called Miami-Dade Transit to ask for a copy of their advertising policy (they said they’d get back to me about that), the spokeswoman reported that Miami-Dade Transit would be reinstating the ads, based on advice from the County Attorney’s office.”

The AP reports on a homeowner’s sign which is near a local high school: “Leviticus 20:13, To be gay equals death.”

“For most of human history perhaps 2% of women have been lesbian or bisexual . . . Recent surveys of teenage girls and young women find that roughly 15% of young females today self-identify as lesbian or bisexual . . . why are young women today at least three times more likely than their brothers to identify as bisexual or homosexual?”

Christian Post: “In just a little over an hour, the court heard from both sides of the debate and mulled over a number of hypothetical situations ranging from racist skinheads in an NAACP club to the takeover of a Muslim group by anti-Muslim students . . . Attorneys with CLS and the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom have since argued on behalf of the CLS chapter, insisting that the group should be able to decide its own membership and not be required by the college to admit homosexuals and non-Christians as members and officers in order to receive school recognition.” | ADF Christian Legal Society v. Martinez resource page

WORLD Magazine: “Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) want President Obama to appeal the decision. ‘The National Day of Prayer provides an opportunity for all Americans to pray voluntarily according to their own faith—and does not promote any particular religion or form of religious observance,’ said ADF senior legal counsel Joel Oster. ‘It does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and this decision should be appealed.’”

OneNewsNow: “A lawsuit against a presidential edict to use federal funds for embryonic stem-cell research has gone to an appeals court . . . ‘In the Dickey/Wicker Amendment, Congress prohibited federal funding for destructive embryonic stem-cell research,’ [Steven H. Aden] explains. ‘That didn’t matter to the Obama administration, which issued the executive order allowing the funding of research on lines that had been derived from the destruction of human embryos.’

WorldNetDaily: “A plea has been sent worldwide for moms, dads, brothers, aunts and grandparents – in fact anyone – to contact Swedish authorities and ask them to return to his parents a 7-year-old boy taken into police custody over a dispute that includes the family’s decision to homeschool . . . ‘What you have here is a socialist country trying to create a cookie cutter kid,’ said [Roger Kiska], an Alliance Defense Fund attorney based in Europe. ‘This kind of thing happens too often where social workers take a child and then just keep him.’”

How Appealing links to reports on the employer/employee sexting case here (whether an employer can review an employee’s communications believed to be private even though a company pager was used) and the cruelty to animals video case here (court issued a ruling addressing whether animal cruelty videos are protected free speech).

Washington Post: “Senate Republicans will have a chance this week to directly confront President Obama on his vision for reshaping the nation’s courts.”

The Badger Herald: “A Wisconsin anti-abortion group is questioning the legality of using state funds to train state-employed physicians at Planned Parenthood, saying it violates state law because training involves performing abortions . . . ‘UWHCA appears to be violating the law by using [the funds of an agency of the state of Wisconsin] to pay residents for activities at Planned Parenthood that include their performance of abortions,’ Matt Bowman from the Legal Counsel of Alliance Defense Fund said in the letter to Van Hollen.”

“Tennessee Attorney General Opinion 10-52 (April 15, 2010) concludes that the state’s issuance of a specialty license plate carrying the motto “Jesus is Lord” would violate the Establishment Clause . . . ”

EducationNews.org (links to draft report): “Education has witnessed a broad movement to reduce the central role of school districts in the administration of schools by providing individual schools with greater independence in making educational decisions. . . . ”

Tallahassee.com: “Stripped of its controversial references to prayer, a Senate bill that protects school faculty free-speech rights is more likely to move forward. The House has acted on its version, but amended it as well to delete specific references to ‘inspirational message’ and ‘school prayer.’”

The AP reports on Same Sex “Divorce” litigation pending in the state of Texas. Excerpt: “Abbott disagrees with the judge in that case, who ruled in October that the same-sex marriage ban violates equal rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for the conservative Liberty Institute in Plano, called that decision ‘outrageous judicial activism’. . . ‘It’s a backdoor run at establishing same-sex so-called marriage against the people’s vote,” Shackelford said. ‘Once you grant the divorce, you are recognizing that there was a marriage.’”

AP: “Measured by raw numbers, women already surpass men in undergraduate degrees, by roughly 1.2 million.”

The Hill: “Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) on Monday returned political fire at a trio of senior Democrats who don’t want coastal states to receive a guaranteed share of the revenues from oil-and-gas production in federal waters off their shores . . . ”

Karen Sloan write at The National Law Journal (Law.com): “The two have founded a non-profit organization called Law School Transparency with the goal of compiling detailed employment and salary information from all ABA-accredited law schools. The goal is to collect data on individual law graduates, rather than the general class breakdowns required by the ABA and U.S. News. ‘The number one problem with the current system is that it allows schools to hide their employment information in aggregate statistical forms,’ McEntee said. ‘You may know that 50% of graduates got jobs at law firms, but you don’t know what types of firms and types of jobs they got.’”

The Hill: “Gay rights protesters interrupted President Barack Obama’s speech at a fundraiser for California Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) Monday night in Los Angeles. Activists from a group called GetEQUAL began shouting at Obama while he was speaking at the podium. They expressed frustration over the slow progress of repealing the ban on openly gay people serving in the military . . . ”

“If every college group must admit even those who are hostile to its mission and beliefs, the result is nonsense and conformity.”

Gerald P. O’Driscoll writes at the Wall Street Journal: “When government and business collude, it’s called crony capitalism. Expect more of this from the financial reforms contemplated in Washington . . . istorted prices and interest rates no longer serve as accurate indicators of the relative importance of goods. Crony capitalism ensures the special access of protected firms and industries to capital. Businesses that stumble in the process of doing what is politically favored are bailed out. That leads to moral hazard and more bailouts in the future. And those losing money may be enabled to hide it by accounting chicanery. If we want to restore our economic freedom and recover the wonderfully productive free market, we must restore truth-telling on markets . . . ”

Reuters: “Arizona lawmakers passed a controversial immigration bill on Monday requiring police in the state that borders Mexico to determine if people are in the United States illegally, a measure critics say is open to racial profiling . . . ”

The Hill: A congressman from the president’s home state is threatening that he will urge Latino voters to stay home this November if the Democratic Party does not make a concerted effort to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (Ill.) is arguably President Barack Obama’s biggest Democratic critic in Congress

Pacific Justice Institute: “A victim of domestic violence has now found herself unemployed thanks to a mistake by a government agency she turned to for help. The woman, a South Dakotan identified as “Vickie” to protect her identity, called police in 2006 after assaulted by her then-husband. She was also interviewed by a social worker. Shortly thereafter, an official notice was sent to the couple’s home that, because their children had witnessed the abuse, he was being placed on the state’s official registry of child abusers. A judge gave Vickie a protective order, and the couple later divorced. Now, nearly four years later, Vickie was recently fired from her job at a daycare center after her employer learned that she is also listed on the state’s child abuse registry – apparently through an error by the county.”

Iviola Solanke, Independence and Diversity in the European Court of Justice (January 1, 2009). Columbia Journal of European Law, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 89-121, 2009. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1592457

“The European Court of Justice (ECJ) currently comprises twenty-seven judges and eight Advocates General who together make law affecting citizens of the European Union over a wide range of social and economic issues, including racial and ethnic equality. However, the ECJ’s composition remains unreflective of the millions of black and migrant European Union citizens whom it serves. As the rulings of the Court reach into the everyday lives of an increasing number of people, the need for it to be legitimate in the eyes of all those it serves also rises. Courts derive their legitimacy from both inputs and outputs. A traditional input is independence; a more recent concern is diversity. This Article argues that the current procedure for appointments to the ECJ undermines both of these. The lack of transparency, coupled with the proximity to the national governments, undermines the independence of the members and precludes racial and ethnic minority representation at the Court. To address this problem, I suggest the development of objective eligibility criteria, the use of which, I argue, can promote both diversity and independence in the ECJ.”

ADF attorney Greg Baylor appeared on CBN News to discuss the CLS v. Martinez. The MP4 Video runs approximately 4 minutes. A written report with embedded video is available at the CBN site here. | ADF attorney Casey Mattox appeared in a separate segment. The MP4 Video runs approximately 3 minutes.

Lorenzo Zucca, Religious Conflicts and Toleration in Today’s Europe (April 19, 2010). A SECULAR EUROPE- LAW AND RELIGION IN THE EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPE, Oxford University Press, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1592425

“In this paper I sharply distinguish between tolerance and toleration as competing attitudes towards religious diversity. I stipulate a definition of tolerance as a non-moralizing attitude, which should be kept apart from moralizing toleration (involving a great deal of moral judgement) and should be understood as the human disposition to put up with diversity. Tolerance thus defined is the basis for an alternative approach to cope with religious conflicts. Such an approach is less dependent on normative assumptions and more responsive to empirical data, including psychological insights as to the human ability to deal with difference. In the paper, I explain the distinction between tolerance and toleration. Then I show the limits of liberal theories based on toleration as a moralizing attitude, which I suggest is as much a problem as it is a solution to religious conflicts. I argue instead that we should rely on and nurture the natural disposition of every individual to cope with difference as the best basis for a theory on how to cope with religious conflicts.”

Amy L. Wax, Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice (April 13, 2010). University of Pennsylvania Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 10-17. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424

“The past fifty years have witnessed a growing divergence in family structure by social class, income, education, and race. The goal is to explain why significant segments of the population are moving away from the traditional patterns of family and reproduction. Most demographers acknowledge that external and material constraints fail to account for most of the present dispersion by class and race in marriage, divorce, and patterns of childbearing. Nor do these factors explain the widening of disparities over time. In attempting to improve on prior theories, this paper proposes a different explanation for these developments. It argues that demographic trends can best be explained as the product of growing differences in styles of thinking about partner choice and reproductive behavior.”

Carson Halloway writes at Public Discourse: “Promoting a sexually permissive pop-culture in the Muslim world gets the true foundations of ordered liberty wrong. In defining our ideals by rejecting our enemy’s, we go from one extreme to another, and miss the virtuous mean.”

“Chaurasiya had denied she was trying to leave the Air Force, and instead was trying to confront what she believed was the injustice of the military policy.”