Daily Archives: June 28, 2010

PR Newswire: “Under the ICANN guidelines, sites with adult content are not required to purchase a domain ending in .xxx or to abandon their existing .com addresses. Therefore, existing adult sites will be able to purchase .xxx versions of their domains and simply use the new address to point traffic to their existing .com site, effectively doubling their presence on the Internet.”

Catholic Culture: “Afghan authorities have detained over 20 of the nation’s Christians after Abdul Sattar Khawasi, a deputy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’s National Assembly, called for the execution of converts to Christianity. Khawasi’s comments followed the broadcast of adult baptisms on Afghan television.”

T. Dalrymple writing at Cross and Culture: “In my earlier post I framed the issues behind CLS v. Martinez and noted the first-blush response of David French, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which argued the case alongside the Christian Legal Society. The ADF just issued their press release on the case. Granted, they have an interest in arguing that this does not decide the issue of free religious association on college campuses without discrimination. Still, they may well be right in their interpretation of the case.”

Christian NewsWire: “CWA objects to ICANN giving so-called ‘adult entertainment’ respectability in the Internet world. … Penny Young Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America (CWA) said, ‘Since the new .xxx domain is voluntary, it will not isolate all pornography in one area, but it will cause parents and others to think that the Internet is safe for children. Worse, it continues to ease the seepage of pornography into the popular culture, making it an acceptable aspect of daily life. Any initiative that mainstreams pornography is harmful to children and society.’”

The Blog of LegalTimes: “Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was the only Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor a year ago. Today, he continued to drop hints that he might be willing to vote for Elena Kagan, too.”

Andrew Kern writing at The Circe Institute: “My conviction is this: when you apply naturalistic evolutionary teaching to education, you undercut education itself. … When Darwin was believed to have demonstrated that humanity descended through an evolutionary process so that God was no longer a necessary concept and the soul was ‘a needless hypothesis,’ any Christian classical conception of reason and will were dismissed. Knowledge was no longer regarded as the internalization of an external object into a soul that no longer existed through a contemplative process that no longer could happen. Now it was, as Dewey said, ‘the adaptation of an organism to its environment.’ The will was no longer regarded as the faculty by which the individual overcame his appetites, but as a supreme appetite to propagate the species. Consequently, the twentieth century is the story of the neglect of reason and will and the exaltation of appetite. It may be that modern education is summarized in that single sentence.”

Breitbart: “To those hearty souls who tuned in to C-SPAN on Monday it must have sounded like a tale of two Kagans. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the panel, previewed the GOP lines of attack—reaching all the way back to her college thesis on socialism, which he said ‘seems to bemoan socialism’s demise.’ … For every GOP thrust, there was a Democratic parry. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont called her legal credentials ‘unassailable.’”

Catholic News Agency: “The spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico City, Father Hugo Valdemar, said last week that if the country’s Supreme Court upholds the legalization of adoption by homosexual couples, the Church would continue to condemn the act as immoral.”

ChristianNewsWire: “Rev. Mahoney is being charged with ‘unlawful entry’ . . . ‘As I plead not guilty to these outrageous and baseless charges, I am affirming the power of the First Amendment and free speech and joining a long proud tradition of Americans who refused to keep silent and go silently into the night and surrender their God given rights and liberties.’”

Byron York writing in The Washington Examiner: In the past several years, newspapers have assigned reporters to specifically cover conservatives, but they haven’t done the same thing for liberals. It started in January 2004, when the New York times chose David Kirkpatrick to cover the conservative movement. The goal, as Times editor Bill Keller told then-ombudsman Byron Calame in 2006, was to identify ‘the [conservative] thinkers and the grass roots they organize’ and explore ‘how the conservative movement works to be heard in Washington.’ ‘We wanted to understand them,’ Keller said of conservatives. If you were trying to craft the most concise statement of the distance between mainstream media figures and conservatism, it would be hard to do better than that.”

Lance Ulanoff writing at PCMag.com: “Some conservative leaders have been quoted arguing that a porn-only domain would only serve to validate the porn industry. In other words, this multi-billion dollar business with thousands of employees, print services, video production operations and its own trade show is not already ‘validated as an actual business’. This has to be the silliest argument I’ve ever heard. The constitution of an official TLD for adult material will have no more impact on the validation of the porn industry than a teenage boy picking up his first Playboy.”

BioEdge: “Chinese petitioners, troublemakers and corruption whistleblowers are being locked up in psychiatric institutions, according to the BMJ. Liu Feiyue, founder of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, says that he has documented more than 500 cases.”

“India has become a world centre for surrogate motherhood. Now the government proposes to legalise commercial surrogacy. The Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) [Regulation] Bill 2010 will allow unmarried women to act as surrogates for both couples and singles, including homosexuals. It is a radical measure in socially conservative India which could deliver big profits to the country’s aggressive IVF industry.”

BioEdge: “British researchers believe that they have found a way to communicate with people who appear to be in a vegetative state. Recent studies have shown that responses from some of these people can be detected with an fMRI scanner.”

“That patient who received the embryos was informed of the error within an hour and decided to take the ‘morning after’ pill to prevent the pregnancy, according to state records.”

PR Newswire: “www.BeautifulPeople.com, the dating site with a strict ban on ugly people, has launched a virtual sperm and egg bank for people who want to have beautiful babies. … The Beautiful Baby service – which is also available to non-members – was created for people who want to maximize their chances of having good looking children.” | Via Wesley J. Smith

Zenit: “Direct abortion is never morally permissible, but there are some medical procedures that are legitimate to protect the life of a pregnant mother, even if they might result in the death of her child. … The committee added that a contrasting case arises in some situations where it might be permissible to perform a ‘medical procedure on a pregnant woman that directly treats a serious health problem but that also has a secondary effect that leads to the death of the developing child.’” | The Distinction Between Direct Abortion and Legitimate Medical Procedures

Zenit: “Peter Kleponis, a Catholic psychotherapist who specializes in marriage and family therapy, . . . spoke with ZENIT about his extensive work with pornography users and their families, the success stories and how virtue plays a role in recovery. … Zenit: ‘What problems do you see in single men and how to you counsel them?’ Kleponis: ‘We tell single young men that by engaging in pornography they’re giving into profound selfishness, which is undermining their ability to relate in a healthy way to young women . . . Also, pornography use contributes to overreacting in anger as men lose a sense of refinement and true manly confidence in how to relate to a woman. The women they see in pornography don’t have feelings, needs and opinions. When the men leave their fantasy world and meet a real woman who does have emotions and opinions, they often don’t know how to deal with her, and withdraw due to insecurity or overreact in anger.’”

Washington Post | 44: “The Senate Judiciary Committee has announced the witness list for Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin Monday at 12:30 p.m.”

Chuleenan Svetvilas writing in California Lawyer: “As Chad Griffin tells it, the idea for filing a federal challenge to Prop. 8 took shape ten days after it passed with 52 percent of the vote. Griffin and Kristina Schake, his business partner in the Los Angeles communications firm Griffin/Schake, had joined director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, for lunch at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Griffin had produced three television ads and raised money for the ‘No on 8′ campaign; the Reiners were contributors, as well as Griffin’s longtime clients. The four discussed the failed campaign and other election results.”

American Federation for Children: “Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal this week signed into law the nation’s 20th private school choice program, which will allow children with special needs to use state-funded scholarships to attend the private schools of their parents’ choice.”

Adam D. Thierer writing in The City Journal: “Imagine a world of ‘post-corporate’ newsrooms, where the state serves as the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate. Billions flow from bureaucracies to media entities and individual journalists in the name of sustaining a ‘free press.’ And this new media welfare state is funded by steep taxes on our mobile phones, broadband connections, and digital gadgets. Sound Orwellian? Well, it’s the blueprint for a press takeover drawn up by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism.”

Competitive Effects of Means-Tested School Vouchers | Google Viewer
Author: David Figlio & Cassandra M. D. Hart

“We study the effects of private school competition on public school students’ test scores in the wake of Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program, now known as the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which offered scholarships to eligible low-income students to attend private schools. Specifically, we examine whether students in schools that were exposed to a more competitive private school landscape saw greater improvements in their test scores after the introduction of the scholarship program, than did students in schools that faced less competition.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial: “What the world has now reached instead is a Keynesian dead end. We are told to let Congress continue to spend and borrow until the precise moment when Mr. Summers and Mark Zandi and the other architects of our current policy say it is time to raise taxes to reduce the huge deficits and debt that their spending has produced. Meanwhile, individuals and businesses are supposed to be unaffected by the prospect of future tax increases, higher interest rates, and more government control over nearly every area of the economy. Even the CEOs of the Business Roundtable now see the damage this is doing.”

Associated Press: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan pledged Monday to be properly deferential to Congress if confirmed as a justice, while striving ‘to consider every case impartially, modestly, with commitment to principle and in accordance with law.’”

The Grand Rapids Press: “The world’s largest association of Reformed churches can now break bread together as one ecclesiastical body. An estimated 400 delegates approved Friday at Calvin College a constitution that merges the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and the Reformed Ecumenical Council into the World Communion of Reformed Churches.”

A federal court Friday rebuffed the attempt of an activist group to silence a Christian man who wanted to distribute Bibles in a public park where the group was holding a “Pride Festival.”

OneNewsNow: “The American Academy of Neurology (AAN) has issued new guidelines — an update of rules initially written 15 years ago. Dr. Nick Yates, a spokesman for the Christian Medical Association (CMA), practices medicine in New York, where an existing checklist compares to the new guidelines. He thinks the update is a move in the right direction.” | Full report here.

LifeSiteNews: “More than half (55%) of all diagnoses in the over 45s were made in swingers, compared with around a third (31%) in gay men. One in 10 older swingers had Chlamydia and around one in 20 (4%) had gonorrhoea.”

LifeSiteNews: “A 10-year-old boy is being used as Grand Marshal of an Arkansas homosexual pride parade this weekend. The move has attracted opposition from pro-family leaders, who have decried the movement’s exposure of the boy to the lewd festival of sexual deviancy as ‘a form of child abuse.’ The boy, Will Phillips, attracted national media attention last year after he refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school, saying that homosexuals are refused ‘liberty and justice’ because the government defines marriage as between a man and a woman.”

LifeSiteNews: “Some Republican senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee indicated their opposition to Supreme Court hopeful Elena Kagan’s pro-abortion and homosexualist agenda, as well as her activist leanings, amid opening remarks at the first in a series of Senate confirmation hearings today.”

LifeNews: “Mary Spaulding Balch, a National Right to Life attorney who has overseen the development of legislation in the Unite States informing women of the pain unborn children experience in an abortion, told LifeNews.com that most scientific research says the pain exists. ‘An objective expert in neurobiology would be appalled by the stunning lack of scholarship in the RCOG article,’ she said. … Balch says the RCOG authors ignore the seminal 2007 publication of ‘Consciousness without a cerebral cortex,’ in the medical journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences and dismiss its evidence that children born missing virtually all of the cerebral cortex nonetheless experience pain.”

LifeNews: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is drawing strong condemnation from Republicans on the Judiciary Committee in their opening statements on the first day of her nomination hearings. Even Democrats are pointing out she has little record on which to examine her judicial philosophy. … Sessions also pounded Kagan on abortion, saying ‘Kagan was also the point person for the Clinton Administration’s efforts to block Congressional restrictions on partial-birth abortions.’” | Committee on the Judiciary

Camille Paglia writing in the New York Times: “In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure. … Nor are husbands offering much stimulation in the male display department: visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife. The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.”

Law.com: “Prominent tax lawyer and professor Martin Ginsburg, husband of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for 56 years, died Sunday at their home in Washington, D.C. Martin Ginsburg, who was 78, died from complications of metastatic cancer, according to an announcement from the Court’s public information office. Ginsburg was a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and was of counsel to the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.”

OneNewsNow: “Because of a tight budget, New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie has taken action on state spending for abortion facilities by eliminating their funding. … Democrats are introducing legislation to reinstate those eliminated funds, but the NJFPC president does not believe that will settle well with many voters.”

Education Next: “What happens to public schools when disasters strike? The Obama Administration is talking about turnarounds, but no one ever commands a shut down. Yet 10 percent of all charters have disappeared. Could well-regulated charter schools be a better symbol of our democracy than the public school? Before I could answer that question, it was time to grab my bag, stumble to the door, and jump off the train.”

The Volokh Conspiracy: “The letter is here. Among other things, McConnell argues in some detail that conservatives will likely be pretty happy about Elena Kagan on the freedom of religious and political speech, on free exercise of religion, and on the participation of religious institutions in generally available funding programs.”

Jonathan Adler writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “In today’s NYT, Adam Liptak reports on a new study by political scientists Lori Ringhand and Paul Collins Jr. analyzing the questions asked at Supreme Court confirmation hearings over the past 70 years [which] … ‘shows that the hearings often address real substance, illuminate the spirit of their times and change with shifts in partisan alignments and the demographic characteristics of nominees.’ … This is quite a different view than Elena Kagan espoused in 1995 . . . ”

The Volokh Conspiracy: “The Supreme Court holds in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment is fully applicable to the states through the 14th Amendment. … In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Court affirms the Ninth Circuit 5–4. Justice Ginsburg writes the majority, siding with the University of California on narrow grounds. Justices Stevens and Kennedy write concurrences. The four conservatives dissent in an opinion by Justice Alito.”

Fox News | Live Shots: “A controversial measure Arizona lawmakers passed to crack down on illegal immigration will now go before the Supreme Court, the justices announced Monday, but this is a different law from the one recently passed–and yet to go into effect–that has generated so much attention. The Court’s decision to take the case places a harsh spotlight on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for an apparent reversal on her views of how best to address immigration problems. It also puts added focus on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan and her role as Solicitor General in asking the high court to take the case . . . The 2007 Arizona law . . . forces employers to participate in the national E-Verify database that tracks employment eligibility.”

“Some persons argue that our nation has a ‘living’ Constitution; the court has spoken of ‘the evolving standards of decency . . .Scalia . . . [a] society that adopts a bill of rights is skeptical that ‘evolving standards of decency’ always ‘mark progress,’ and that societies always ‘mature,’ as opposed to rot.” Is he wrong?”

USA Today: “Retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens will ascend the court’s mahogany bench today for the last time, as the justices hand down the final cases of their annual term. … Also today, through a fluke of Senate timing, President Obama’s nominee to succeed Stevens, Elena Kagan, will begin her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Noah Feldman writing in the Wall Street Journal: “But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph.”

Catholic News Service: “The U.S. Supreme Court has left standing a lower court ruling that will allow an Oregon man to try to hold the Vatican financially responsible for his sexual abuse by a priest, if he can persuade the court that the priest was an employee of the Vatican. By declining to take Holy See v. John Doe, the court June 28 left intact the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said because of the way Oregon law defines employment, the Vatican is not protected under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act from potential liability for the actions of a priest who Doe, the unidentified plaintiff, said sexually abused him in the 1960s.” | Related: Charles J. Chaput: Suing the Church

CNN Living: “More than 50 percent of Americans accept the idea of a gay or lesbian relationship, signaling growing support for same-sex couples, according to a Gallup poll in May. The poll, however, doesn’t address the issue of bisexuality, often defined as having a romantic attraction to both men and women. It’s a sexual orientation some advocacy groups and researchers say remains challenging because neither the gay community nor the straight population advocates for men and women who are attracted to both sexes.”

The Daily Mail: “After four long years of being denied religious property status, a landmark court battle over a cloister of pagan witches is brewing. The Maetreum of Cybele, Magna Mater, a faction of matriarchal priestesses living in a historic Palenville inn, has filed suit against the Town of Catskill after being denied a religious property tax exemption on their three-acre parcel along Route 23A.” | Via Religion Clause.

Irish Times: “Germany’s federal high court in a landmark ruling has opened the door to limited euthanasia if a person requests explicitly not to be kept alive by artificial means. The federal court of justice overturned a conviction yesterday against a lawyer who advised his client to remove the feeding tube of her 72-year-old mother in 2002.”

Wayne Allyn Root writing in the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos — thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within. … Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of ’83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands.” | The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

Religion Clause: “In Jivraj v. Hashwani, (EWCA, June 22, 2010), Britain’s Court of Appeal held that Britain’s Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003 invalidate a provision in a private commercial arbitration provision requiring that arbitrators are to be drawn from members of a particular religious community.”

Russ Roberts writing in the Wall Street Journal: “[N]ow that the stimulus has barely dented the unemployment rate, and with government spending and deficits soaring, it’s natural to turn to Hayek. He championed four important ideas worth thinking about in these troubled times. … Despite the caricatures of his critics, Hayek never said that totalitarianism was the inevitable result of expanding government’s role in the economy. He simply warned us of the possibility and the costs of heading in that direction. We should heed his warning. I don’t know if we’re on the road to serfdom, but wherever we’re headed, Hayek would certainly counsel us to turn around.”

Religion Clause: “Justice Alito wrote a dissent, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia and Thomas. The dissent argued that the Court should focus on the non-discrimination policy as written, since that was the policy originally invoked to deny CLS registration. That policy, the dissent argues, amounts to viewpoint discrimination since only religious groups are required to admit students who do not share their views. Political groups or groups formed around other causes can limit membership. The dissent goes on to argue that even limiting the analysis to the broader all-comers rule, the policy is unconstitutional. It was adopted as a pretext to suppress a particular viewpoint and it is not reasonable in light of the purposes of the student organization policy which is promoting diversity among student organizations.” | ADF News Release

Wes Vernon writing at Renew America: “Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is right out of central casting as a stereotypical example of America’s ‘ruling class’ — i.e., out of step with the great majority of Americans, but with a sense of entitlement to wield power in such a way as to make policy against our wishes because we are her inferiors.”

New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedom: “A little noticed provision has been slipped into today’s Budget bills that would recognize same-sex couples married in other jurisdictions for the purposes of the Empire State’s Tax Law. This provision would allow same-sex married couples to file their state income tax returns as a married couple, regardless of whether or not they can file their federal returns in the same manner. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act signed by then President Bill Clinton does not permit federal recognition of same-sex marriages.”

National Center for Policy Analysis: “Many people do not realize that illegal aliens who are caught end up in immigration courts that are part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). These courts are presided over by administrative judges; they are not Article III federal courts, says Hans A. von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department official. According to Mark Metcalf, a former immigration judge: From 1996 to 2008, the United States allowed 1.8 million aliens (many of them here illegally) to remain free upon their promise to appear in court when their cases were scheduled to be heard, and 736,000 of them never showed up for their hearings. After 9/11, court evasion by illegal aliens exploded — from 2002 to 2006, over 50 percent of all aliens summoned to court disappeared.”

National Center for Policy Analysis: “Nearly one in five American women in her early 40s is childless, according to a report that shows a striking increase in women who don’t have biological children. The trend was much less common in the 1970s, when one in 10 women did not have children by ages 40 to 44, the age bracket researchers use to designate the end of childbearing years.”

FindLaw (AP): “Elena Kagan, a trailblazer for women and the law, is hitting a new path that could be strewn with a few rough patches: the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings. Kagan’s chances are bright as she heads into a marathon week of high-pressure vetting before the Judiciary panel, pressing to portray herself as a mainstream, impartial addition to the court. She’s set to break weeks of public silence in sworn testimony before the panel reviewing her nomination.”

Associated Press: “Thousands of marchers and a rainbow of floats filled the streets of New York and other U.S. cities on Sunday as people celebrated gay pride, part of a weekend of events marred by a shooting death Saturday at a street party in San Francisco.”

Associated Press: “What’s new is the experience level of committee members. Three have chaired confirmation hearings before. There are no rookies; even the junior senators toward the end of the dais participated in the questioning last year of Obama’s first nominee for the high court, Sonia Sotomayor. … Republicans are examining her experience from other angles. She’s never been a judge. As an adviser to President Bill Clinton, she showed a political shrewdness that GOP lawmakers say isn’t appropriate for an impartial justice. Most of all, they’ve taken aim at Kagan’s brief refusal to give military recruiters access to the law school’s career services office, over the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy against openly gay soldiers.”

Statesman Journal: “An Oregon man has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the city of Stayton for allegedly violating his right to display anti-abortion signs featuring images of aborted fetuses. … ‘Pro-life advocates shouldn’t be kept from expressing their beliefs simply because city officials or others may oppose their viewpoint or find it offensive,’ ADF Senior Counsel [Nate Kellum] said in a statement.” | ADF News Release

Inside Higher Ed: “The Supreme Court ruled today, 5-to-4, that public colleges and universities may require religious organizations seeking recognition or funds as campus groups to comply with anti-bias rules. … The Supreme Court’s decision, by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found that the law school’s policy was ‘a reasonable, viewpoint-neutral condition on access’ that did not raise First Amendment issues in the way the Christian Legal Society argued. … But the Alliance Defense Fund, which has backed the Christian Legal Society in the case, issued a blog post expressing hope that the decision may be based in large part on policies ‘unique to Hastings,’ expressing hope that there may be further review of some key claims. David French, a lawyer for the ADF, said: ‘This is a disappointing decision but one that does not come close to settling core constitutional issues on campus.’” | ADF News Release

Associated Press: “World leaders made bold pledges to cut their spiraling budget deficits but will probably fall far short of their lofty goals. After spending massive amounts of money to rescue the global economy from the worst downturn in decades, the Group of 20 major industrial and developing nations have reversed course and promised to cut their deficits in half in terms of the global economy in just three years.”

California Catholic Daily: “A federal appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit that challenges the Obama Administration’s policy on embryonic stem cell research as a violation of U.S. law. On Friday, June 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Colombia Circuit issued a 12-page ruling reversing a decision by a U.S. District Court judge dismissing the case … ‘No one should be allowed to decide that an innocent life is worthless,’ said Alliance Defense Fund senior legal counsel Steven H. Aden in a statement issued following the appeals court ruling. ‘Although private-sector funding of embryonic stem cell research has been practically unlimited, it has failed to produce results.’”

WorldNetDaily: “Arguing death threats have a significant ‘chilling’ effect on free speech, an attorney representing supporters of Washington state’s traditional-marriage referendum says he’s confident a lower court will decide to protect their names and addresses. … The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week it would not issue a blanket ban on the release of signatures on petition documents. The high court, however, explained its decision did not prevent the Washington state petition signers from gaining an exemption from public disclosure at the lower court. … [CWA] was one of many [organizations] that filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the Washington state case. Other groups included Liberty Counsel, Cato Institute, Institute for Justice, Alliance Defense Fund, American Center for Law and Justice and the Justice and Freedom Fund.”

The Keene Sentinel: “It’s being hailed as one of the largest settlements of its kind — Richmond town officials have agreed to pay $1.15 million to end a religious discrimination case. … The settlement was announced Friday afternoon by the Alliance Defense Fund … ‘Churches shouldn’t be singled out for discrimination and penalized by a city’s zoning restrictions because of their religious viewpoint,’ said [Doug Napier], senior legal counsel for the group.” | ADF News Release

WorldNetDaily: “The state-sponsored ‘child-napping’ of a Swedish boy because his parents were homeschooling him is being escalated to the European Court of Human Rights, which is being asked to hear the case of Dominic Johansson. The application has been filed by the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association. … ‘We are gravely concerned about this case because of the threat it represents to other homeschooling families,’ said Mike Donnelly, staff attorney for HSLDA and one of nearly 1,700 attorneys in the ADF alliance. … ‘Parents have the right and authority to make decisions regarding their children’s education without government interference,’ said Europe-based ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska.” | ADF News Release

Wall Street Journal: “A Wisconsin evangelist will be able to distribute Bibles and discuss sin this weekend at a Minneapolis gay-pride festival, the result of a federal court ruling Friday that could spark a First Amendment battle in the Midwest. … Mr. Johnson received free legal aid from the Alliance Defense Fund of Scottsdale, Ariz., a group that offers legal assistance in cases focusing on abortion, families and religious freedom. … [Mr. Kellum] said Twin Cities Pride has ‘a constitutional right to speak their peace,’ and ‘that’s what Mr. Johnson does.’”

ADF Attorney David French writing at Speak Up Movement / University: “Congratulations to former ADF Clients (and current treasured friends) Ruth Malhotra and Orit Sklar for a glowing profile in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. … ‘Decisive victory’ is an understatement. Not only did Georgia Tech ultimately change four policies as a result of the lawsuit (speech code, speech zones, student fee distribution policy, and ‘Safe Space’ training manual), it was sternly chastised by a federal judge, and eventually paid more than $200,000.00 in legal fees.”

Coverage is available here.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 Monday to uphold an unusual university policy that forces student groups to allow outsiders who disagree with their beliefs to become leaders and voting members.

The link to the live blog is here.

Liberty Counsel: “Today Liberty Counsel is filing a lawsuit on behalf of Child Evangelism Fellowship of Minnesota (CEF), the sponsor of Good News Clubs, against the Minneapolis Special School District No. 1 for unfairly denying equal inclusion in its promotion of after-school programs.”

AP: “A Catholic panel investigating clerical sex abuse in Belgium is shutting down to protest a police raid on its church offices last week, the group’s chairman said Monday.”

AP: “Iceland’s prime minister has married her partner under a new law legalizing same-sex marriage in the country.”

Kate Orne writing at The Huffington Post: “Roaming the streets while their mothers earn their meager income, the children are easy targets to abuse, drugs and crime. Cheap glue is available through the local shoe factory, an easy high for many of the kids. Looking into their glassy distant eyes I witness myself at age 12 doing the same back in Sweden.”