Daily Archives: September 14, 2010

Telegraph: “The advert was knocked back by Free TV Australia, which regulates all advertising material for free-to-air commercial stations, saying it would probably breach television’s code of conduct. The code ‘states that material which promotes or encourages suicide will invariably be unsuitable for television,’ it said in a statement.”

The Times of India: “First the good news: the number of medical termination of pregnancies (induced abortions) has started to dip in India. The bad news , however, is that the country still records a large number of such abortions — in 2008, India saw 6.41 lakh abortions across 12,510 institutions, approved to carry out MTP.”

Shreveport Times: “Hope Medical Group for Women, a Shreveport abortion clinc, has reopened after a judge issued a temporary restraining order against state health officials.” Related: Louisiana Health Department Closes Abortion Center for Health, Safety Problems

WZZM: “In a unanimous decision Kent County Commissioners voted Tuesday morning to remove abortions from employee benefit packages. Despite it being a controversial issue, the legislative and human resources committee vote was 9 to 0 to remove elective abortions as a covered benefit from one of the county’s two medical insurance plans.”

NY Daily News: “An Iranian sex-trafficking gang in London has admitted attempting to sell underage girls’ virginity for over $200,000.”

ADF Attorney Kevin Theriot writing at Baptist Press: “At the Alliance Defense Fund . . . we hear from churches just about every week who simply cannot afford a church building because of all the restrictions local municipalities are placing on use of land for religious purposes. We’ve also represented churches that are being hampered by local laws that prohibit them from performing time-honored religious services like feeding the homeless. Many people have no idea that this is going on, and it is certainly not what our Founding Fathers intended.”

Reuters: “The Obama administration is unlikely to extend its six-month ban on deepwater drilling because of the progress the industry has shown since the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April, an Interior Department official said on Tuesday.”

Associated Press: “A Massachusetts doctor was sentenced Tuesday to six months in jail after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the case of a woman who died after he performed an abortion on her.”

ADF attorney Erik Stanley appeared on “Grassroots America: We the People” with George Stevenson to discuss why there is no place for government in the pulpit. | MP3 audio 18:10 mins | Pulpit Freedom Sunday | ADF Pulpit Project

Breitbart (AP): “The drilling moratorium enacted after the BP oil spill applies only to the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Yet energy exploration in the Gulf’s shallow waters has come to a virtual standstill as drillers grapple with tougher federal rules since the spill.”

RFI: “American photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair won this year’s Visa d’Or prize for best feature for her report Polygamy in America, an intimate look at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community in Eldorado, Texas. Never before had this most secretive of Mormon sects let an outsider see how they live.”

CBS 6: “The branch at 855 Central Ave. — between CVS and Orange Ford, in the same building as existing tenants Mildred Elley and the Austin Beauty School — opened Monday, September 13, UHPP officials announced.”

Law.com: “The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the State Bar of Wisconsin didn’t violate members’ First Amendment rights by using mandatory dues for a public image campaign, but it also held that compulsory dues spending must be germane to the State Bar’s purposes.” Kingstad v. State Bar of Wisconsin, No. 09-4080 (7th Cir. Sept. 9, 2010)

Chillicothe Gazette: “[Chillicothe] City Council approved the first of three steps aimed at curbing strip clubs in city limits Monday night, but not all council members were on board with the language of the new law. The ordinance would establish a new section of city criminal code that would set requirements for any business wishing to operate as a sexually oriented business.”

Ken Klukowski writing in The Washington Examiner: “There are those seeking to move the Republican Party away from these issues, and even trying to define conservatism as being concerned exclusively with economic and reach-of-government issues. These decisions [in Perry and Log Cabin Republicans] put the lie to that notion. An agenda-driven judge is an agenda-driven judge. A judge who is willing to ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution in one case doesn’t think twice about doing it in another case. Is Obamacare unconstitutional? You bet it is. But a judge who is willing to declare a constitutional right to same-sex marriage or a right to serve in the military is also willing to declare a constitutional right to government healthcare.”

Sacramento Bee / Capitol Alert: “With Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Asia, a conservative law professor is trying to cajole acting Gov. Abel Maldonado to appeal to defend California’s same-sex marriage ban in court. John Eastman, who lost a bid in June to become the Republican nominee for attorney general, is calling on Proposition 8 supporters to ‘help Abel Maldonado do the right thing.’”

Alan Keyes: “Like Glenn Beck[, Rush Limbaugh] casually denies the damage done when a society purports to redefine marriage (that is, the institutional foundation of family life) in a way that denies the relevance of God endowed natural right . . . But, as I have pointed out before, the family is the primordial paradigm for all property rights, which is to say, all human claims to physical belongings. If the government is not obliged to respect the rights of the natural family, this implies that it has no obligation to respect any property rights whatsoever. Once this fundamental point becomes clear, there is something tragically pathetic about the doomed protestations of the so-called ‘economic conservatives’ trapped in the delusion that we can defend all the institutions derived from property rights (such as free enterprise economic activity) when we have denied the basis for all individual claims to any property whatsoever.”

BBC: “France’s Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public.”

The Washington Post / Post Tech: “An official from Craigslist will appear before federal lawmakers on Wednesday for a hearing on sex trafficking, following its surprising move one week ago to take down adult services ads on its classified Web site.”

Times-Union (AP): “Sensing voters’ dissatisfaction with Democrats, Republicans have spent more than $9.5 million trying to retain the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg — believing the winner of the primary will have an edge in November.”

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. writing at The Christian Post: “Give the strident atheism a rest, [Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future] demands, and adopt the language of spirituality. As he tells the atheists, the language of spirituality is utterly compatible with atheism, but it will not scare the public . . . In its own way, Mooney’s column serves to illustrate the vacuity that marks modern spirituality. There is nothing to it – no beliefs, no God, no morality, no doctrine, no discipleship. Spirituality in this sense is what is left when Christianity disappears and dissipates.”

San Francisco Bay Times: “Supporters of same-sex marriage say the appeals court has put the matter on the fast track, which they believe helps the cause for equality . . . ‘It made no sense to impose a radical change in marriage on the people of California before all appeals on their behalf are heard, so the 9th Circuit’s decision is clearly the right call,’ stated pro-Prop 8 conservative Alliance Defense Fund Litigation Staff Counsel Jim Campbell. ‘Refusing to stay the decision would only have created more legal confusion surrounding any same-sex unions entered while the appeal is pending. This case has just begun.’”

The Hill: “Speaking at a fundraiser for Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak, Biden referred to ‘the woman in Delaware, my home state, who’s giving a scare to Mike Castle’ when expanding upon the positions taken by Tea Party-affiliated candidates.”

Harry Jackson, Jr. writing at Black Christian News: “Advocates of making same-sex marriage a legally recognized right claim that this will have no impact on traditional marriage — that it can peacefully coexist alongside traditional marriage. On the contrary, it will have profound impacts. It will create a conflict for people of faith (and nonreligious people as well) who fervently believe in traditional man-woman marriage and the law . . . We can teach our children at home that marriage is between a man and a woman, but our children’s public schools will teach them that marriage includes same-sex couples. Both would be “equal marriages” under the law.”

Delaware Online (AP): “Arguments before the state Supreme Court will be webcast live starting this week, a first for a court that’s admittedly slow to embrace change, Chief Justice Jim Hannah said Tuesday.”

The Palm Beach Post: “Gov. Charlie Crist said he has had an ‘appropriate evolution’ regarding gay rights and is considering dropping the state’s lawsuit challenging a gay couple’s adoption of two foster children . . . The Department of Children and Families, one of Crist’s agencies, is challenging a judge’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional.”

Associated Press: “Five teenagers accused of disrupting a religious service at a small-town mosque were hit with extra misdemeanor charges Monday, but a prosecutor said he was holding off classifying their acts as a hate crime.”

FindLaw (AP): “The competition is particularly strong in Delaware and New Hampshire, where GOP senatorial nominations are the prize, and New York, where Republicans pick a challenger for an uphill fall campaign for governor. Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Maryland also hold primaries Tuesday, along with the District of Columbia.”

Victoria Toensing writing at National Review Online: “[T]he little-known history of Washington, D.C.’s Islamic Center shows how the entity controlling the purse strings can transform even a moderate ecumenical institution into a mouthpiece for Wahhabism, an intolerant form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.”

George Stephanopoulos writing at ABC: Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on ‘GMA’ that he’s not prepared to conclude that — in the internet age — the First Amendment condones Koran burning. ‘Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,’ Breyer told me. ‘Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?’” Via Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy.

The Hill: “The Senate on Tuesday defeated an effort to strip a controversial tax-reporting provision from the sweeping healthcare law Congress passed earlier this year. In a 46-52 vote, lawmakers killed an amendment sponsored by Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) that would have saved businesses and nonprofit groups from having to report an array of small and medium-sized purchases to the Internal Revenue Service.”

Daniel Griswold writing in The Washington Times: “All the evidence points to the fact that rising imports and a growing trade gap, far from being drags on growth, are among the surest signs that the economy is expanding . . . In the long run, imports spur growth by forcing domestic producers to be more efficient and productive. Like competition generally, imports weed out the less-productive domestic producers, leaving the market to more-competitive U.S. companies. Those companies are better able to expand their share in global markets and create sustainable jobs with higher pay.”

CNN: “Earlier this year, [Camie Ayash] and her husband of 15 years, a Kuwaiti Muslim, announced plans to build an Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a city of about 100,000 people 35 miles southeast of Nashville. The city has a burgeoning Middle East refugee community, many from Iraq.”

“This movie beautifully depicts how law and science have combined to allow two women to create a social and legal family that once would have been reserved for an opposite-sex couple.”

SIFY News: “The Supreme Court Tuesday said the chief secretaries of state governments that have not furnished details of unauthorized religious structures in public places will have to appear in person to answer their failure to comply with the court’s directions. Granting the defaulting state governments yet two more weeks, the apex court bench of Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice Deepak Verma said there would be no extension of time to file details of unauthorised structures in public places.”

Calgary Herald: “Artur Pawlowski of Street Church Ministries accuses outgoing Mayor Dave Bronconnier and the city clerk’s office of a religious bias in its refusal to allow the group to hold a ceremony and deny a bid to have Bronconnier declare the following December Jesus Month.”

The Christian Institute: “Robert Kelly, rector at Berwickshire High School in the Scottish town of Duns, said flouting uniform rules by wearing short skirts and half-buttoned blouses would encourage inappropriate thoughts among boys. But some parents thought he was blaming girls for unwanted male attention, and he is now under investigation by the Scottish Borders Council.”

The Christian Institute: “Two thirds of parents in the UK believe children are exposed to unsuitable content on television before the watershed, a survey has shown . . . A further 80 per cent said they felt films and video games with violent or sexual themes can be accessed too easily by children.”

The Christian Institute: “Taxpayers are footing the bill for council officials to go on a ‘diversity’ course which encourages participants to go on an ‘adventure in Lesbianandgayland’. The programme, which has been attended by Brighton and Hove City Council officials, involves imagining a world where it is normal to be homosexual.”

Haaretz: “Ultra-Orthodox network that runs the Beit Yaakov girls school in Immanuel told last year t it must pay a fine of NIS 5,000 for every day they continued to violate court order requiring it to eliminate any vestige of ethnic discrimination . . . ”

The Jakarta Globe: “Islamic leaders on Tuesday defended a government regulation that requires local consent before a house of worship can be established, which pluralism advocates say has been used to discriminate against minority religious groups.”

Jerusalem Post: “One month after taking a stand against construction of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero in Manhattan, the Anti-Defamation League has started an interfaith coalition meant to help American Muslim communities who are facing opposition in building mosques.”

The Jakarta Globe: “Responding to harsh public criticism over an attack on two church leaders, authorities in Bekasi on Monday said they had warned the congregation not to hold services in Ciketing, where the crime took place.”

Diane Noble, author of “The Sister Wife,” the first book in her new historical polygamy fiction series “Brides of Gabriel,” writing at CNN: “I’m also concerned that HBO’s popular ‘Big Love’ and TLC’s upcoming reality show ‘Sister Wives,’ for the sake of entertainment and palatability, can’t give us the whole truth about life in polygamous families. I’m concerned that both shows are essentially promoting a lifestyle that is illegal in the U.S.”

Jakarta Globe: “About 4,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the government do more to protect Constitution-enshrined religious freedoms in response to Sunday’s brutal attack on two leaders of the Batak Christian Protestant Church (HKBP) in Bekasi.”

New York Times: “The decision by the executive board of the Service Employees International Union of California will be announced in the next few days, according to officials who have been briefed about it but were not allowed to speak publicly before it was announced.”

USA Today: “The U.S. Judicial Conference, the policymaking arm of the judiciary, is scheduled to vote today on whether to authorize a pilot project for recording some district court civil cases. The project would allow cameras only if participants in the case agreed.”

Chicago Tribune: “[Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Fitzgerald], 69, told his colleagues Monday that he has Parkinson’s disease, court spokesman Joseph Tybor said. Fitzgerald received confirmation of the diagnosis this month, Tybor said.”

Chad Groening writing at OneNewsNow: “Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, says the media clearly made a mountain out of a mole hill on the story. ‘This is a story in which they would usually say, ‘Why would we pay attention to one pastor with a flock of 50?’ he states. ‘I think it really shows the news media today have a hypersensitivity to criticism of Islam.’”

RaelPress: “The European Raelian Movement (ERM) has filed a lawsuit in the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division, against Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger. Allegations in the suit include charges of violating international human rights laws, perpetrating genocide by continuing to claim that condoms don’t stop the spread of AIDS, and stating that Pope Benedict and the Vatican orchestrated a campaign of disinformation against the business of the ERM after its membership reported on these matters.” Via Religion Clause.

CBS 5: “A federal appeals court in San Francisco agreed Monday to reconsider whether a Muslim woman’s religious rights were violated when she was required to remove her headscarf in an Orange County courthouse holding cell four years ago.”

Associated Press: “Assailants targeting Sunnis in Bahrain set off an explosion Tuesday that damaged several parked cars in the first such attack since the country’s Sunni-led rulers began a crackdown on suspected Shiite dissidents last month, security officials said.”

Associated Press: “The Hartford City Council’s decision to replace a scheduled Islamic prayer with an interfaith moment of silence before its meeting sends the wrong message to Connecticut’s Islamic community, Muslim leaders said.”

The Arizona Republic: “Nine of 13 attorneys and judges who applied to fill a vacant seat on the Arizona Supreme Court have been granted interviews with the selecting committee, including a close political associate of Gov. Jan Brewer.”

Ibn Warraq writing at National Review Online: “Rauf [claims] that ‘America is substantively an “Islamic” country, by which I mean a country whose systems remarkably embody the principles that Islamic law requires of a government.’ For gullible multiculturalists and Western liberals, the thought that the U.S. Constitution is sharia compliant is most reassuring — ‘Ah! There is no real clash of civilizations after all. Rauf is a true moderate who wants to get along.’ And for an Islamic triumphalist, it is a way to infiltrate Western institutions and eventually destroy them from within . . . ”

Associated Press: “Public colleges must be neutral in allowing controversial speakers and their ideas on campus and must work harder to educate citizens about the roles of colleges in presenting varying ideas, speakers at a free speech forum said Monday. The University of Wyoming organized the forum, which featured four academics from across the country, in the wake of recent campus visits by former Vice President Dick Cheney and former 1960s radical Bill Ayers.”

Associated Press: “China’s currency advanced to a fresh high against the U.S. dollar for the third straight trading day Tuesday, as U.S. lawmakers prepared for hearings on Beijing’s foreign exchange policies.”

Associated Press: “The defection of a third Iranian diplomat in Europe hints at widening fissures within Iran’s government over its crackdown on protesters after the disputed 2009 election that kept hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power.”

LifeNews: “Massachusetts-based abortion practitioner Rapin Osathanondh pleaded guilty to the charge of manslaughter on Monday in relation to his killing 22-year-old Laura Smith in a failed abortion. The plea in court from Osathanondh came on the third anniversary of Smith’s death.”

Andrew C. McCarthy writing at National Review Online: “To ‘burn the sacred texts of someone else’s religion is contrary to what this country stands for,’ lectured Pres. Barack Obama at last week’s press conference. ‘It’s contrary to what this country — this nation — was founded on.’  . . . ”

Daily Mail: “Schools have wrongly labelled as many as 750,000 children as having special needs to cover up poor teaching, a damning report warns today.”

The Hill: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) intends to bring the 2011 defense authorization bill to the floor next week. The defense bill contains critical military policy as well as a provision that would repeal the ban on openly gay people serving in the military. Reid was scheduled to meet with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) on Monday afternoon to discuss his plans.”

Wall Street Journal editorial: “The Senate will vote on amendments to the White House small business bill that would rescind an ObamaCare mandate that companies track and submit to the IRS all business-to-business transactions over $600 annually. Democrats tucked the 1099 reporting footnote into the bill to raise an estimated $17.1 billion . . . Meanwhile, small businesses are staring in horror . . . ”

Miami Herald: “Continuing his makeover from Republican to independent U.S. Senate candidate, Gov. Charlie Crist on Monday affirmed his support for civil unions, adoption by same-sex couples, and doing away with the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers. Equality Florida, the state’s leading gay rights group, called Crist’s statement on a range of gay issues ‘the most comprehensive, pro-LGBT equality stand of a sitting governor in Florida’s history.’”

ADF’s Weekly Update is on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyGRgy6UjYM

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/09/gay_federal_workers_can_now_ta.html

Nachrichten [modified Google Translation]: “While gay couples can [already] marry [in the registry offices] of some Thuringian[, this is generally not the rule]. Now the Parliament has given it the green light.”

“Gay and lesbian federal workers with a same-sex partner can now take leave without pay to attend to their family’s educational and medical needs. The Office of Personnel Management announced the changes late last week . . . ”

Judith Miller writing at City Journal: “The white flag hasn’t reached the top of the flagpole yet, but Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf all but surrendered on Monday morning in his battle to build a Muslim interfaith community center with a prayer room two blocks from Ground Zero . . .”

“A Balanced Budget Amendment has been linked to the idea of a constitutional convention for a simple reason: Congress refuses to restrain government spending.”

Syracuse.com: “A Syracuse man claims in a federal lawsuit that DeWitt police violated his rights to free speech and religion when they arrested him last year for preaching from the sidewalk.”

Religion Clause Blog: “In Australia, the Queensland University of Technology has placed research lawyer Alex Stewart on leave after he posted a 12-minute video on YouTube showing him smoking what he says were grass clippings wrapped in pages of the Bible and the Qur’an.”

AP: “The French Senate debates Tuesday whether to ban the burqa-style veil, a move that affects only a tiny minority of the country’s Muslim women but has significant symbolic repercussions.”

AP: ” . . . The Himalayan region has been wracked by anti-India protests throughout the summer, but the chaos Monday – exacerbated by reports of a Quran desecration in the United States – was the deadliest since large-scale demonstrations began in June.”

Free Exercise of Religion: A Pragmatic and Comparative Perspective
Mark S. Kende, 55 S.D. L. Rev. 412 (2010)

“This short article analyzes the leading free exercise of religion cases from the U.S., South Africa, and Canada. It reveals that the most well reasoned case (from Canada) take an approach that can be called ‘constitutional pragmatism.’ This approach focuses on the factual details of the case, the social and historical context, and the likely consequences. It is also transparent in its justifications and openly balances the various competing factors on both sides of the case. Moreover, the weaker cases utilize more formalistic and abstract reasoning, tend to be overbroad, and therefore produce decisions that create doctrinal tensions with previous precedents. This comparative analysis can provide valuable lessons for religious liberty jurisprudence.”