Daily Archives: October 20, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “Just think of the progress made by women just during my lifetime by women, or ethnic, racial and religious minorities over the course of our history —and by gays and lesbians, many of whom are now free to live their lives openly and proudly. Here at the State Department, I am grateful every day for the work of our LGBT employees who are serving the United States as foreign service officers and civil servants here and around the world. It wasn’t long ago that these men and women would not have been able to serve openly, but today they can—because it has gotten better. And it will get better for you.”

The Hill: “Likely voters in battleground districts see extremists as having a more dominant influence over the Democratic Party than they do over the GOP.”

Message from Patrick A. Trueman of www.PornHarms.com: “We have a wonderful, new development in the War on Illegal Pornography. We are beginning a series of online interviews with key people discussing pornography from various perspectives. The first three interviews were with author Mark Kastleman who is also a director of Candeo, the online pornography addiction recovery site.”

President Barack Obama stripped the word ‘Creator’ from the Declaration of Independence when giving a speech again.

Newsmax: “Outspoken talk-radio host Michael Savage warns that China is steadily wiping out the American industrial base and ‘burying’ the United States by keeping the value of its currency artificially low.”

ChristianNewsWire: “Wendy Wright, President of Concerned Women for America, Penny Young Nance, CEO and Kristan Hawkins, President of Students for Life of America have joined the Northern Virginia IS Pro-Life Rally.”

Hill Country Times: “The issue of whether prayer should be a part of a meeting for a municipality or governmental entity has become a hot topic in the Hill Country community of Bulverde after the October 12 City Council meeting.”

Terry Mattingly writing at The Republic (Columbus, IN): “While these chaplains ‘worry about being discriminated against, they openly discriminate against some of the very people they are pledged to serve and serve with. If the hate speech currently uttered by some conservative chaplains and their denominations is any indication of how they will respond in the future, we can expect this discrimination to continue.’ These chaplains need to resign, he said. The armed services ‘will be the better for it.’”

Globe & Gazette: “A conservative businessman spearheading an effort to unseat three Iowa Supreme Court justices believes that by allowing gay marriage in the state, the high court opened the door for intrafamily marriage and polygamy.”

New York Times / The Caucus: “Media Matters, the liberal activist group that wages a rhetorical war against Fox News Channel and others in the conservative press, will announce on Wednesday the receipt of a $1 million donation from the philanthropist George Soros.”

Christian Science Monitor: “Only by engaging fully with Iraq’s rival religious leaders can an authentic coalition government – and the security that it can provide – be achieved. I know, because I’ve spent years forging relationships among religious factions here in Iraq, and I’ve seen the problem, and the possibilities for peace.”

Vancouver Sun: “Sex shop owner Tony Perry vows to challenge a recent Board of Variance decision denying his appeal of a city hall ruling aimed at shutting down his Fantasy Factory outlet at 701 Kingsway.”

Cristina Odone writing at the Telegraph: “The person who packs their bags for Dignitas (no need for a toothbrush: the whole procedure takes only a couple of hours) is likely to belong to the well-educated, articulate elite who are addicted to choice and who view assisted suicide as the ultimate consumer choice. They want to stage-manage their death as they have stage-managed every other aspect of their lives, from childbirth through marriage to divorce.”

The Daily Caller: “Social conservatives . . . are now on the defensive. Federal courts continue to march against their priorities . . . among the ranks of Republican elites in Washington, D.C., acceptance of gay rights is on the march . . . Faced with these obstacles, leaders of the social conservative movement are crafting a vision fit for the times with a heavy emphasis on economic issues and scaled back ambitions that might have been shocking in their modesty only a few years ago.”

Reuters: “The issue of abortion in the world’s most populous Roman Catholic country has been thrust into the spotlight by a presidential election in which front-running candidate Dilma Rousseff has been punished by religious voters for her past support for decriminalizing the procedure.”

Fresno Bee: “Two of the three justices who will decide whether the U.S. Episcopal Church or the breakaway Diocese of San Joaquin owns the Valley churches’ properties appeared this morning to be uncertain about how they will rule.” | More news coverage, including a timeline, of the case can be found here. | Docket: Schofield et al. v. The Superior Court of Fresno County, No. F058298

LifeNews: “Two new polls of the Pennsylvania Senate race make the claim that pro-life candidate Pat Toomey lost his big lead to pro-abortion candidate Joe Sestak. Toomey had led in every poll from July through last week, but trails in two new surveys that come after Sestak launched his television advertising blitz.”

Telegraph: “The popular belief that women’s minds turn to mush during pregnancy and birth is completely wrong and their grey matter actually increases, they say. Research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up as they coped with the steep learning curve of dealing with a newborn.”

Washington Blade: “The White House has rejected the recommended nomination of a New York attorney who would have become the first openly gay man to sit on the federal bench, because of comments he reportedly made about the Pledge of Allegiance and Christmas that were deemed anti-Christian.”

FoodConsumer.org: “In the pink month – the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we’d like readers to know something that many women may not have learned from any other source, and that is, induced abortion increases risk of breast cancer.”

Boston Herald: “A Suffolk County program has identified more than 400 child prostitutes in the past five years, taking them off the streets and diverting them to social services in a program that Attorney General Martha Coakley wants to expand to the rest of the state.”

Dutch News: “Tilburg vicar Harm Schilder has been banned from ringing the bells of the Holy Margarita Maria church in Tilburg at 07.15 every weekday morning.”

FOX 9: “Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Minnesota will protest what it considers irresponsible spending by the school in front of Morrill Hall on Northrop Plaza at noon.”

Inc.com: “Complaints of religious discrimination at work have increased 87 percent in the past decade – more than four times the increase of any other type of complaint, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . . . Complaints from Muslims nearly tripled in the past decade and now account for nearly one-quarter of the anti-religious accusations.”

Michael Medved writing at Townhall: “Reservations about Islam, and even fears of the Muslim faith’s influence on the world at large, don’t constitute paranoia or intolerance. These concerns represent an honest and reasonable response on the part of a significant segment of the public to a serious global challenge to the values that Americans hold most dear.”

Boston Herald: “A third-year Boston College Law School student facing dismal job prospects and a mountain of student loan debt has offered the prestigious Hub institution a unique deal: Keep the degree . . . and give me back my tuition!”

NIS News Bulletin: “Christians are threatened or maltreated by Muslims in many asylum-seeker centres in the Netherlands, TV programme Uitgesproken EO has reported. The Lower House is demanding clarification.”

Fox News: “A group that promotes the separation of church and state is demanding an end to prayers before football games at Soddy-Daisy High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

Des Moines Register / Iowa Politics Insider: “Churches that have become increasingly political – including two in Ames that will host satellite voting later this month – blur the line between the separation of church and state, the executive director of the Iowa ACLU said today.”

W. James Antle writing at The American Spectator: “There’s a double standard when it comes to religion and politics. Many people who claim to want the former out of the latter really only object to conservative religion advancing conservative politics . . . But Jack Conway is learning that even this old double standard has its limits. Conway is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Kentucky. With his campaign in desperation mode, he released an ad that suggests his Republican opponent Rand Paul is anti-Christian.”

Jim Lindgren writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “On this, I reprint part of an old post from 2005 . . . 6. The phrase ‘Separation of Church and State,’ as Philip Hamburger establishes in his classic book on the subject, is not in the language of the first amendment, was not favored by any influential framer at the time of the first amendment, and was not its purpose.”

The Guardian: “The old, ill, mute and frail will be deemed expendable if assisted suicide is legalised, a thinktank says today. Society’s most vulnerable risk being bullied into an early death by greedy or uncaring relatives or bureaucrats, according to a study published by the Centre for Policy Studies.” The report can be found here.

The Daily Caller: “There are now more than a dozen House Democrats – the list is at 14 and growing by the day – who want to fire Speaker Nancy Pelosi if their party somehow manages to keep its majority on Nov. 2.”

NPR: “After running afoul of China’s One Child policy, a Chinese couple expected to be hit with a fine. But instead, officials demanded that the woman — who was in the eighth month of her pregnancy — have an abortion, according to a new Al Jazeera report.”

Cincinnati.com / Politics Extra: “The Ohio ACLU today joined the fight against an Ohio law that potentially makes political speech a crime. The group filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief on behalf of the Susan B. Anthony List, a Washington D.C.-based anti-abortion group that wanted to put up billboards in Cincinnati.”

Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson writing at The Center for Vision & Values: “You’ve probably seen the headlines about major banks suspending foreclosure proceedings to reclaim houses from borrowers who have defaulted on their mortgages. This has the potential to be hugely disruptive—a milestone development comparable to the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008, after which all hell broke loose.”

Law.com: “Are the Wild West days of federal clerk hiring back? That’s what some law school administrators and judges fear. They worry that the voluntary system whereby federal judges wait until September of the 3L year to hire clerks is teetering.”

LifeNews: “Democrats for Life of America is supporting Ohio congressman Steve Driehaus in his bid to put the head of a pro-life group in jail for informing his constituents about his vote for taxpayer-funded abortions. However, internal emails LifeNews.com has obtained from DFLA to the Susan B. Anthony List reveal DFLA director Kristen Day admitting the bill funds abortions.”

Associated Press: “Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday it’s up to each member of the Supreme Court to decide whether to attend the president’s State of the Union addresses, but he wouldn’t discuss whether he thinks the speeches should be a forum for the executive branch to critique the court’s decisions.”

Compass Direct: “After four years of legal battle in a Turkish court, a judge acquitted two Christians of insulting Turkey and its people by spreading Christianity, but not without slapping them with a hefty fine for a spurious charge.”

Minnesota Independent: “‘Quite often you hear people say, “What about separation of church and state?” There is no such thing,’ Severson told Brandon. ‘I mean it just does not exist, and it does not exist in America for a purpose, because we are a Christian nation.’” More information via Religion Clause.

Lyle Denniston writing at SCOTUSblog: “The Court is now scheduled to consider, at its private Conference on Nov. 5, a case filed by a California-based conservative legal advocacy group, the Pacific Justice Institute, and by a former California state legislator, Steve Baldwin, who is a devotee of limited government and now objects to the idea that the government could compel him to buy health insurance. The Institute also objects to parts of the new law that will affect it as an employer. Each has several other complaints about the law, too.”

John Finnis, Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy in the University of Oxford and the Biolchini Family Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, has this article at Public Discourse: “The Other F-Word.” The Public Discourse editors summarize: “In an article adapted from his debate last week with Peter Singer and Maggie Little on the moral status of the ‘fetus,’ Professor Finnis explains that outside of medical contexts use of the word ‘fetus’ is offensive, dehumanizing, prejudicial, and manipulative. It obscures our perception of moral reality. Moral status is not a matter of choice or grant or convention, but of recognition, of someone who matters, and matters as an equal, whether we like it or not.”

Associated Press: “A witness says Nadya Suleman’s fertility doctor has expressed remorse for providing the mother of 14 with treatments that helped her conceive octuplets.”

Associated Press: “Turkey’s governing party failed to win key opposition support on Wednesday for plans to lift a ban on the wearing of Islamic head scarves at universities, a deeply divisive issue in a country with secular laws and a Muslim population.”

Associated Press: “China’s ruling Communist Party called Wednesday for its members to reject Western-style democratic notions amid a brewing debate on the direction of future political reform.”

Associated Press: “At least three service members discharged for being gay have begun the process to re-enlist after the Pentagon directed the military to accept openly gay recruits for the first time in the nation’s history.”

Rasmussen: “Thirty percent (30%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe it isn’t worth the effort trying to contact their senator or congressman, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.”

Associated Press: “A Rome court on Wednesday upheld the seizure of euro23 million ($33 million) from a Vatican bank account, prompting the Vatican to react in ‘astonishment.’”

TIME / The Curious Capitalist: “What is the most likely cause today of civil unrest? Immigration. Gay Marriage. Abortion. The Results of Election Day. The Mosque at Ground Zero. Nope. Try the Federal Reserve . . .

“In court documents filed in San Francisco, California, the administration asked that the status quo prevail with the policy known as ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

Conn Carroll writing at The Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “Monday was the third time in a little over a month that President Obama wrote the Creator out of one of our nation’s founding documents . . . And the President is not alone. MSNBC’s new ‘Lean Forward’ Progressive Movement branding campaign also leaves out ‘by their Creator’ from their reading of the Declaration. Again, this is no accident . . . For far too long the American people have allowed the Progressive Movement to read out of existence the checks that America’s Founders placed on government in our founding documents.”

Associated Press: “Members of a Muslim sect blamed for recent violence across northern Nigeria apparently have shot dead another police officer, despite a military crackdown in the region, authorities said Wednesday.”

New York Times: “China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted some shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said this week.”

CNBC (Reuters): “A commerce ministry official denied a report that China would cut export quotas for rare earth metals by 30 percent next year, the China Business News said on Wednesday.”

These kinds of negative outcomes are consistent with the idea that anti-gay bullying is mainly responsible for the higher suicide rate among gay teens. But as I kept reading, I kept finding pieces of the puzzle that don’t seem to fit the “it’s homophobia pulling the trigger” narrative.

ADF attorney Joe Infranco appeared on Relevant Radio to discuss this: Calif. school district threatens to terminate principal for endorsing prayer breakfast | MP3 audio 19:06 mins | Joe also appeared on AFR Focal Point with Bryan Fischer to discuss the same case. | MP3 audio 9:58 mins

LifeNews: “Tens of thousands of pro-life students endured taunts and threats from fellow students today to don red tape and keep their mouths shut in remembrance for the unborn children who have been killed in abortions. But dealing with the harassment paid off for the eight students who helped prevent abortions.”

ADF attorney Daniel Blomberg on the Janet Mefferd Show to discuss this: ADF: Voter-approved Act 1 adoption, foster care law should be upheld | MP3 audio 19:17  mins

ADF Attorney David Hacker writing at Speak Up Movement / University: “On Tuesday, two national legal organizations filed amicus briefs in the Ninth Circuit supporting The Liberty’s case against Oregon State University. The Student Press Law Center and the National Legal Foundation both filed amicus briefs arguing that a federal district court should not have dismissed The Liberty’s case.”

Student Press Law Center: “The Student Press Law Center filed a friend-of-the-court brief October 19 urging a federal appeals court to reinstate the First Amendment challenge brought by the editors of an independent campus newspaper at Oregon State University whose newsracks were confiscated by the university . . . The SPLC brief supports the OSU Students Alliance brief previously filed by the Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit legal-services organization representing the students. The brief was prepared with the assistance of SPLC Legal Fellows Laura Napoli and Adam Schulman.”

ADF Attorney David French writing at Speak Up Movement / University: “Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed, reported that the University of Illinois has delivered its ‘academic freedom verdict’ on the Professor Kenneth Howell matter . . . you’ll note that the committee agreed with Professor Howell in virtually every material respect . . . [but] the committee suggested that the real reason for his termination was his department chair’s dissatisfaction with Professor Howell’s description of utilitarianism.”

WorldNetDaily: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has denied police officers immunity from a lawsuit alleging they violated the rights of two young women who were arrested, put in leg irons and strip-searched for conducting a pro-life demonstration . . . ‘The state shouldn’t persecute Christians for expressing their beliefs on important social issues, nor deny them their constitutional rights,’ said Senior Counsel [Kevin Theriot] of the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the women.”

OneNewsNow: “A Swedish home-schooling family has been trying to get their son back from foster care since he was taken away by authorities more than a year ago, but an attorney for the family believes the courts have turned a deaf ear to their situation . . . [The Home School Legal Defense Association] and the Alliance Defense Fund have filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights, demanding justice for the family.”

OneNewsNow: “A federal appeals court has upheld an Illinois law that allows public school students to engage in voluntary prayer and reflection as part of a moment of silence during the school day . . . ‘The plaintiff claimed that simply because another student would be able to pray silently, that somehow created a constitutional crisis and injured them in some way — which we are certainly at a loss to figure out,’ says [David Cortman] with the Alliance Defense Fund.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State / Wall of Separation: “[L]ast week, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals . . . held the legislature had a secular purpose in passing the Illinois Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act and upheld the law as constitutional . . . Not surprisingly, Religious Right groups like the Alliance Defense Fund, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, are hailing the decision.”

ADF Attorney David Hacker writing at Speak Up Movement / University: “On Columbus Day, UW-Madison launched its ‘Stop the Silence’ campaign, which is designed to curb harassment on campus . . . As a university that likes to think of itself as an epicenter of the 1960s student free speech movement, Madison needs a short history lesson before it tramples students’ free speech . . . Given the tenacity with which students have challenged UW-Madison policies in court over the years, the administration would do well by treading carefully with their new campaign.”

LifeNews: “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit issued a ruling on Monday upholding a district court decision that denied the request of several Maryland state police officers to be immune from a lawsuit filed by Alliance Defense Fund attorneys representing pro-life advocates . . . ‘Pro-life advocates shouldn’t be handcuffed and arrested for expressing their beliefs,’ said ADF Litigation Counsel [Daniel Blomberg]. ‘The 4th Circuit’s decision is a positive development for our clients, who deserve justice after what they endured.’”

ADF attorney Matt Bowman appeared on the Mike Gallagher Show to discuss the issue. | MP3 audio 4:21 mins | Related LifeNews report: Fort Hood Shooter Faces More Charges, None for Killing Pregnant Soldier’s Baby

Judge honored for ‘significant efforts in publicly promoting and defending religious liberty and…constitutional originalism’

Penney J. Lewis, Informal Legal Change on Assisted Suicide: The Policy for Prosecutors (July 19, 2010). Legal Studies (Online), October 13, 2010. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1693774

“Following the House of Lords’ decision in Purdy, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued an interim policy for prosecutors setting out the factors to be considered when deciding whether a prosecution in an assisted suicide case is in the public interest. This paper considers the interim policy, the subsequent public consultation and the resulting final policy. Key aspects of the policy are examined, including the condition of the victim, the decision to commit suicide and the role of organised or professional assistance. The inclusion of assisted suicides which take place within England and Wales makes the informal legal change realised by the policy more significant than was originally anticipated.”