Daily Archives: October 22, 2010

Alliance Defense Fund allied attorneys representing a 16-year-old girl secured a temporary restraining order Monday from a Texas court that blocks her parents from forcing her to have an abortion against her will.

Well, in this case, I’m not so sure that the church is violating the tax code by speaking out on judicial retention . . . In this issue, with judicial retention, it is not clear to me that the Justices up for a retention vote are “candidates.”

San Gabriel Valley Tribune: “About a dozen people stood outside a Pasadena Planned Parenthood to speak out against abortions on Friday. ‘We just wanted to come here to share the gospel and show ladies there are other options,’ said Evelyn Vane, a sophomore at Province Christ College. ‘They don’t have to be forced to make this decision, it’s a human life.’”

ABC: “Child protective services in Pennsylvania were at her doorstep, taking her 1-day-old baby because they thought Liz was abusing drugs . . . Jameson Hospital in New Castle, Pennsylvania, tests mothers of newborns for drugs. State law allows it, but what the hospital did not consider more closely was poppy seeds.”

CNSNews: “The Republican leadership in both the House and the Senate have said they will continue to oppose any attempt to repeal the legislative ban on homosexuals serving in the military.”

The Messenger: “Justice Mark Cady, of Fort Dodge, said Thursday night that Iowa and the United States has over the years held onto some practices, like segregation, that are eventually discarded as knowledge and attitudes change.”

New York Times: “College seniors who graduated in 2009 had an average of $24,000 in student loan debt, up 6 percent from 2008, according to an annual report from the Project on Student Debt.”

Peter Sprigg writing at the FRC Blog: “Homosexuality is a behavioral characteristic; being black is a superficial matter of skin color. The racial integration of the military was successful precisely because it proved that the behavior of black soldiers did not differ from that of whites. But with homosexuality, a difference in behavior is what defines the issue. Do not be fooled by vague references to ‘sexual orientation”’ as though it were an innate characteristic—what homosexual activists now seek is the right to continue engaging in homosexual acts while in the military.”

ABC News: “Police in Melbourne are executing a warrant at an abortion clinic, linked to a doctor suspected of infecting dozens of women with hepatitis C.”

The Gazette (Colorado Springs): “Mann Middle School officials, standing firm on an odd new policy, are placing the taxpayers of District 11 in needless danger of expensive litigation the district will almost certainly lose. It’s all because school administrators don’t want students wearing rosaries outside of their shirts. It’s a discriminatory policy that’s an affront to freedom of expression and religion. If not rescinded soon, a lawsuit should be welcomed as a necessary defense of fundamental freedom.” For more information on the case, see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/tag/state-colorado+category-religious-freedom+topic-education/

Des Moines Register: “‘This is a bigger issue, not just about Iowa,’ [FRC president Tony Perkins] said in an interview. ‘What you see happening here is a precedent being set, and other states will feel comfortable following it.’”

Helsingen Sanomat: “The Finnish Supreme Court found on Friday that a conservative clergyman of the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland, who was a guest pastor at a Sunday service of the Hyvinkää congregation of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, had been guilty of gender discrimination when he refused to work alongside a woman pastor, Petra Pohjanraitio, in 2007.” More from YLE.

Calgary Herald: “A judge will have to decide whether University of Calgary security had the authority to charge a man with trespassing for distributing anti-gay pamphlets on campus two years ago . . . Fedorchuk said the issue is freedom of speech and this incident is connected directly to a similar charge on Jan. 17, 2005, in which complaints of Whatcott handing out anti-abortion flyers led to him being banned from the campus indefinitely.”

“Attorney General Bill McCollum announced his decision today, the last day he could ask the Florida Supreme Court to review the 3rd District Court of Appeal’s decision.”

CatholicCulture.org: “Poland’s bishops are apparently divided on the appropriate disciplinary treatment for Catholic lawmakers who support a bill that would provide government support for in vitro fertilization.”

The Christian Post: “Hundreds of imams and mullahs from West Africa have been coming to Christ in the past decade and in turn sharing the Gospel with their peers, said a former Muslim who witnesses to Muslim scholars and clerics.”

The Christian Institute: “Religious freedoms should not be relegated below other rights, a Church of Ireland bishop has said. Bishop Kenneth Good warned that as values of pluralism and the promotion of equality and diversity are ‘considered to be paramount’, religion can be reduced to simply a personal matter.”

UKPA: “A Christian British Airways employee from south west London who has waged a long legal battle with the airline over the wearing of a cross is to take her case to the European Court of Human Rights, it has been revealed.” | For more information, see this post at The Christian Institute.

Daily Nation: “Nearly two months after the new Constitution became law, Christian colleges continue to publish admissions information that suggests they are still discriminating against applicants who do not subscribe to their faith. It’s against the Constitution to discriminate in admission on the basis of religion or belief. And once a student has been admitted, it’s also against the law to discriminate against the student in services and facilities on the basis of religion or belief.”

Jakarta Globe: “Buddhists are the latest minority religious group to feel the heat, being at the center of a festering row over a large Buddha statue on the roof of a temple in the North Sumatran city of Tanjung Balai. City council chief Surya Dharma said on Friday the governor and the foundation in charge of the temple had agreed to remove the statue after complaints from an Islamic group.”

Connecticut Law Tribune: “[In Thibodeau v. American Baptist Churches of Connecticut, 120 Conn. App. 666 (2010),] Timothy Thibodeau, an ordained Baptist minister, claimed that American Baptist Churches of Connecticut (Baptist Churches), which provides placement services to Baptist ministers, committed several torts when it declined to recommend him to congregations seeking ministers . . . [The Connecticut Appellate Court] concluded that the First Amendment prohibited civil courts from adjudicating disputes that revolve around church doctrine or church administration.”

Deseret News (LA Times): “The scenic village green of Litchfield has long symbolized the charms of Connecticut small-town life. Settled in 1721, it hosts tourists drawn by its Revolutionary War history . . . This summer, a federal judge ruled that sufficient evidence of ‘discrimination against Jewish people’ may exist, warranting a trial over the Borough of Litchfield’s denial of a Hasidic group’s application to build a synagogue on the west end of Litchfield Green.”

The Christian Post: “Seven months after being kicked out of Morocco, more than a dozen Christian parents have still been unable to see their foster children. And the chances that they’ll ever be reunited with them seem very slim . . . They claim that the Village of Hope was legally registered and thus mass deportations of its workers violated the protections afforded to associations under the North African country’s administrative law, [Roger Kiska], an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, explained.” For background, see this related ADF Alliance Alert post: ADF confirms yesterday’s WSJ article on the Village of Hope deportations in Morocco

WDSU: “The ACLU of Louisiana on Friday delivered a letter to Livingston Parish leaders urging them to repeal an ordinance that changes the official date of Halloween when Oct. 31 lands on a Sunday.”

The Body (AP): “Helena school district trustees voted 6-3 on Oct. 12 in favor of a revised sex education curriculum . . . But the changes are not enough for some religious and conservative parents who argue that sex education should be taught at home, not at school. ‘This is going to send people into isolation,’ said school board member Trevor Wilkerson. His proposal to send the curriculum back to the planning stage and to highlight the sex education component for further scrutiny was rejected.” | For background, see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/tag/state-montana+topic-sex-indoctrination/

BusinessWeek: “An attorney for opponents of a proposed mosque attempted Thursday to use unverified Internet information to prove that there is a militant motive behind the project . . . Computer technician Timothy Cummings said he was hired by one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys to search the Internet for content connected to the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro and its board members.”

Hannah Cummings reports at Baptist Press: “Several countries in the Organization for Security and Co-operation have violated religious liberty commitments set forth by the organization, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.”

John Cloud writing at TIME / Healthland: “The authors of the new study — psychologist Cynthia de Medeiros of the University of Toronto and four colleagues — followed a group of 88 rats after they were born. Rats live only about two or three years, so it was possible for the researchers to track their sexual development from birth to death. Here’s the news: boy rats who have more sisters are less reliable heterosexuals than boy rats who have fewer sisters. That’s not to say having a sister makes you gay, but the boy rats with lots of sisters were significantly less interested than other boy rats in mounting girl rats.”

Does the study say anything like what TIME’s headline claims? Does it say anything about “less reliable heterosexuals?” See abstract below:

Deconstructing Early Life Experiences: Distinguishing the Contributions of Prenatal and Postnatal Factors to Adult Male Sexual Behavior in the Rat
Cynthia B. de Medeiros, Stephanie L. Rees, Maheleth Llinas, Alison S. Fleming, David Crews

“In rodents, a pup’s experiences in utero and during postnatal development shape its sexual behavior as an adult and how it is perceived by potential mates. We show that the male rat’s sexuality is primarily influenced by the postnatal sex ratio of its litter, but not by the litter’s prenatal intrauterine sex ratio or the behavior of its mother. Pups from litters with differing prenatal sex ratios were divided into litters with differing postnatal sex ratios. We found that males raised in a female-biased litter exhibited less mounting than males raised in either a male-biased litter or one with an equal sex ratio, and were less attractive to sexually receptive females, eliciting fewer soliciting behaviors, such as hop-darts, and fewer lordosis behaviors. However, the number of intromissions and ejaculations did not differ across groups, which suggests that males from female-biased litters mate as efficiently as males raised in other sex ratios, but do not require as many mounts to do so. The reported differences in sexual behavior did not vary with the quality of maternal behavior or with sexual experience in adulthood.”

Fox News: “[Joel Oster], an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the woman free of charge, describes the case as ‘outrageous.’ ‘Clearly this woman has a right to pick and choose who she wants to live with,’ he said.”

Click on Detroit: “The Fair Housing Center of West Michigan filed the complaint against the 31-year-old Grand Rapids woman, saying she was being discriminatory by excluding people of other faiths when she posted the flier . . . The woman is being represented by an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund.”

Alex Pareene writing at Salon: “Reagan nominee Vaughn Walker made a striking ruling — and wrote a remarkable decision — that destroyed the legal case against marriage equality for gays and lesbians . . . California attorney general Jerry Brown refused to defend Proposition 8, leaving the anti-equality argument to an array of well-funded conservative groups like the Alliance Defense Fund and Campaign for California Families . . . ‘I think he believes that he’s accomplished what he’s set out to accomplish, and now he’s interested in living the rest of his life and not being chained to a court calendar,’ U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said.”

Jerry Markon and Krissah Thompson writing at The Washington Post: “Interviews and government documents reviewed by The Washington Post show that the case tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race.”

John Yoo writing at Ricochet: “There’s a lot of truth to the argument that the enactment of the 17th Amendment undermined federalism. State legislatures have a greater institutional incentive to protect federalism than do the people of a state . . . The problem is that there is no point to trying to fix this problem — an effort to amend the Constitution will be fruitless. It requires two-thirds of the Congress and three-quarters of the states.”

Letter to the editor of The Daily Nonpareil (Council Bluffs, IA) by Steve Meidlinger: “I’m not at all hesitant to tell you I feel my right to vote has been usurped by Senator Mike Gronstal and three activist Judges on our Iowa Supreme Court. We, the people, have every right to be heard this most important issue of our time. We are being held hostage by politicians like Mike Gronstal who has been diligently working with activist homosexual groups from outside the state in an effort to affect our Iowa state laws on marriage. We are being told we don’t deserve to voice our opinion on this one of the most important moral issues of our time.”

Yahoo (AP): “The French Senate, pushed into an early vote, approved on Friday a hotly contested bill raising the retirement age to 62, hours after riot police forced the reopening of a strategic refinery to help halt growing fuel shortages amid nationwide strikes and protests.”

LifeSiteNews: “One of Europe’s busiest abortion agencies, the Family Planning Association (FPA), sponsored a conference in Newcastle, Northern Ireland, earlier this month, that the pro-life campaign group Precious Life said was ‘absolutely outrageous’ and illegal because it incited physicians to commit criminal acts. In Northern Ireland abortion remains a criminal act, except in cases where there is an immediate threat to the life of the mother.”

Telegraph: “The German entrepreneur, whose Body Worlds exhibitions showed human cadavers in lifelike poses, has told clients they will be able to buy the fleshless corpses which he injects with plastic resin over the internet.”

Joseph Knippenberg writing at First Things / First Thoughts: “Here’s the boldest statement of [Gerson's] thesis: ‘America is not a Christian country and has never been, for historical, theological and philosophic reasons’ . . . The principal bone I want to pick has to do with the ‘institutional’ separation of church and state . . . The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the very same Congress that adopted the First Amendment, provides for schools in which religion and morality are taught. Whatever this arrangement is, it is neither an establishment of religion nor an ‘institutional’ separation of church and state.”

Michael Gerson: Christine O’Donnell’s misconceptions of the Constitution

LifeSiteNew: “A victim of China’s coercive one-child policy has offered the world a bitter personal account of the country’s oppressive population control law, which officials have affirmed would continue following its 30th anniversary last month.”

LifeSiteNews: “A newborn left to die in a dumpster in northwest Calgary was saved by a man who only later found out he was the boy’s father. Calgary police said that the boy’s mother told them she did not know she was pregnant until she gave birth to the child. She allegedly put the living baby in a garbage bag and tossed him into the dumpster.”

Eugene Volokh writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “[A]rbitration decisions in ordinary commercial disputes, church employment disputes, disputes about property settlement in a divorce, and the like would largely be enforceable. That’s already done for Christian and Jewish arbitration; under American law, it should equally be so as to Islamic arbitration. But there is one potential difficulty, I think, and it’s one that potentially applies to Orthodox Jewish arbitrations as well as to Islamic arbitrations: The application of procedural rules that discriminate against witnesses based on their sex, religion, or ethnicity.”

The Globe and Mail: “The Supreme Court of Canada has granted journalists in Quebec the right to protect confidential sources – provided they can show it is in the public interest. The judgment Friday was a significant victory for The Globe and Mail and other media outlets because it creates strong protection for journalists who are asked to reveal their anonymous sources.” | Globe and Mail v. Canada, 2010 SCC 41

Diane Ravitch writing at The New York Review of Books: “Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for ‘Superman’ . . . arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary . . . The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions . . . The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement. But this proposition is false.”

Linda Greenhouse writing in The New York Times: “I am eager to see whether Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will take a page from his mentor and criticize his fellow Republicans — who are functionally even if not formally in charge of the United States Senate — for their role in creating the current judicial vacancy crisis.”

Terrence McKeegan, J.D. writing at LifeNews: “‘An infant has no moral status because he is not self-aware,’ said Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics. Singer argued this point at an historic [conference] he co-organized at Princeton University last weekend, seeking new dialogue on the heated issue of abortion . . . The headline panel featured two heavyweight Australian philosophers – Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton, and John Finnis, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Oxford. The two debated the ‘Moral Status of the Fetus.’”

The Age: “Prime Minister Julia Gillard is facing a new push for a conscience vote on same-sex marriage, with community groups spurred on by a poll that shows 78 per cent support for the move.”

The Oregonian: “The Beaverton School District and Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education leaders announced this afternoon that they jointly agreed to return Stambaugh to his original student teaching placement in Beaverton starting late next week, according to a press release from both schools . . . In September, Stambaugh told a fourth-grader who asked whether he was married that he was not. When the student asked why, Stambaugh replied it was not legal for him to get married because he would choose a man.” | Related: Student-teacher ousted over same-sex “marriage” discussion with 4th grader

NPR: “NPR’s Robert Siegel talks to Ritch Savin Williams, a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University . . . Prof. WILLIAMS: ‘So from a scientific perspective, there is certainly no gay suicide epidemic. But the more problematic aspect for me is that I worry a great deal about the image that we are giving gay-identified youth.’” | See also: “No scientific evidence of gay youth suicide epidemic”

Guardian: “Barack Obama has released a video to draw attention to the pressures facing gay teenagers, lending his weight to a campaign that has attracted more than 2,000 video contributions and 10m views on YouTube.”

Washington Blade: “Michael Guest, former U.S. ambassador to Romania, headed a delegation of about 25 U.S. diplomats during the human rights portion of an annual review conference for the Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe. The review conference took place between Sept. 30 and Oct. 8 in Warsaw, Poland.”

The St. Petersburg Times: “A third St. Petersburg court ruled Tuesday that City Hall’s ban of a gay pride event last summer was illegal, two days before the European Court of Human Rights ordered Russia to pay damages to a gay rights activist.”

WorldNetDaily: “ADF spokesman [Joel Oster] confirmed the organization sent a letter to the state explaining that such housing rules don’t apply to people living in their own homes and wanting to share their resources. ‘[Tricia] is a single lady looking for a roommate. She is not a landlord. She does not own a management company. She does not run an apartment complex. She is a single person seeking to have a roommate live with her in her house,’ the letter said.”

ADF Attorney David French writing at Patheos: “According to some, the ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘evangelical’ (those terms are often used interchangeably) Christian community has created a ‘cultural climate‘ that stigmatizes gay people. Allegedly, this stigma ‘contribute[s] to the atmosphere‘ that makes suicide more likely . . . But all these contentions run hard against the evidence. Ever since the Stonewall riots, our culture — including large segments of the Body of Christ — has been working quite hard to ‘de-stigmatize’ homosexual behavior . . . As we de-stigmatize homosexuality, the human toll continues to mount. Why? Perhaps because the fundamental problem wasn’t ‘stigma’ in the first place. Perhaps when the problem is sin, de-stigmatizing sin doesn’t actually heal the human heart.” |  At National Review Online / Phi Beta Cons, Robert VerBruggen reponds: “I remain unconvinced, however, that the overall higher rate of suicide for gays is unrelated to stigma . . . If humans don’t naturally process a given behavior as sinful, and yet that behavior is seen as sinful, that’s due to stigma. And thus attributing gay suicide to sin and attributing it to stigma go hand-in-hand.”

Becket Fund: “Today the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a decision that could require a Lutheran elementary school to re-hire a teacher it dismissed for religious reasons. At issue in the case is the scope of the ‘ministerial exception’—a First Amendment doctrine that protects the right of religious organizations to select employees who perform religious functions.”

The Christian Post: “‘Christians shouldn’t live in fear of being punished by the government for being Christians,’ said ADF Senior Legal Counsel [Joel Oster] in a statement Thursday. ‘It is completely absurd to try to penalize a single Christian woman for privately seeking a Christian roommate at church – an obviously legal and constitutionally protected activity.’”

The Times Union: “Local officials, seeing a green light in state law, want to tax churches after they’ve been closed for a year. ‘A church can be deemed taxable by the assessor if the church is not being used for purposes of the religious organization,’ according to state Tax Department spokesman Geoff Gloak. But the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany isn’t buying that take on church and state and has launched a legal challenge.”

The Hill: “House Republicans announced Friday they would take action that could force a vote on defunding NPR in the wake of the firing of news analyst Juan Williams.”

The Hill: “‘Look, the time to go along and get along is over,’ said Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), the chairman of the House Republican Conference. ‘House Republicans know that. We’ve taken firm and principled stands against their big government plans throughout this Congress, and we’ve got, if the American people will send them, we’ve got a cavalry of men and women headed to Washington, D.C. that are going to stand with us.’”

SCOTUSblog: “A hearing in the Ninth Circuit Court on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 — a state constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage — has been set for 10 a.m. (Pacific time) on Monday, Dec. 6, the Court announced Thursday.”

Vikram David Amar and Alan Brownstein writing at FindLaw: “Is it important that the Constitution never uses the phrase ‘the separation of church and state’ in its text? Not really, or more accurately, not nearly as much as some people think. The phrase ‘the separation of church and state’ is a metaphor. It is a shorthand description of a much more complicated interpretation of the constitutional text . . .”

FindLaw (AP): “Minority Leader John Boehner promised this week that if southwest Georgia residents unseat Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop, he will support placing GOP challenger Mike Keown on the House Agriculture Committee.”

Islamist Watch: “Based on the history of Islamists targeting passenger airliners — decades of hijackings, Pan Am 103, the Bojinka plot, the 9/11 attacks, the shoe bomber, suicide bombings on Russian planes, the transatlantic airline plot, the underwear bomber, etc. — Williams’ fears are far from irrational or bigoted. No, they are the perfectly logical response . . .”

Lisa McElroy writing at SCOTUSblog: “Let’s start with Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, a case about whether vaccine manufacturers can be held liable for design defects in their vaccines. In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), providing that vaccine manufacturers cannot be sued for injuries from vaccines if the injuries resulted from side effects that were ‘unavoidable’ . . . The petitioners in this case are the parents of Hannah Bruesewitz, who when she was six months old suffered severe seizures after receiving one of her childhood vaccines . . . This case is a great example of one major class of Supreme Court cases – cases involving statutory interpretation. Here, the parties disagree about what the statutory language of the Act means.”

Conn Carroll writing at The Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “$154 billion. That is the amount of taxpayer money that will be needed to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac according to a new ‘stress test’ performed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency . . . The Progressive Corporatist partnership between the Obama administration and a few of the nation’s largest financial institutions represents a fundamental threat to our nation’s economy.”

Associated Press: “[The Egyptian press] grew confident that growing press freedoms were irreversible. Now the backlash has come, with a media crackdown in this top U.S. ally that included the ousting of a prominent, muckraking editor.”

Associated Press: “A Dutch court ordered a retrial Friday for anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders, sending the closely-watched hate speech case back to square one before a whole new panel of judges.”

David P. Goldman writing at First Things / On The Square: “Today, [Merkel's] party offered a position paper stating that while Germany had benefited from immigrants, it had problems ‘with a minority which will not integrate itself, doesn’t learn our language and shields its children from participation and advancement in our society.’ Germany should offer ‘no tolerance’ to those who refuse to integrate into German society, including consequences for residency’ . . . The facts the global press failed to mention, however, include the fact that an important motivation for the Chancellor’s remarks lies in Germany’s profound disillusionment at the radical Islamist tendencies in Turkey’s government, led by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, and Germany’s alarm at Turkey’s drift towards Islamism.”

The Grand Rapids Press: “[ADF Attorney Joel Oster] said the law protects his client’s rights and allows her to ‘seek a roommate of similar faith.’ ‘That’s insane to think that a person cannot request and seek out a Christian roommate,’ Oster said. ‘Each statute protects the right of a person to have a roommate of their own choosing.’”

Buffalo Grove Patch: “Buffalo Grove atheist activist Rob Sherman says ‘the war continues’ to keep prayer out of public schools . . . [David Cortman], Senior Legal Counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, which filed a friend-of-the court brief in the case, said the opinion is on sound legal footing. ‘It highly unlikely the 7th Circuit Court will revisit the ruling,’ said Cortman.”

OneNewsNow: “‘Unfortunately, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights processed this complaint and is going after my client, claiming she violated the law simply by posting an ad or seeking a roommate who is Christian,’ [ADF Attorney Joel Oster] laments.”

OneNewsNow: “The [4th Circuit] recently [denied] several state police officers’ request for immunity from a lawsuit that stems from an incident in August 2008 when they handcuffed and arrested a group of peaceful pro-lifers. . . . [ADF Attorney Daniel Blomberg] says that request was made before his group ‘even had a chance to undergo discovery. Before we had a chance to really get into the case, the courts would just kick out this portion of the plaintiff’s complaint against them.’”

WZZM 13: “The Alliance Defense Fund, a group of Christian attorneys and other organizations, is representing the woman. The group’s lawyers argue it is absurd to penalize a woman for privately seeking a Christian roommate at her church.”

Jeremiah G. Dys, president and general counsel of The Family Policy Council of West Virginia, writing in The Charleston Gazette and at the Engage Family Blog: “Christians should never be penalized for expressing their religious beliefs. They have the same First Amendment rights as everyone else. Our government — whether a lawmaker or school administrator — should never single out Christians or Christian groups for simply expressing their religious beliefs.”

The Santa Barbara Independent: “Said ADF Senior Counsel [Joseph Infranco], ‘It’s ridiculous to punish and fire a Christian administrator simply because he wanted to honor teachers at an event that includes prayer. The district’s contention that he was somehow violating the Constitution is not only unfounded, but absurd, as the video itself demonstrates.’”

Chattanooga Times Free Press: “Praying silently, in secret or off school property won’t cut it for a group of vocal protesters upset over this week’s ban of public prayer at Hamilton County high school football games . . . Brown said he is waiting to hear back from both the Christian Law Association in Seminole, Fla., and the Alliance Defense Fund in Scottsdale, Ariz., about whether they will take on the case.”