Daily Archives: December 10, 2010

Politico: “Gay-rights activists on Friday booed the mere mention of newly sworn in Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the only Democrat to join Republicans in blocking a repeal of the Pentagon’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.”

6News: “He told 6News’ Norman Cox on Thursday that social conservatives in the Legislature can go ahead with bills important to them, as long as they don’t sidetrack important measures like the budget and reforming schools and local government.”

Christian Heinze comments at GOP-12: “So did he back down on the truce? Not really. Even though it betrays personal preference, it doesn’t alter professional priority, which remains centered on education reform and his fiscal agenda.”

CNBC: “An Anchorage Superior Court judge is expected to rule by early next week on a lawsuit seeking to block the parental notification law approved by voters in August.”

For more information on the topic, see this ADF Alliance Alert compound tag: http://www.alliancealert.org/tag/state-alaska+topic-parental-rights+topic-abortion/

The Aegis: “Harford County government’s lawyers have been authorized to try to settle federal lawsuits in which anti-abortion protesters claim their civil rights were violated by the county, the Town of Bel Air and local police agencies during a 2008 protest.”

Indianapolis Star: “Abortion foes, strengthened by the November election that put Republicans in charge of the Indiana legislature, will seek measures to restrict both the procedure and those who perform it. Among the bills being proposed: banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and barring Planned Parenthood of Indiana from receiving taxpayer dollars.”

Chicago Breaking Sports: “A former state high school golf champion who thought she would coach the University of Minnesota women’s golf team is claiming that she was demoted to a desk job because she is lesbian.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Attorneys for four members of the right-to-die group Final Exit Network who are charged with assisting in the suicide of a 58-year-old Cumming man argued Friday that Georgia’s statute covering assisted suicide is unconstitutional and ‘totally incoherent.’”

CRI English: “A Chinese man was given three years probation by a court in southern Shenzhen city on Thursday for his debated ‘euthanasia efforts’ that led to the death of his ailing spouse, the Guangzhou Daily reports.”

Indian Express: “Uttar Pradesh has sanctioned prosecution of BJP leader Varun Gandhi in the cases registered against him for making ‘hate speeches’ at public meetings in Pilibhit in the run-up to the 2009 Lok Sabha election. Varun was later elected from Pilibhit.”

Ventura County Star [AP]: “A West Virginia woman urged a federal appeals court Thursday to reinstate her lawsuit claiming that Mingo County school officials violated her religious rights by insisting that her daughter receive state-mandated immunizations. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case and is expected to rule in a few weeks.”

My Fox Wausau: “The clock tower at Southern Illinois University has played Christmas carols for nearly 15 years. But this year, someone complained, leading university officials to briefly silence the holiday tradition until they could add a more diverse selection of music.”

National Post: “Canadian Forces have issued a new policy detailing how the organization should accommodate transsexual and transvestite troops specifically. Soldiers, sailors and air force personnel who change their sex or sexual identity have a right to privacy and respect around that decision, but must conform to the dress code of their ‘target’ gender, says the supplementary chapter of a military administration manual.”

Scotsman: “Scottish Green Party leader Patrick Harvie has predicted the Scottish Parliament will back marriage for gays and lesbians after next year’s elections.”

Washington Post: “A majority of senators on a key committee in Maryland now favor legalizing same-sex marriage, making it increasingly likely that the state will join five others and the District in allowing such unions.”

“Crossroads Television System has been found in violation of broadcasting codes for statements made by evangelical television personality and minister Charles McVety that implied there was a ‘malevolent, insidious and conspiratorial purpose’ to the activities of homosexuals.”

The Christian Institute: “An autistic Christian street preacher who was handcuffed and arrested for speaking out against homosexuality and many other sins has been awarded £4,250 in damages following a court case against West Midlands Police.” | Christian Today

David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam writing in the Wall Street Journal: “Along with jobs and 401(k)s, a major casualty of the Great Recession has been charitable giving. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, America’s charities report an 11% drop in contributions in the past year alone. There’s one big exception: Charitable contributions to religious groups dropped by only 0.1% from 2007 to 2009.”

W. Bradford Wilcox writing at Conservative Home: “[I]n high-rent urban neighborhoods and the prosperous suburbs of the nation’s major cities, divorce is down, marital satisfaction remains high, and nonmarital childbearing is still an exotic activity. It is not upscale America but Middle America that is experiencing marital troubles. From small towns in the heartland to working class suburbs outside of the nation’s major cities, divorce, marital dissatisfaction, and nonmarital childbearing are on the rise. In a word, marriage is in much better shape among Whole Foods regulars than it is among Walmart shoppers.”

At the Front Porch Republic, Patrick Deneen objects [to a Ross Douthat NYT column that makes an argument similar to Wilcox's]: “[W]e should be suspicious particularly of the gap between how the highly educated are living . . . First, I think there is good reason to think that the ‘highly educated’ have come to support marriage because of growing evidence that marriage is a net benefit for one’s economic bottom line . . . What might be a growing commitment to marriage among a segment of the college-educated class is generally not accompanied by a commitment to the idea of sexual self-control and the felt-need for a broader culture that would support such a commitment; rather, it could be argued that marriage is the conclusion of a long period of serial partnerships and sexual experimentation that colors more broadly the view of the highly-educated. If marriage is good for one’s bottom line, better to put it off until one has tasted the hedonistic pleasures of Babylon before settling down in Greenwich. Yet, both decisions are born of a hedonistic calculus – first the benefits of guilt-free sexual experimentation, and then the pleasures of guilt-free Wall Street bonus checks.”

Radio Free Europe: “Hundreds of people protested in Azerbaijan today for the right to wear Islamic head scarves in schools, challenging the strictly secular regime.”

Telegraph: “The backtracking happened quietly, and it’s not even mentioned in the official press releases. At a meeting of the Council in charge of Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs (EPSCO) on 7th December 2010, Ministers dropped the plans for the compulsory labelling of non-stunned meat and meat products. It will now be impossible for European meat-eating consumers to know whether or not they are eating meat from animals that were stunned prior to slaughter.”

MSN / AFP: “Turkey’s Alevis, a distinct moderate sect of Islam, have put government support for religious freedom to the test by pressing for broader rights in a country where they are often seen as heretics.”

News & Record: “There’s no evidence in the Davidson or Duke cases that the campus cops were enforcing religious doctrine. They arrested suspected drunken drivers for the sole purpose of public safety. There’s not even any evidence that these officers were, in fact, Christians. Religious affiliation is not required to work for the Davidson or Duke police departments.”

Telegraph: “The Catholic Education Service said it was ‘very surprised and concerned’ following a decision not to incorporate religious studies into new-style school league tables.”

The Northern Virginia Daily: “The Warren County School Board on Thursday narrowly approved a modified regulation for religious exemption from mandatory school attendance. The School Board voted 3-2 to approve an exemption regulation that does not require parents to submit a letter explaining religious beliefs.”

Christian Today: “The drafters of the Manhattan Declaration submitted a revised app to Apple on Wednesday after the company pulled its original one for being ‘offensive’ to some. The revised app no longer contains a poll that asked users about same-sex relationships and abortion.”

Gay City News: “In an historic first for the country considered the most Catholic in Europe, Krystian Legierski became Poland’s first openly gay elected official when he was elected to Warsaw’s City Council in country-wide municipal elections on November 21.”

OneNewsNow: “According to a new mental health survey, parents must accept the alternative sexual lifestyles of their children to prevent suicide, drug abuse, and depression. But one expert believes the study is biased.”

The Globe and Mail: “In contrast, Prof. Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia told a judge examining Canada’s polygamy laws that multiple marriage is linked to increases in crime, substance abuse, child mortality and discrimination against women.”

National Catholic Register: “Following is a list of the members of the 112th Congress who refer to themselves as Catholics. The percentage next to them is their pro-life rating since 1997, as compiled by National Right to Life. Information prior to 1997 was unavailable at press time. They are listed from the highest pro-life rating to the lowest.”

Rasmussen Reports: “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that Americans remain overwhelmingly in favor of auditing the Fed: 74% of Adults think it’s a good idea, and just 10% are opposed. Sixteen percent (16%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)”

Cherokee Tribune: “Cherokee County School District students see themselves as caught in the middle of a legal battle that will decide the site of their graduation ceremonies. Students say they’re voicing their opinions in hopes the school board members tasked with making the decision will consider their views.”

LifeNews: “Officials with Life Decisions International say that, over the last few months, more corporations have been dropped from its boycott list in a six-month time period than ever before.”

Randy Barnett writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “In a briefing of White House reporters yesterday, anticipating the forthcoming decision, the White House issued a fact sheet conceding that, should the individual mandate be held unconstitutional, the regulations being imposed on insurance companies ‘would’ also fall . . . ”

Christian Century: “Backers of a referendum that would bar Oklahoma courts from considering Islamic law admit they suffered a setback when a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against the measure last month. But they are pinning their hopes on Attorney General-elect Scott Pruitt, a minor league baseball team owner and former state senator who has already made a big mark on religious laws in Oklahoma.”

theunchoice.com: “A woman testifying at a New Jersey Senate hearing about undergoing a coerced abortion was stopped from speaking after being told that she couldn’t talk about her experience with Planned Parenthood. Now she is sharing the story that she wasn’t allowed to tell at the hearing.”

Associated Press: “Abortion rights foes emboldened by a new Nebraska law that restricts late-term procedures based on the disputed notion that fetuses can feel pain after 20 weeks are pushing for similar legislation in other states, particularly those where Republicans won big in November.”

New York Law Journal: “Some law firms are rolling out new perks aimed at reimbursing their gay employees for the tax liability they incur when they elect to add domestic partners to their health benefits plans.”

Family Research Council: “Wednesday, Ohio Judge Jody Luebbers ruled that Planned Parenthood failed to comply with state abortion laws and thereby caused a young Planned Parenthood client significant psychological and emotional harm.”

Al From writing in the Wall Street Journal [Full text via Google News]: “[T]he Department of Education is pursuing regulations that threaten to cripple or close down for-profit colleges and career schools that provide advancement opportunities for millions of poor and minority students. The proposed ‘gainful employment’ regulations would deny potential students the student loans they need to pursue their educations at for-profit schools.”

Crosswalk: “Nurta Mohamed Farah, who had fled her village of Bardher, Gedo Region to Galgadud Region to live with relatives after her parents tortured her for leaving Islam, died on Nov. 25. Area sources said they strongly suspected that the two unidentified men in Galgadud Region who shot her in the chest and head with a pistol were relatives or acting on their behest.”

C-FAM: “A new campaign seeks to eliminate disclosure laws which require HIV positive individuals to inform their sex partners of their potentially deadly infection. The campaign is led by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and UNAIDS, an umbrella group of UN agencies. Notably absent from this campaign is any recognition of the danger posed for the possible victims of a willful refusal to disclose HIV status.”

Jonathan Wynne-Jones writing in The Telegraph: “Today may come to represent a significant milestone in the changing face of religion in Britain, following the Church of England’s publication of plans to merge three dioceses into one . . . It is also difficult not to see the merger – or axing depending on which way you’re looking at it – in the context of the rise of Islam in Britain. In Bradford, one of the dioceses that is being subsumed, Muslims make up as much as three-quarters of the population in some parishes.”

Christian Century: “Close friendships among congregants, rather than theology seem to be the key to happiness among religious people, according to a new study.” Full text is here.

Christian Concern: “The survey, conducted by Hull University experts on health and social care, investigated the sexual health knowledge, behaviour and attitudes of young people aged from 13 to 16. The survey found that teenagers see the responsibilities of being a parent as the number one ‘fact of life’. They take it as a priority ahead of sexual intercourse, contraception and sexually-transmitted infections.”

Christian Concern: “It is reported that more than 140 primary and secondary schools across Britain have won the right to opt out of the legal requirement to provide a daily act of worship which is ‘broadly Christian’ in character. Some schools have adopted Islamic assemblies where pupils are reading the Koran whilst others promote the multi-faith approach.”

Michelle Malkin writing at Townhall: “When jihad-bent American Muslims target American soldiers on American soil, why does America yawn? The Fort Hood massacre has faded from view. The Little Rock Army recruiting station ambush barely registered on the national radar screen. And the arrest this week of a Baltimore-area bomb plotter, intent on blowing up a military center and murdering our troops in the name of Allah, was met with a collective shrug.”

Human Rights Campaign: “Under his powers to ensure national security following the September 11 attacks, the President has the ability to issue stop-loss orders preventing certain service members from discharge. Pending an enduring solution to this unjust and discriminatory law, the President can and should suspend DADT-related discharges under the stop-loss provision.”

William Carroll writing at The Public Discourse: “Many biologists who insist that living things are nothing more than the sum of their physical components conclude that a question such as ‘what is life?’ is at the very least not a biological question, and probably is best rejected as a question without content. So we hear that one ought to resist using the term ‘life’ to describe what is just a highly sophisticated movement of matter. In an important sense, according to such a view, ‘life,’ as something other than matter in motion, does not exist. For those scientists and philosophers who embrace some form of materialism there is a strict disjunction: either we explain the living in terms of material, mechanically operating constituents, or in terms of some mysterious spiritual substance, some vital force. There is no substitute to materialism but magic.”

The Republican National Committee and Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao today asked the Supreme Court of the United States today to consider their constitutional challenge to the laws that limit the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates to the extent that those expenditures constitute the party’s speech.

The Hill: “‘Using the end-of-the-year spending bill as a Trojan horse to fund the new federal healthcare law is hardly the mandate from the November elections,’ said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) in a statement Thursday.”

Tony Perkins writes in the FRC Washington Update: “This morning, I had the opportunity to appear on ‘Fox and Friends’ to respond to the Left’s ongoing campaign to smear and silence FRC and other pro-family organizations. As I reported yesterday, the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has called on national TV networks to censor us because of our support for man-woman marriage.” Video is here.

Associated Press: “A Massachusetts doctor sentenced to six months in jail for performing an abortion on a woman who later died has been released from jail early.”

Associated Press: “The Glastonbury Holy Thorn Tree, said to have links to the earliest days of Christianity in England, has been reduced to a six-foot stump by vandals who sawed off its limbs. The desecration happened the night after a sprig from the tree was cut off in a ceremony so it could be given to Queen Elizabeth II to decorate her Christmas table, said Glastonbury Mayor John Coles.” BBC video here.

Associated Press: “President Barack Obama is calling on China to free Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo (lee-OO’ show-BOH’).”

Daily Mail: “England needs more than half a million extra primary school places before the end of the decade, ministers have admitted. By the Government’s own calculations, 543 new nursery and primary schools are needed within eight years. The immigrant baby boom has put unprecedented strain on an education system that is already struggling under a surge in pupil numbers.”

Christian Post: “‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ proponents were handed another victory Thursday as the 17-year old ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military was narrowly spared in a Senate vote . . . [Daniel Blomberg], an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, told NPR that chaplains could be charged with discrimination based on sexual orientation if they expressed that homosexual behavior is not in accordance with God’s will. ‘And that could be career-ending for a chaplain,’ he told the radio program.”

The Independent: “Nearly half the 11-year-olds on free school meals cannot read or add up properly by the time they leave primary school, according to figures released yesterday.”

ADF Attorney Tim Chandler writing at Speak Up Movement / Church: “Perhaps the best way of answering this is to consider who the ‘government authorities’ are. Our system of government features a series of authorities at different levels (e.g. local, state, and federal) and of different types (e.g. executive, legislative, and judicial). Yet one authority in our system stands above all others: the United States Constitution. By using the judicial system to insist that government officials follow the Constitution, a church is not resisting authority. It is simply using the established system of government to appeal to a higher authority.”

OneNewsNow: “‘This is just really a state drunk with its own power trying to justify a decision that was wrong from the beginning,’ the [ADF Attorney Roger Kiska] contends. ‘These parents are the parents; they have the right to educate their child the way that they think is best for Domenic, and they shouldn’t be punished in this manner.’”

OneNewsNow: “‘It violates fundamental constitutional rights. A church [absolutely] has a right to use its building for religious purposes, and it is unconstitutional for the city to target religious uses and exclude those uses from a commercial district,’ [Joel Oster] contends.”

NJ Law Journal (Subscription only): “A federal judge in Newark on Wednesday dismissed a constitutional challenge to the Obama administration’s health care reforms, finding claims by a doctors’ organization and a representative patient were speculative therefore that they lacked standing. The suit, New Jersey Physicians Inc. v. Obama, 10-cv-1489, was filed on March 24 . . . ”

David Prentice writes at the FRC Blog: “Using a very roundabout technique, scientists have created mice with two genetic fathers. But don’t look for this to be applicable any time soon with humans. The convoluted technique needs flow charts to explain (thankfully provided by the authors in their paper.)”

“Collins and Sen. Joe Lieberman are now pushing standalone legislation they insist could be considered before the Senate’s target adjournment next week. Its prospects are uncertain, although Reid indicated he was open to bringing it up before the holiday break.”

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys are available for media interviews via phone or satellite regarding the ongoing hearing at the Supreme Court of British Columbia on the question of whether polygamy can continue to be prohibited in that province and throughout Canada.

“A Hamilton County court determined Tuesday that Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio Region violated a state ‘informed consent’ law when it failed to meet with a 14-year-old girl at least 24 hours prior to giving her an abortion.”

AP: “The military should not begin preparing troops for a possible repeal of the ban on gay service until Congress takes action, despite worries the prohibition could be overturned by the courts, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday.”

Brent Bozell writes at Townhall: Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he’d contracted the HIV virus . . . Lured into the porn world with the promise that he looked like money, Burts concluded his greed was unwise: “Making $10,000 or $15,000 for porn isn’t worth your life.”

David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam write at the Wall Street Journal: “Along with jobs and 401(k)s, a major casualty of the Great Recession has been charitable giving. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, America’s charities report an 11% drop in contributions in the past year alone. There’s one big exception: Charitable contributions to religious groups dropped by only 0.1% from 2007 to 2009.”

Sarah Palin writes at the Wall Street Journal: “The publication of the findings of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was indeed, as the report was titled, “A Moment of Truth.” The report shows we’re much closer to the budgetary breaking point than previously assumed. The Medicare Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2017. As early as 2025, federal revenue will barely be enough to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on our national debt. With spending structurally outpacing revenue, something clearly needs to be done to avert national bankruptcy.”

Todd E. Pettys, Letter from Iowa: Same-Sex Marriage and the Ouster of Three Justices (December 6, 2010). Kansas Law Review, Forthcoming; U Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-39. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1721158

“In this contribution to a symposium sponsored by the Kansas Law Review, I examine the path from the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 ruling in Varnum v. Brien (in which the court struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage) to the ouster of three of the court’s seven justices in Iowa’s 2010 judicial retention election. I describe the campaign efforts of the justices’ detractors and supporters. I then suggest a number of lessons that academics, activists, and judges nationwide can learn from the Iowa experience.”

Amy Ronner, When Courts Let Insane Delusions Pass the Rational Basis Test: The Newest Challenge to Florida’s Exclusion of Homosexuals from Adoption (April 7, 2010). University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 21, No. 1, April 2010. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1721578

“lorida was the only state to categorically exclude homosexuals from adopting children. Recently, a gay prospective father, Frank Martin Gill, successfully challenged the constitutionality of that homophobic statutory provision. The State of Florida appealed and The Third District Court of Appeal, affirming Judge Cindy S. Lederman, concluded that Florida’s statute violated Gill’s equal protection rights. See Fla. Dep’t of Children & Families v. In re Matter of Adoption of X.X.G. and N.R.G., 35 Fla. L. Weekly D2107 (Sept. 22, 2010).

This article, one of the first to address this high profile decision, looks at the constitutional issue in a new way. It yokes together what might seem to be two distinct areas of the law: the doctrine of insane delusion under wills and trusts’ law and rational basis review in constitutional law. Its narrow thesis is that the statutory exclusion of homosexuals from adoption is based on an insane delusion and that any court upholding it under the rational basis test is itself insanely deluded. On a broader level, however, this article explores the damage that results when courts use the rational basis test to uphold legislation which is premised on an irrational belief that is refuted by amble evidence to the contrary.”

Brad Snyder, The Judicial Genealogy (and Mythology) of John Roberts: Clerkships from Gray to Brandeis to Friendly to Roberts (December 8, 2010). Ohio State Law Journal, Vol. 71, No. 1149, 2010; Univ. of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1146. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1722362

“During his Supreme Court nomination hearings, John Roberts idealized and mythologized the first judge he clerked for, Second Circuit Judge Henry Friendly, as the sophisticated judge-as-umpire. Thus far on the Court,Roberts has found it difficult to live up to his Friendly ideal, particularly in several high-profile cases. This Article addresses the influence of Friendly on Roberts and judges on law clerks by examining the roots of Roberts’s distinguished yet unrecognized lineage of former clerks: Louis Brandeis’s clerkship with Horace Gray, Friendly’s clerkship with Brandeis, and Roberts’s clerkships with Friendly and Rehnquist. Labeling this lineage a judicial genealogy, this Article reorients clerkship scholarship away from clerks’ influences on judges to judges’ influences on clerks. It also shows how Brandeis, Friendly, and Roberts were influenced by their clerkship experiences and how they idealized their judges. By laying the clerkship experiences and career paths of Brandeis, Friendly, and Roberts side-by-side in detailed primary source accounts, this Article argues that judicial influence on clerks is more professional than ideological and that the idealization of judges and emergence of clerkships as must-have credentials contribute to a culture of judicial supremacy.”

Felice Batlan, Florence Kelley and the Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism (December 1, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1721725

“The usual story of the demise of laissez-faire constitutionalism in the 1930’s features heroes such as Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and the great male legal progressives of the day who rose up from academia, the bench, and the bar, to put an end to what historians label ‘legal orthodoxy.’ In this essay, I seek to demonstrate that Florence Kelley was a crucially important legal progressive who was at the front lines of drafting and defending new legislation that courts were striking down as violating the Fourteenth Amendment and State constitutions. Looking at who was drafting and lobbying for path breaking progressive legislation and how such legislation was being defended accomplishes a number of things. It uncovers how male legal actors at times worked closely and collaborated with women reformers. Furthermore, thinking about women reformers as central legal actors demands that we examine our own categorical thinking. Placing progressive era women reformers in a non-porous women’s sphere, while imagining that elite male legal thinkers were sealed within an all-male world of academics, lawyers and jurists, distorts late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal culture and leads to what we might call ‘intellectual segregation.’ This essay is thus a work of bricolage that brings together the scholarship on women’s leading roles in progressive era reform with mainstream narratives of legal history.”

Douglas W. Allen, Let’s Slow Down: Comments on Same-Sex Marriage and Negative Externalities (December 9, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1722764

“Same-sex marriage is the most pressing social policy in family law, and pressure exists to provide empirical findings on the effect it will have on traditional marriage. However, it is too early to tell. This paper critiques one of the first U.S. same-sex empirical papers and shows that the negative externality is poorly specified, the data contains coding errors, and the test has no power. Therefore, the conclusion drawn in the paper (that there is no rational grounds for opposing same-sex marriage) is not supported by the evidence in the paper.”