Daily Archives: December 20, 2010

This is a historic step forward for all Americans, a step toward a more perfect union and a more perfect reflection of our core values. As the President and I have repeatedly said, we are committed to universal standards abroad and here at home. Our progress on equality here strengthens our advocacy for human dignity everywhere.

Jerusalem Post: “A breakthrough legal ruling in the Jerusalem Family Court on Thursday will pave the way for homosexuals to officially adopt their partner’s or spouse’s child, the Tel Aviv-based New Family organization told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.”

Christian Post: “In the aftermath of the 65-31 Senate vote that did away with the 1993 ban on open homosexuality in the armed forces, religious legal defense group Alliance Defense Fund predicts that military chaplains will be the first to feel the effects of the repeal. ‘The first official casualty of this hurried vote may well be the religious freedom of chaplains and service members,’ said ADF Litigation Counsel [Daniel Blomberg] in a statement.”

Hindustan Times: “The Icelandic Parliament, after much persuasion from the couple and heated debates back home, decided to give the baby a social security number. This means Joel could be the first surrogate baby to be granted citizenship of Iceland.”

“One Army sergeant struck at the heart of this whole debate. ‘They were kicking people out for being homosexual,’ he said, ‘and now they will be kicking people out for picking on homosexuals.’ It’s a foreboding message for our troops–one that homosexual activists hope will echo through every policy debate to come: embrace homosexuality or else . . . ”

Catholic News Service: “Costa Rica is under pressure to overturn its ban on in vitro fertilization — and as a result abandon long-held Catholic teaching — or risk sanctions for violating international accords on human rights.”

LifeNews: “San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West is already facing a rebuke from a Catholic bishop over an abortion one of its hospitals did that he says violated Catholic teachings. Now, a national pro-life organization has released the results of a new research study showing CHW has a longer history of promoting abortions.”

“Clearly a determined effort is afoot, in cultural bastions controlled by the left, to anathematize traditional views of sexual morality, particularly opposition to same-sex marriage, as the expression of ‘hate’ that cannot be tolerated in a decent civil society. The argument over same-sex marriage must be brought to an end, and the debate considered settled. Defenders of traditional marriage must be likened to racists, as purveyors of irrational fear and loathing. Opposition to same-sex marriage must be treated just like support for now long-gone anti-miscegenation laws.”

Douglas Wilson writing at Blog and Mablog: “The issue is this. Homosexual behavior in the ranks is now being considered as a protected and honorable lifestyle choice. This means that if an evangelical Christian witnesses to his crewmates, and he says that Jesus died to liberate them from their sins, and somebody says, ‘Like what, fer instance,’ he can still say ‘drunkenness, cocaine use, gambling away your family’s paycheck, sleeping with hookers in Naples, laziness, stealing, and adultery.’ But if he now includes sodomy, then if someone complains about him (and someone will), the witnessing Christian will be subject to the discipline of the service.”

“The magic numbers are 266 and 16 — two-thirds of the House and Senate, respectively — the number of votes needed to override what is expected to be Gov. John Lynch’s veto of any repeal bill.”

Daily Mail: “The number of lesbian couples and single women seeking to start a family through IVF has rocketed since the law governing a child’s need for a father was relaxed.”

“After a monthslong blockade, Senate Republicans have agreed to let at least 19 of President Barack Obama’s non-controversial judicial nominees win confirmation in the waning days of the congressional session in exchange for a commitment by Democrats not to seek votes on four others.”

The Manteca Bulletin: “Two weeks after their application for a new charter school was denied unanimously by the Manteca Unified Board of Education, Great Valley Academy officials in Modesto filed an appeal with the San Joaquin County Office of Education.”

Stars and Stripes: “One week after warning the distraction of repealing ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ could risk Marines’ lives, Gen. James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, pledged to lead the effort to integrate openly gay Marines.”

Christian Post: “Christian street preacher Dale Mcalpine is to receive more than $10,000 in damages after police in Cumbria, England, admitted wrongful arrest, unlawful imprisonment and a breach of his human rights.”

Des Moines Register: “A Polk County judge has declined to hear a legal challenge to last month’s judicial retention vote to avoid the appearance that he has a conflict of interest.”

Video is here.

ChristianNewsWire: “Bishop E. W. Jackson, Sr., founder of S.T.A.N.D., [Staying True to America's National Destiny] and a former Marine issued the following response to the Senate vote today allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the United States Military for the first time in American history.”

Washington Post: “In the past few years, enrollment of Muslim students such as Shabnan has spiked at Catholic campuses across the country. Last year, Catholic colleges had an even higher percentage of Muslim students than the average four-year institution in the United States, according to the Higher Education Research Institute. The influx has astonished and sometimes befuddled administrators. Some Catholic campuses are creating prayer rooms for new Muslim students and hiring Islamic chaplains to minister to them. Others are unsure how to adapt.”

The Sunday Business Post: “If, as seems certain, the next government is formed in the coming months by Fine Gael and Labour, the negotiations on the Programme for Government have just got a little more combustible . . . ‘Abortion becomes election issue,’ declared the front page of the Irish Times in the wake of the decision.”

WSJ (AP): “New York City has settled a lawsuit with an Orthodox Jewish nurse who was denied a job at a city hospital because she couldn’t work on the Sabbath.”

Tiffany Stanley writing at The New Republic: “[W]hen Obama took office, the Democrats’ faith outreach began to fall by the wayside. Several of those who had led the religious aspects of the Obama campaign landed in the OFBNP, which is legally barred from electoral politics, and thus faith-based political outreach . . . At the same time, the national party began to strip down its religious outreach programs . . . Current DNC Chairman (and former missionary) Tim Kaine has made vague statements denying that he would allow faith outreach to falter, but evidence of the DNC’s clear commitment to faith-based coordination is hard to come by.”

Jennifer Rubin comments at The Washington Post: “You have to imagine that value voters lack core convictions — an obvious bit of cognative dissonance — to miss why it is that religious voters disapprove of the Democrats these days. It’s the agenda.”

Pakistan Christian Post: “The high profile criminal trial of 21-year-old Christian Copt Girgis Baroumi, accused of sexually assaulting a Muslim girl, is viewed by the Coptic community as an example of how the Egyptian government, using all its organs, including the Attorney General, Interior Minister and Parliament Speaker, has conspired to use him as a scapegoat to justify deadly Muslim assaults on Christians.”

UPI: “Florida man says co-workers made his life difficult after he took a demotion so he could study to become a Pentecostal minister.”

Reuters: “Recent efforts by authorities, clergy and unknown bands of neighbourhood enforcers to police morals by shutting nightclubs, bars and other establishments has heightened concerns among academics and intellectuals that Iraq, now emerging from war, is displaying the tendencies of a hard-line Islamic state.”

“A culture war has broken out at the United Nations over whether gays should be singled out for the same protections as other minorities whose lives are threatened. The battle will come to a head on Tuesday when the General Assembly votes to renew its routine condemnation of the unjustified killing of various categories of vulnerable people.”

BBC: “A group of village elders and clerics sentenced Sufia Begum under Sharia law to 40 lashes for adultery. The 40-year-old died of her injuries almost a month after the beating in Rajshahi district, her family says.”

NewsBusters: “‘I was at – forgive the expression – a Christmas party,’ NPR reporter Nina Totenberg interjected on Inside Washington in the weekend’s oddest cautionary separation from a common description for a common event, seemingly embarrassed to invoke any religious terminology for Christmas.”

Jerusalem Post: “Discrepancies between colloquial and literary Arabic may have far-reaching legal ramifications in Egypt. Egypt may have the highest divorce rate in the Arab world, but that might be moot if a new ruling by the country’s senior jurists goes into effect. Sheikh ‘Ali Goma’a, Grand Mufti of Egypt, found in a recent study that the Egyptian mispronunciation of the Arabic word for ‘divorced’ may nullify the action, meaning the couple was still legally married.”

UPI: “Canada’s abortion debate is being revived by the case of a woman who killed her boyfriend when he tried to force her to have one.”

USA Today: “President Obama is likely to sign the repeal of the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy on Wednesday, and may well hold a news conference later this week, spokesman Robert Gibbs said today.”

LifeSiteNews: “Faithful Catholic teachers are outraged after discovering that the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA) is funding Canada’s leading homosexualist organization with dues collected from them.”

LifeSiteNews: “The attorney for David Epstein, a Colombia university professor charged with incest with his adult daughter, is defending sex between family members by appealing to homosexual ‘rights’ as a precedent.”

Maureen Dowd has this piece at the New York Times speculating on the question and lamenting the extent of opposition in the country to the homosexual agenda.

Associated Press: “Gov. Deval Patrick has sworn in the first black chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.”

Associated Press: “The federal agency that monitors gun sales wants weapons dealers near the Mexican border to start reporting multiple sales of high-powered rifles, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.”

Associated Press: “Serbia urged international authorities on Monday to investigate allegations of a trade in the kidneys and other organs of civilians slain in the aftermath of Kosovo’s 1999 war for secession, officials said.”

The Independent: “A Deputy Commons Speaker has come out as gay ahead of today’s launch of a support group for homosexual MPs and parliamentary staff.”

Telegraph: “Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said the question of children’s wellbeing should come before the wishes of adults wanting to become parents.”

CBS: “Just days after Saturday’s historic passage of a stand-alone Senate bill repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ David Brock, founder and CEO of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, has announced the launch of Equality Matters – a new media initiative that aims to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality. The initiative, which Brock describes in a press release as a ‘communications war room for gay equality,’ comes as activists start to shift their focus to other issues in the fight for gay rights. ”

Politico: “In a landmark series of votes Saturday, the Senate officially recognized a historic change in American public opinion — that in just 17 years, the ban on openly gay men and women serving in the military went from being seen as a necessary compromise to keep peace between two sides in the culture war to a baffling and unnecessary relic of another era.”

LifeSiteNews: “Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva has become the ‘Santa Claus for gays’ as his reign comes to an end, approving hundreds of millions of dollars for pro-homosexual propaganda, as well as a new government agency to promote the gay agenda.”

MSNBC: “A judge has upheld the seizure of euro23 million ($30.2 million) in Vatican assets in a money-laundering probe involving the Holy See’s bank, the second time the bank has been denied the return of the funds.”

The Volokh Conspiracy: “So the Ninth Circuit holds today in United States v. City of Arcata . . . ‘The cities also raise the Tenth Amendment as a defense, arguing that the ordinances represent a valid exercise of the cities’ general police powers . . . But regulating the federal government’s military recruitment efforts is not a power reserved to the states . . . And the Supreme Court has made clear that the federal government “can determine, without question from any State authority, how the armies shall be raised.”‘”

Raymond Ibrahim writing at Hudson New York: “So much for Sweden epitomizing Al Qaeda’s respect for freedom. Why the change in policy? According to an audio-recording issued by the terrorists minutes before the attack, the vitriol is such that ‘all Mujahadeen [jihadists] in Europe and Sweden’ are to prepare for action: ‘Now is the time to strike, do not wait any longer.’”

“Conservatives tend to exaggerate the slippery slope from homosexuality to anything-goes. But many of the arguments for repealing DADT, coupled with ongoing efforts to reform military sex laws, do point in that direction.”

Daily Tribune: “Have we become a country so concerned with political correctness that we prefer ‘Happy Holiday’ to ‘Merry Christmas’? We hope not. And we see no reason for an anti-religion group in another state to dictate what’s wrong or right in Warren.”

Orin Kerr writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “Why did a specialized Supreme Court bar form in the first place? Most accounts suggest it started in the 1980s and has grown in size since then. But why? . . . ”

Jonathan H. Adler writing at The Volokh Conspiracy: “CRC metastasized into a new organization with a much broader mission – the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), but the campaign against judicial seminars continues . . . The aim of these attacks have always been to discourage judges from attending judicial education seminars at which they might be exposed to ideas Kendall and his colleagues dislike, if not shut down the seminars altogether . . . ”

LifeNews: “The new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey released today finds 52 percent think it is at least somewhat likely that the health care law will be overturned. Thirty-three percent view repeal as unlikely. Those figures include 16 percent who say it is very likely and 5 percent who say it is very unlikely.”

New York Times: “Under the proposed ‘repeal amendment,’ any federal law or regulation could be repealed if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted to do so.”

Salt Lake Tribune: “A judge has reversed a custody order barring a Juab County man from talking to his children about his religious belief in plural marriage and taking his children to the largely polygamous community he lives in.”

Associated Press: “Despite uneven progress in Afghanistan, Vice President Joe Biden said next summer’s planned withdrawal would be more than a token reduction and that the U.S. would be out of the country by 2014 ‘come hell or high water.’”

Associated Press: “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez defended plans for a law that would impose broadcast-type regulations on the Internet, saying Sunday that his government should protect citizens against online crimes.”

Associated Press: “The incoming head of the House Committee on Homeland Security says he will hold hearings on what he calls the ‘radicalization’ of some American Muslims.”

Religion Clause: “According to another report by KOCO News, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe and U.S. Rep. Frank Lucas sent a letter to the Federal Reserve Board calling the action an ‘all-out assault on the faith, values and rights of the bank, its employees and the people it serves.’ This led the Fed changed its mind. The president of Payne County Bank, Lynn Kinder, said that both sides have agreed to work out the issue and in the meantime the Fed has allowed the bank to restore its display of Christian items and verses.”

Associated Press: “Automakers and engine manufacturers are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over a plan to allow the sale of gasoline containing 15 percent ethanol.”

Associated Press: “[F]or the time being the restrictions will remain on the books, though it’s unclear how fully they will be enforced. Some people believe gay discharge cases will be dropped as soon as Obama signs the law. Military leaders, who have been divided on the issue, gave indications that the policy change will be aggressively pursued.”

Jeremy Dys writing at the Family Policy Council of West Virginia’s Engage Family Blog: “[T]he DADT repeal passed 65-31 in the U.S. Senate. Of that, 8 – EIGHT – GOP Senators voted in favor of repeal. Frankly, Manchin’s family obligations gave him convenient political cover, but it was an effective vote against repeal – which is more than can be said 1/5th of the republicans in the U.S. Senate!”

Washington Times: “Responding to the federal repeal of the military policy banning open gays from serving in the armed forces, a state lawmaker in Virginia plans to fight back with legislation that bars ‘active homosexuals’ from serving in the Virginia National Guard.”

Bryan Fischer writes at Renew America: “The Saturday morning cloture vote on the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was the critical vote. It needed 60 votes and got 63, because of Republican renegades Scott Brown, Mark Kirk, George Voinovich, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. If these traitors to national defense had voted in line with the Republican Party platform, the cloture motion would have received just 57 votes and would have failed.”

WorldNetDaily: “Operating much like a ‘memory hole’ in George Orwell’s classic novel ’1984,’ the Obama administration has replaced the content of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America website, providing additional evidence the White House intends to implement the SPP agenda by executive action, below the radar of public opinion and outside the framework of congressional approval.”

Bill O’Reilly writing at Human Events: “Why would any rational person get testy about a federal holiday that brings joy to the majority of their countrymen and helps the economy, to boot? As a Christian, I don’t mind the winter solstice people doing whatever it is they do. If it involves ice hockey, I might even participate. Why resent the happiness of others, especially if no harm is being done? That’s not reasonable.”

Washington Times: “The second and more threatening wave is the creeping takeover of Western political and social institutions, something Mr. Rubin calls the ‘silent tsunami.’ The spearhead of this movement is ‘collusion between Islamic ideologues and the far left to promote the idea of moral relativism,’ he said, ‘that all values and ideologies are equal. But they are not. Americans have never believed this.’ One dangerous manifestation of this viewpoint is the fashionable intellectual movement to infiltrate Shariah law interpretations into American jurisprudence, something for which there is no need and no precedent and which is antithetical to American norms and traditions.”

Reuters: “The top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee filed an amendment on Thursday to halt U.S. regulators’ plans to act on contentious Internet traffic rules next week.”

Wilberforce Academy
20th – 25th March 2011
Deadline for applications: 21st January 2011

[2010 video includes comments from Jeffery J. Ventrella and Jordan Lorence.]

In association with:
Christian Concern
Christian Legal Centre
Blackstone Legal Fellowship, An Alliance Defense Fund Ministry

Associated Press: “Sudan’s president has vowed to more deeply entrench strict Islamic Sharia law in the northern half of his country if the predominantly animist and Christian south votes to secede in a Jan. 9 referendum.”

SCOTUSblog: “Virginia officials, disappointed that the Justice Department is not moving for prompt Supreme Court review of the health care mandate’s constitutionality, are considering their own attempt. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, in an op-ed column in Friday’s Washington Post, made a new plea for bypassing a federal appeals court, saying that ‘simply too much is at stake.’ Cuccinelli’s aides have said that officials are leaning toward asking the Justices to take the case on without awaiting appeals court review, but have not yet decided.”

Breitbart: “The government is creating a vast domestic spying network to collect information about Americans in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent terror plots, The Washington Post reported Monday.”

Heritage Foundation: “The White House is still confident that, despite losing Graham and possibly McCain, they can still muster the nine Republican votes needed for ratification. Yesterday, President Barack Obama issued a letter pledging to fully develop missile defense in Europe. In the letter, the President claims that New START ‘places no limitations on the development or deployment of our missile defense programs’ and promises that he ‘will take every action available to me to support the deployment of all four phases’ of a missile defense system in Europe. Senator Bob Corker (R–TN) took to the floor welcoming the President’s letter: ‘A number of people on our side of the aisle have asked for it.’”

John Schwartz writing in the New York Times: “Professor Freedman of Hofstra noted that even if the justices were reluctant to accept the government’s primary argument that inactivity can be controlled under the Commerce Clause, there are other grounds for finding the health care law constitutional. The most attractive to the court, he suggested, might be categorizing the fine for not buying health care as a tax. He noted that a while only a handful of cases had restricted the power of Congress, under the Commerce Clause, the power to tax has almost always been upheld.”

News.com.au: “The Catholic Church is instructing parishioners to lobby federal MPs against voting for gay marriage, suggesting they base arguments on the natural order and the importance of a biological relationship with children rather than on marriage being a religious institution.”

“The UK Government is to combat the early sexualization of children by blocking internet pornography unless parents request it, it was revealed today.”

“[T]he Great Recession didn’t cause this budget insanity, it merely exposed it. The overspending has been going on for decades.”

ADF Attorney Kevin Theriot writing at Speak Up Movement / Church: “This [9th Circuit's] en banc opinion [in Rosas v. The Corporation of the Catholic Archbishop of Seattle, No. 09-3500], which has more precedential value than opinions from 3 judge panels, first confirmed the vitality of the ministerial exception to prohibitions on employment discrimination. It explained that ‘[t]he Free Exercise Clause rational for protecting a church’s personnel decisions concerning its ministers is the necessity of allowing the church to choose its representatives using whatever criteria it deems relevant. Indeed, the ministerial relationship lies so close to the heart of the church that it would offend the Free Exercise Clause simply to articulate a religious justification for its personnel decisions.’”