Daily Archives: March 25, 2011

Today’s Alliance Alert Categorical Digest is being released a few hours early. The normal publication schedule will resume Monday.

Washington Post: olice said about 40,000 people gathered at Manila’s Rizal Park for the prayer rally led by Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales.

Fox News: The bills were modeled after legislation passed last year in Nebraska premised on research suggesting a fetus is able to feel pain after 20 weeks. Similar proposals are percolating in at least nine other states, according to one organization’s estimate.

LifeSiteNews: Top ‘gay-rights’ groups claiming to represent Christians and Catholics, and at least one Jesuit-run college, are being funded by a major homosexualist business magnate with the aim of stirring up dissent within the ranks of the church . . . The Arcus Foundation was begun by Jon Stryker, an openly gay billionaire stockholder and a leading supporter of homosexualist initiatives. A 2006 Salon article points to the influence of gay software millionaire and activist Tom Gill on Stryker.

Huffington Post: The Mexican Senate has repealed part of the Federal Criminal Code that made cheating on a spouse an offense punishable by two years in prison.

LifeNews: “Planned Parenthood is under attack by Tea Party Republicans who have put their extremist ideology above women’s health,” Lautenberg said while pro-life advocates who counterprotested shouted, “Shame on you, Lautenberg.”

This powerful video captures Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s (Ruth Institute) testimony to the Rhode Island House Judiciary on March 1, 2011. Reportedly, silence followed her testimony in our nation’s most Catholic state.

“The Rhode Island AFL-CIO executive board has, for the first time, voted to endorse legislation that would allow same-sex couples to marry in the state.”

Washington Times (3/20): t is interesting to note that The Catholic Church agency, Aid to the Church in Need, on March 14, 2011, in new report, estimated that 75% of all religious persecution around the world is directed against Christians. That means approximately 100 million people are facing persecution for Jesus today.

Here’s the key legal issue, and the holding: Reviewing an unpublished opinion of the court of appeals, we address whether, in seeking to terminate a guardianship established by parental consent, fit parents may invoke the constitutional presumption that they make custodial decisions in the best interests of their child . . .

Daily Mail: “A lesbian couple are to open Britain’s first gay-only fertility centre. Natalie Drew and Ashling Phillips, who have two children by a sperm donor, said they decided to set up a centre exclusively for gay people after their own experiences in trying to start a family. The Gay Family Web Fertility Centre opens its office on Monday in Birmingham where it will ‘match-make’ potential parents with sperm donors, egg donors or surrogates . . . ”

Intoleranceagainstchristians.eu: Jelena Coric Mudrovčić, Catholic catechism teacher in the primary school in Zagreb has been accused of saying that “homosexuals are sick” during a lesson on catechism in 2009.

Andrea Minichiello Williams at Christian Concern for Our Nation: One of the most encouraging parts of this decision is the clear understanding from the Judges that secularism is not neutral. Judge Power said that: “Neutrality requires a pluralist approach on the part of the State, not a secularist one. … secularism (which was the applicant’s preferred belief or world view) was, in itself, one ideology among others. A preference for secularism over alternative world views—whether religious, philosophical or otherwise—is not a neutral option.” Judge Bonnello said that “Freedom of religion is not secularism. Freedom of religion is not the separation of Church and State. Freedom of religion is not religious equidistance – all seductive notions, but of which no one has so far appointed this Court to be the custodian. In Europe, secularism is optional, freedom of religion is not.”

Religion Clause Blog: Yesterday’s Pittsburgh (PA) Tribune-Review reports on a lawsuit filed against a Beaver County (PA) bathroom remodeling company by a woman who alleges she was forced out of her job with the company by the company’s insistence that she attend faith-based training sessions to increase her trust in God.

Religion Clause Blog: M and C reports that Egypt’s interim cabinet on Wednesday approved a new law that creates a framework for creating political parties.  Reuters has summarized the provisions of the new law . . .

AP: That could hurt not just the world’s poor, but America’s reach in emerging markets where China has ramped up investment and provided easy credit.

Religion Clause Blog: The East Valley Tribune reported yesterday that the Arizona Senate has passed HB 2565 that will bar colleges and universities from discriminating against students because of their religious beliefs or religious expression and will permit religious and political student groups to exclude members who do not share their beliefs.

NY Times: As the best organized and most extensive opposition movement in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to have an edge in the contest for influence. But what surprises many is its link to a military that vilified it. “There is evidence the Brotherhood struck some kind of a deal with the military early on,” said Elijah Zarwan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.

ABA Journal: At issue is whether Michael Turner had a due-process right to an appointed lawyer when he was sentenced to a year in prison for failing to pay child support.

WLAJ.com: “It seeks to overturn a state law that permits law enforcement officials to remove a child from parents’ custody without proving the child is in immediate danger.”

ADF attorney Erik Stanley appeared on “In the Market” with Janet Parshall to discuss this: Kansas town sued for taxing church attendance. | MP3 audio 14:35 mins

“A group of Chinese scientists from the National Institute of Biological Scientists have appeared to find a way to regulate sexual preference in male mice.”

ADF attorney Byron Babione appeared on the Mary Reichard Show to discuss this: Ark. Supreme Court showdown Thursday over law protecting adopted, foster children. | MP3 mins 8:15 mins

ADF attorney Erik Stanley appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show to discuss this: ADF files suit to protect Ariz. church from foreclosure based on $50K illegal tax bill. | MP3 audio 5:40 mins

LifeNews: ADF Legal Counsel Matt Bowman, earlier this week, commented on the law and the lawsuit in remarks to LifeNews.com. “Pregnancy centers, which offer real help and hope to women, shouldn’t be punished by political allies of the abortion industry,” he said. “Attacks on pregnancy centers are an ideologically motivated attempt to distract from the growing national scandals in the abortion industry. For years, abortionists have preyed on women and girls for profit. Now pro-abortion politicians are trying to give women fewer choices.”

LifeSiteNews: “Parents, not the government, are ultimately responsible for making educational choices for their children, and jailing them for exercising this universal right is ridiculous,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “Eduard Wiens was well within his rights under the European Convention of Human Rights to opt to teach his children a view of sexuality that is in accord with his own religious beliefs, instead of sending them to classes and an interactive play that they found to be objectionable. In addition to the concerns directly related to this case, ADF wants to head off any opportunity for activists in the U.S. to cite foreign court decisions as patterns to follow.”

World Magazine: A common complaint leveled at evangelical Christians, according to David French, is that they’re obsessed with gays and abortion. “The criticism is so common that it’s often internalized and adopted by the church itself,” he writes. So French, director of the Alliance Defense Fund (“a card-­carrying member of the professional religious right”), decided to crunch some numbers—and found there’s no comparison between what Christians give to cause-oriented organizations like his and what they give to anti-poverty groups like World Vision. We fight culture wars, he said, but our charitable obsession is “serving our fellow man.”

One News Now: This is an attack on pregnancy centers by the city council of New York City, who were working together with political allies of the abortion industry to actually regulate pro-life pregnancy centers and impose fines and penalties on them,” says Bowman. [more quotes by Matt Bowman]

National Secular Society: The ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights that the display of crucifixes in state school classrooms does not violate a student’s freedom of conscience is a severe blow to the concept of secularism in Europe. It also leaves an uncomfortable suspicion over the motives and independence of the European Court . . . The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) – (a branch of US televangelist Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice), was elated. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) also hailed the ruling. (Both groups had filed briefs urging the court to uphold the crucifixes.)

Milwaukee News Buzz: Meanwhile, Wisconsin Family Action is getting legal help from the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal organization based in Arizona. It’s fielding three staff attorneys and two in Wisconsin that it has described in press releases as “ADF-allied,” Michael Dean of Waukesha and Taylor Samuel of Kenosha.

OrthodoxyToday.org: What happens then when people leave Christianity and want to promote ideas about morality that violate the moral tradition? They have only one option: Hijack the language. They use the terms of traditional Christianity but mean very different things by them. Words don’t mean what they used to mean. Language gets inverted, turned upside down. Do this long and loud enough, and in less than a generation the new meanings take hold. When hijackers use the language of the moral tradition, they implicitly claim to stand inside that tradition. It’s only a pose of course, but their pose fools many people.

ConservativeActionAlerts.com: In every instance where any government in the world has triggered their Internet kill switch (which every government in the world possesses), whether affecting only their broadband users, or both broadband and dial-up users, and whether those shutdowns were complete or impacted only segments of the Internet market in that country, those shutdowns or denials of access to the Information Superhighway targeted the law-abiding population at large whom those governments felt they had cause to fear.

. . . Mr. Alinsky’s first rule is that “revolutions do not go backwards.” Mr. Obama has presided over a massive increase in government spending – redistributing substantial wealth from the haves to the have-nots – and he is not going to go backwards.

Carl Bialok at WSJ (3/11):  My print column this week examines a widely reported claim that one in five divorces is linked to Facebook . . .  Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which first released the stat, acknowledged in an interview that this may not be representative of all divorces . . . For one thing, the site’s users tend to be young, owing to its online presence and that it is likely to appeal to people seeking relatively simple divorces, without thorny issues such as child custody. | Hat tip: IMAPP

Adelle M. Banks at USA Today (3/14) Wilcox’s analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households has found that Americans who attend religious services several times a month were about 35% less likely to divorce than those with no religious affiliation. | Hat tip: IMAPP

Freakonomics: “A new working paper by the economists Pedro Carneiro, Katrine V. Løken, and Kjell G. Salvanes exploits a recent reform in Norway to answer that question . . . The authors found that more time with Mom led to lower high school dropout rates later on.”

Wall Street Journal (full text via Google): Wisconsin Democrats and unions are still seething over their failure to thwart Governor Scott Walker’s government union reforms. Now they’re trying to spin their rage into gold by aiming it at the state Supreme Court election on April 5. If they defeat David Prosser’s re-election bid, labor leaders and their Democratic allies hope a newly activist court will be their proxy in the fight against Mr. Walker’s policies.

U.S. Dept. of State: The United States welcomes today’s action by the UN Human Rights Council to further the international community’s efforts to combat religious intolerance. The consensus resolution adopted by the Council today represents a significant step forward in the global dialogue on countering intolerance, discrimination, and violence against persons based upon religion or belief. We appreciate the leadership shown by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and member states on today’s landmark achievement. The United States strongly supports today’s resolution, which rejects the broad prohibitions on speech called for in the former “defamation of religions” resolution . . .

AP: “Target Corp. is suing a San Diego pro-gay marriage group to get it to stop canvassing outside its San Diego County stores, alleging its activists are driving away customers.”

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell: The cost in jobs is startling. A new analysis by Louisiana State University professor Joseph Mason projects national job losses at 19,000 from the drilling moratorium, with wage losses at $1.1 billion. About one-third of those jobs are located outside the Gulf region.