Daily Archives: April 7, 2011

Alliance Defense Fund attorneys filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of a student-led pro-life club against Independent School District #885 for denying the club, at St. Michael-Albertville High School, official status because it allegedly “does not support the student body as a whole.”

LifeSiteNews: “The 45,000-strong union, whose leadership has become infamous for advancing causes opposed to Catholic teaching, voted at its annual general meeting in Toronto last month to force every member to pay an extra $60 towards its political campaign. The fee takes effect July 1st.”

LifeNews: Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter signed into law a measure (SB 1115) that prohibits qualified health plans participating in the state’s health exchange from paying for elective abortions. The health exchanges, established by the health care reform law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), go into effect in 2014.

Charles Haynes at North Country Gazette: It’s little known that many public schools made significant progress toward getting religion right over the past decade. Thanks to consensus guidelines supported by advocacy groups from left to right, I have found that constitutionally protected student religious expression is way up in schools – and unconstitutional school promotion of religion is way down. If schools now backslide into litigation and shouting matches, administrators who ignore (or misinterpret) the law have only themselves to blame.

CTPost.com: The state Senate has approved a bill offering legal recognition to same-sex couples in Delaware.

Journal-Sentinel: “Wisconsin’s whipsaw of a Supreme Court election kept jiggling Thursday, as the first statewide recount in two decades loomed and the ongoing process of officially counting ballots appeared to swing the unofficial winner from the challenger to the incumbent.”

The error, revealed today, would give incumbent Supreme Court Justice David Prosser a net 7,381 votes against his challenger, attorney Joanne Kloppenburg.

Chicago Tribune: Republicans pointedly questioned whether Terry Cosgrove, the president and CEO of Personal PAC, could be fair in a role as a member of the state’s Human Rights Commission.

AP: The federal judge who struck down California’s gay marriage ban has confirmed that he’s gay. Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker retired in February, several months after his landmark decision that’s being challenged in an appeals court.

DailyCaller.com: If I sound bitter, I am. The Greatest Generation went to war to stop Nazism and provide a future for their children. The baby boomers spent all of that future and put the rest on a half-dozen credit cards, which they passed off to their own children, Generations X, Y, and Z. We never asked for it, we never volunteered for it, but yet here we are, being forced to pay off these credit cards.

NWI.com: A Senate-approved measure prohibiting schools from using state money to sue the state seeking more money is headed for a final vote in the Indiana House. The House Education Committee voted 11-0 Wednesday to send Senate Bill 495 to the full House.

St. Louis Beacon: Both chambers of the Missouri General Assembly focused on abortion and contraception this morning, with the Senate passing a bill to restrict abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy while the state House approved a measure to put more restrictions on the abortion drug RU-486. The House bill also allows pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraception pill known as “Plan B.”

Daily Mail: She will grow up to call her Auntie Emma. But an extraordinary rearrangement of Chris and Sandra Barlow’s family tree means that Emma Vaughan is actually baby Maia Barlow’s mother. The 29-year-old barmaid effectively gave birth to her own cousin after agreeing to become a surrogate mother to help her aunt Sandra’s 15-year fertility battle.

Christian Newswire: “Today, the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) released a Skype video interview with Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) revealing her support for the effort to defund Planned Parenthood of taxpayer dollars in the Continuing Resolution (CR).”

Kansas City Star: Senators passed the bill 27-5 Thursday, sending it to the House. Representative already have passed their own bill, which is pending in the Senate. Both chambers must agree on the same version for the bill to go to the governor.

LifeNews: If the government shuts down on Saturday, military men and women will have to serve while not getting a paycheck. Families planning on spending spring break at one of our national parks will have their vacations ruined. It’s also possible that many government websites would be offline during a shutdown. And why? Just to ensure that taxpayers continue paying for abortions in the nation’s capital? How shameful.

LifeNews: Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter has signed SB 1070, a measure prohibiting assisted suicide in Idaho. The bill comes as Oregon and Washington has approved assisted suicides and Montana has opened the door slightly.

Christian Newswire: oday, the Supreme Court of Mississippi granted the Emergency Motion to Vacate or Stay Judge Joe Dale Walker’s March 23 order that required school attendance officers in the Thirteenth District to provide him with the names and addresses of all homeschoolers in the district.

CNSNews: “Absolutely right on. Let’s crush them,” wrote Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal. “I’ll speak to Elena and designate someone.”

C-FAM: In an awkward turn of events that pitted pro-life and pro-family advocates against the students, legislators heard a host of reasons why U.S. ratification posed a threat to religious freedom, parental rights, and the right to life. Heightening tensions was talk in the halls that the Vatican backed the resolution. The school’s lay chaplain testified that the resolution was launched at a joint event at the United Nations last year hosted by the Holy See and the religious order that runs St. Raphael’s.

Pink News: US District Judge Vaughn Walker, now retired, was outed during the course of last year’s trial by a newspaper which said his sexuality was an open secret . . . He said: “I was the ogre of the gay community when I was nominated, and a hero when I leave” . . .

The suggested change would require state-licensed private and church-run adoption agencies to allow gay couples to adopt children.

FRC Action clearly sees any attempt to strip the D.C. language from the continuing resolution as a vote for taxpayer funding of abortion.

WorldNetDaily: “I’m not a ‘birther,’” Hawaii State Sen. Sam Slom told Jeff Katz of WXKS Radio in Boston, “and I followed this from the very beginning. At first I followed it with amusement, and then I got really concerned about it, because the question was if it was not just the birth certificate, but other records as well – school records, academic records, work records – why would anyone spend millions of dollars in legal fees, particularly someone in public office, particularly someone in the highest public office, to not make that information public?”

LifeNews: Senate Democrat on Thursday said they will not pass a bill the House is expected to approve that would keep the federal government funding for another week because it contains a provision banning abortion funding in the nation’s capital.

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday against Arkansas Act 1, a voter-approved law designed to protect adopted and foster children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e3aCW6G4d8

“This is a classic example of judicial tyranny,” said Family Council Action Committee President Jerry Cox.

The Arkansas Constitution was interpreted in Jegley v. Picado (2002) as securing a right to privacy, included in which is protection of “private, consensual, noncommercial acts of sexual intimacy between adults.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education: David A. French, who, as senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, helped represent Mr. Adams in the case, on Wednesday cheered the Fourth Circuit’s ruling as “a ringing victory for academic freedom,” with language that “is very clear, and not only binding in the Fourth Circuit but, I hope, quite persuasive to the other circuits.” The ruling “deals a real blow to the idea that professors’ speech is somehow wholly owned by the university. It is not,” said Mr. French, whose organization, an Arizona-based alliance of Christian lawyers and like-minded groups, took up the case partly because Mr. Adams had accused the university of religious discrimination.

Stop the ACLU: The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) was thrilled to hear the decision. “Parents should be able to choose what’s best for their own children. This ruling empowers parents to do just that,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman. “Parents should decide what schools their children attend and where their money goes. The ACLU failed in its attempt to eliminate school choice for hundreds of thousands of students nationwide and also failed to demonstrate that it had any constitutional basis for its clients to file suit in the first place.”

Bay Area Reporter: The Nuxoll case began in 2006, when Heidi Zamecnik, a student at a public high school in Illinois, wore a T-shirt with “Be Happy, Not Gay” on the Day of Truth, an event developed by the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal organization. ADF sees a Day of Truth as a conservative response to GLSEN’s Day of Silence, and promotes the event on the school day following the Day of Silence . . . [more about ADF involvement]

LJWorld.com: Daniel Blomberg, who represented the ADF, fielded the majority of the questions asked by concerned and interested residents. He said if gender identity were to pass in Lawrence, several privacy issues could come into play. “My focus is constitutional law and religious liberty,” Blomberg said. “At the end of the day, sometimes religious liberty is bad for business, it is, and it’s still the right thing to do.”

Inside Higher Ed: David French, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, issued a statement calling Wednesday’s decision “a ringing vindication of the academic freedom of public university professors. Disagreeing with an accomplished professor’s religious and political views is no grounds for refusing him promotion. Opinion columns are among the purest examples of free speech protected by the First Amendment.”

One News Now: ADF senior counsel David French argued before the court on Adams’ behalf. “Christian professors should not be discriminated against because of their beliefs,” French states, “and this decision thoroughly upholds that principle.” French calls the circuit court’s decision “a ringing vindication” of the academic freedom of public university professors.

Warrne Moore at the American Culture: “In an interesting side note, Adams was represented by David French, of the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization dealing in religious liberty issues. French is also a pundit, and he happens to live in a portion of my ancestral domain.”

Religion Clause Blog: A Malaysian government minister says that non-Muslims who quote verses from the Qur’an for ulterior motives or to question Islamic practices may be prosecuted under the country’s Penal Code (Sec. 295 – 298A) for insulting the Qur’an.

AP: “A French family detained in Ukraine for trying to smuggle out twins born to a surrogate mother is asking any sympathetic country to grant the children citizenship.”

In a bill passed by a 27-1 vote, the state Senate has increased donation limits from $500 to $750. The bill also removes donation limits for corporations and insurance companies.

NCPA Policy Digest: In recent decades, many calls for transformative change in American schooling have advocated school choice. Yet these calls themselves have too often accepted the orthodoxies of the 19th century schoolhouse. Working with the Walton Family Foundation’s Bruno Manno, Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, offers a more promising vision for 21st century, choice-centered reform.

NCPA Policy Digest: Texas is now the nation’s leading industrial and manufacturing state. Thus, the state will be disproportionately impacted by the recent Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation and the many other major rules to take effect in the next three years. Indeed, the rules on track to go into effect in the next three years could cost more than $1 trillion, result in hundreds of thousands of jobs lost and significantly impair electric reliability, says Kathleen Hertnett White, director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and Environment . . .

MSNBC carries the video (9:53 mins).

AP: “An Ohio woman who gave birth to another woman’s baby after a fertility clinic mix-up has announced she and her husband are expecting twins through a surrogate mother.”

AP: Gary Gates puts the figure at 4 million adults, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population.

CNN: “He spent $2 million in legal fees trying on to get away from this issue, and if it weren’t an issue, why wouldn’t he just solve it?” he said. “I wish he would because if he doesn’t, it’s one of the greatest scams in the history of politics and in the history, period. You are not allowed to be a president if you’re not born in this country. Right now, I have real doubts.”

Journal-Sentinel: With the largest number of local clerks of any state in the nation, Wisconsin’s Balkanized system of running elections could make for an epic statewide recount, experts said Wednesday. And with a possible legal challenge lying beyond the likely recount, any irregularities with local ballots now could feed into potential courtroom debates later.

AFP on Breitbart: China warned the international community it had “no right to interfere” in the case of outspoken artist Ai Weiwei, who has been detained for investigation of unspecified economic crimes.

Robert Knight writes at Townhall: Rep. Allen B. West, Florida Republican, belled the cat neatly during a hearing last Friday on the military’s breakneck pace in implementing the new lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) law. Mr. West, whose 20-plus years in the U.S. Army included combat commands, noted that he and others at Fort Bragg had to endure “sensitivity training” in the 1990s. It didn’t enhance the “warrior ethos,” he recalled . . . the Pentagon is forging into unknown territory, driven by political correctness, not military need.

AP on Yahoo News: “The issue is ideology, not numbers,” Reid said. “The two main issues that are holding this matter up are … reproductive rights and clean air. These matters have no place on a budget bill.”

Doroth Rabinowitz at the Wall Street Journal: Mobs murder more than 20 innocents in the name of God—and the commander of Afghan forces rebukes a publicity-hungry pastor in Florida

CBS: “We’ve had about 400 death threats,” he said, adding that Hezbolla, the Shia Muslim militant group, had put out a “reward out on my head for $2.4 million.”

“The Arkansas Supreme Court has upheld a decision to strike down a state law barring gay couples and other unmarried people living together from serving as adoptive or foster parents.”

The emphasis of both conferences is a familiar one to American voters – change. Soros wants to begin changing the global economy in one event. In the other, his flunkies want to “Change the world. Change the media.”