Daily Archives: June 15, 2011

NYTimes.com: The two senior administration lawyers contended that American forces have not been in “hostilities” at least since April 7, when NATO took over leadership in maintaining a no-flight zone in Libya, and the United States took up what is mainly a supporting role — providing surveillance and refueling for allied warplanes — although unmanned drones operated by the United States periodically fire missiles as well.

Senate Republicans reached no decision today on whether to vote on a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York.

John Smeaton, SPUC director: A growing list of Polish women journalists are signing an open letter (see press release and letter below) calling for a complete legislative ban on abortion in Poland.

LifeNews.com: North Carolina has become the third state to de-fund the Planned Parenthood abortion business now that both houses of the state legislature have agreed to override the veto pro-abortion Gov. Bev Perdue’s budget veto.

The Washington Post: But the count has been dropping since then. Last year, it fell 3 percent to slightly more than 4 million births, according to preliminary figures released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CatholicHerald.co.uk: Ashur Yacob Issa, 29, was abducted late Friday night or early Saturday morning and his mutilated body was discovered Monday morning. His family had been asked for a ransom but was not able to pay the sum of more than £61,500 (€70,000) the kidnappers demanded.

CatholicHerald.co.uk: Months after the revolution led by the ‘Facebook Generation’ John Pontifex meets frightened Coptic Christians worshipping in secret.

Catholic Culture: The bodies of nine aborted babies, all girls, were discovered in a drain in India’s western Maharashtra state, in one of regions where sex-selection abortion is most commonplace

Toronto Star: Canada’s anti-prostitution laws were enacted for the mundane purpose of keeping neighbourhoods clear of hookers and johns and not to prevent women from being exploited, as the federal government claims, the Ontario Court of Appeal was told Wednesday.

LifeNews.com: The Louisiana state Senate approved a bill the state House already passed designed to prevent women from being pressured into having an abortion they may not otherwise want. HB 586 . . .

Christian Post: Statistics from 2009 show that about 19% of same-sex couples claimed they had adopted a child on their forms. This shows a sharp increase since 2000 when just 8% stated the same.

LifeSiteNews.com: Catholic group in Palatine, Illinois has been banned from participating in the upcoming Palatine Jaycees Hometown Fest parade on July 2 because their banner displays a picture of an unborn child.

LifeSiteNews.com: Just after midnight Monday night, House members of North Carolina’s General Assembly overrode a veto of a state budget that barred funding for Planned Parenthood, making the state poised to join several others that have cut off funding for America’s largest abortion provider.

LifeNews.com: House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee released the first draft of their bill today funding the District of Columbia and the legislation keeps in place the ban on paying for abortions with taxpayer funds in the nation’s capital.

Phill Kline writing at LifeNews.com: In January 2008, Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius appointed Stephen Six as Kansas Attorney General to replace Paul Morrison who was forced to resign in a sex and legal scandal. [1] Six then used the power of his office to thwart, delay and interfere with the only criminal case ever filed against abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

CDC puts the number at 1.4%

TheHill.com: A bipartisan group of House lawmakers sued the Obama administration on Wednesday over its use of U.S. military forces in Libya.

OneNewsNow.com: There is now a 41-percent fertility gap between those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice,” he said. “And for the last 38 years, pro-life parents have been having their babies and they’ve been raising them to be pro-life. Pro-choice parents, alas, have often not had their babies — and so they haven’t raised them to be anything.

OneNewsNow.com: A pro-family leader in California says it’s alarming that the teachers union in his state is paying for a sexual indoctrination course for elementary students.

WorldNetDaily: An Ohio judge hung a poster in his courtroom reasserting the law’s historical reliance on moral absolutes, only to have the American Civil Liberties Union sue – and win – because one of their lawyers was offended by the poster’s reference to the Ten Commandments . . . Now the American Center for Law & Justice is petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn an appellate ruling that Davis has grounds to sue simply because he’s “offended.”

But enough Democratic and Republican senators have announced changes in their votes that there may now be a tie in the chamber.

Marital love implies dependence on another instead of autonomy, and it shows that certain goods (sex and procreation, love and marriage, marriage and parenthood) are connected. We must recover the language of self-giving. The second in a two-part series.

Religion Clause: A petition for certiorari (full text) was filed yesterday with the U.S. Supreme Court in DeWeese v. ACLU of Ohio Foundation, Inc. . . . | ACLJ press release

Religion Clause: The United States’ new Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Suzan Johnson Cook, spoke yesterday in Geneva, Switzerland at a panel on “Combating Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief” arranged by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. (Full text of remarks.) She said in part . . .

Religion Clause: Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) announced yesterday that he plans to introduce a bill into Congress that would prevent San Francisco and other cities from banning male circumcision of minors

LifeNews.com: Three pro-life legal groups have weighed in on the case — including the American Center for Law and Justice, Alliance Defense Fund and Thomas More Society — and they have said the law is constitutional.

Christian Newswire: The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) have filed motions for a preliminary injunction blocking the implementation of the NYC Pregnancy Services Center Local Law 17 ( # 0-371a ) on behalf of Chris Slattery, Expectant Mother Care / EMC Frontline Pregnancy Care Centers and two other single site crisis pregnancy centers.

OneNewsNow.com: “This is just one of numerous lawsuits throughout the country demonstrating that many municipalities don’t understand the law. Zoning schemes may not exclude churches or single them out from similar uses for disfavored treatment,” notes ADF attorney Joe Infranco. “The lawsuit had a great outcome, and we hope other cities and similar situations will take notice.

AZ Republic / Tucson Citizen: In 2009, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Donald Daughton issued a preliminary injunction halting those parts of the law from going into effect. On Tuesday, attorneys representing the state and the Christian legal group Alliance Defense Fund argued that Daughton was incorrect in his decision.

Rasmussen Reports: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 47% of American Adults still believe states should run lotteries to generate revenue. But that’s continuing a downward trend from 56% in October 2009 and 52% in August of last year.

Chelseanow.com: Also speaking were Chuck Stetson, a founder and managing director at PEI Funds, an investment firm, and a longtime opponent of gay marriage, and Brian Raum, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative law firm. City Councilman Fernando Cabrera, a Democrat who represents part of the Bronx, attended part of the press conference, but did not speak.

Herald Sun: Christians should be allowed to express themselves on public school campuses just like everyone else,” David Cortman, a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, said in a written statement. Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian organisation, initiated the lawsuit for Hart and Caronna. “It is cowardly to shut down everyone’s participation in this program simply out of animosity toward Christian speech,” Mr Cortman said. “There is absolutely nothing unconstitutional about a Bible verse on a brick when a school opens up a program for anyone to express a personal message. The school could simply have allowed the Bible verses, but instead, it chose to punish everyone.”

Thomson Reuters: For the gay marriage opponents: Charles Cooper, David Thompson, Howard Nielson, Nicole Moss and Peter Patterson of Cooper and Kirk; Andrew Pugno of the Law Offices of Andrew Pugno; Brian Raum and James Campbell of the Alliance Defense Fund.

‘Gay’ judge’s Prop 8 ruling upheld: “When judges ruled on cases in which they possess a direct and substantial personal interest, there can be no justice. And when judges fail to disclose all relevant facts concerning their potential personal interest in the outcome of a case and permit the appearance of partiality, the entirety of our judicial process is undermined,” said Austin R. Nimocks of the Alliance Defense Fund.

FoxNews.com: “Christians should be allowed to express themselves on public school campuses just like everyone else,” David Cortman, an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, said in a written statement. Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian organization, initiated the lawsuit for Hart and Caronna. “It is cowardly to shut down everyone’s participation in this program simply out of animosity toward Christian speech,” Cortman said. “There is absolutely nothing unconstitutional about a Bible verse on a brick when a school opens up a program for anyone to express a personal message. The school could simply have allowed the Bible verses, but instead, it chose to punish everyone.”

LifeNews.com: ADF Legal Counsel Matt Bowman also 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.”

The American Independent: . . . the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a legal alliance of Christian attorneys, appealed the judge’s order in conjunction with the Center for Arizona Policy (which helped draft the bill), the Bioethics Defense Fund and the Life Legal Defense Foundation. On Tuesday afternoon, counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund is arguing at the Arizona Court of Appeals in Phoenix . . . testifying on Tuesday is ADF senior counsel Steven H. Aden. “The protection of women should not be on hold while the nation’s largest abortion purveyor ties things up in court,” Aden said in a press release sent out Monday.

AP: Congress is holding the second in a sequence of hearings about violent Islamic radicalization in the U.S., a subject so controversial that the first event drew days of protests from religious and civil rights groups and tears from a Muslim congressman who testified about his religion.

AP: The North Carolina House has voted to cancel out Democratic Gov. Beverly Perdue’s historic veto of the two-year state budget.

Wisconsin’s controversial new law limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employees had been blocked for months in the wake of a lawsuit that claims Republican legislators passed the bill without giving adequate public notice. But the law has been revived . . .

FT.com / Global insight – The global order fractures as American power declines: Harold Macmillan, the prime minister who watched US power rise as the British empire crumbled, used to say that Britain would play ancient Greece to America’s Rome. These days it looks as if Rome is declining too. The US finds it increasingly hard to drive forward its vision of international trade and economics over the objections of big emerging-market countries . . .