Daily Archives: July 21, 2011

Washington Post: Acting on a suit filed by the monks of St. Joseph Abbey in St. Tammany Parish in August, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval said “there is no rational basis” for the licensing requirement to be applied to those only wanting to sell caskets, such as the 38 monks.

Cristina Odon at The Telegraph: A Government “discussion paper” seen by Paul Goodman of Conservative Home argues that, to create “the conditions for integration”, all religious marriages should be recognised by the state.

Joseph K. Grieboski at the Huffington Post: On July 12, the Hungarian parliament procured for the country the title of Worst Religion Law in Europe when it rushed after midnight to adopt its new “Law on the Right to Freedom of Conscience and Religion, and on Churches, Religions and Religious Communities.”

Telegraph: Ministers have ruled out legalising polygamy after a leaked Whitehall paper suggested multiple Islamic marriages could be officially recorded by the state.

LifeNews: The Obama administration is continuing to go after pro-life people who provide abortion alternatives information to women outside abortion facilities. They are going after one elderly man for stepping on a woman’s shoe and breaking the strap.

Asia News: A couple comprising a Christian and a Muslim is forced to live hiding: society condemns their love, for an Islamic scholar it “is punishable by death.” The bishop of Islamabad: “The State must defend them, or it will soon disappear.”

Catholic Culture: An Australian lawmaker—picking up a suggestion that has been advanced by the Irish government—has suggested the priests should be required to report sexual abuse even if they learn about it in the confessional.

CTPost: A Fargo judge on Thursday put the brakes on a new state law that some believe could stop North Dakota’s only abortion clinic from using medicines to induce abortions.

Washington Post: O’Malley, a Democrat, will hold a news conference on Friday afternoon to talk about how he will support legislation in the next regular session of the General Assembly in January.

LifeSiteNews: The National Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) gave an emotional homily Sunday concluding the July 14-17 ELCIC National Convention which approved both performance of same-sex ‘marriages’ in Lutheran churches and ordination of practicing homosexual clergy. “

LifeSiteNews: After a five-year legal battle, a pro-life group in the United Kingdom has succeeded in obtaining detailed statistics about eugenic abortions from the UK’s Department of Health (DoH).

LifeSiteNews: Europe’s ongoing economic crisis is due to more far-reaching problems than credit and massive national debt, said the head of the Vatican bank. The “true origin of the current economic crisis” is Europe’s aging population and low birth rate, according to Ettore Gotti Tedeschi.

LA Times: During a Senate panel hearing on the issue, the 1996 law that bars same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits is decried as unjust.

ADF Attorney Steven Aden appeared on KFUO with Roland Lettner to discuss the situation. | MP3 audio 22:47 mins

ADF attorney Steven Aden appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show to discuss the new law. | MP3 audio 5:37 mins | Related ADF press release

One might expect the civil liberties community to defend those cases as a natural extension of its campaign for greater privacy and personal choice.

Washington Times: Senate and House Democrats urged their colleagues at a Wednesday hearing to support a bill that would repeal the federal law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, so federal benefits and rights can flow to gay couples who are legally married under a state law.

Religion Clause Blog: In March 2010, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals held that a Seventh Day Adventist Congregation’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause and RLUIPA were infringed when Prince George’s County, Maryland refused to grant a change in sewer and water classifications for a portion of property on which the congregation planned to build a church. | Reaching Hearts International, Inc. v. Prince George’s County Maryland

ADF attorney David Cortman on the Janet Mefferd Show to discuss the topic. | MP3 audio 19:17 mins | Update and related post.

Deseret News: New research out of Britain’s Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the education level of parents has a greater effect on children’s social and cognitive development than their marital status, reports the Guardian.

Religion Clause Blog: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has now filed its answer (full text) to the complaint in a widely publicized case that charged the Houston (TX) National Cemetery with censoring veterans’ committal service rites to eliminate the mention of God. | Rainey v. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, (SD TX, answer filed 7/15/2011)

Religion Clause Blog: The ACLU of Texas announced yesterday that it has filed open records requests with state,county and city offices seeking information on the amount of government support that is being devoted to Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s controversial prayer service scheduled for August 6 in Houston’s Reliant Stadium.

AP: “Parents and teachers have launched a scholarship program that goes beyond offering money for college.”

The Obama administration is going after New Hampshire the same way it went after the state of Indiana following decisions in both states to strike taxpayer funding for the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

AP: Earlier this month officials said 25 out of the 122 female prisoners were being held for killing or attempting to kill their children.

AP: Several current and former students are suing Minnesota’s largest school district over its policy requiring staff to remain neutral when the topic of sexual orientation is raised in the classroom. | Related ADF Media.

AP: “Ohio voters will get to decide in November whether to repeal the state’s new collective bargaining law . . . ”

AP: It’s a revolution of sorts in Ireland, a nation founded on a pillar of devotion to Roman Catholicism, where many now question the church’s role in a rapidly changing society.

LifeNews: In April, a lawsuit the family brought against Planned Parenthood was settled and Alliance Defense Fund attorney Brian Hurley, who represented the parents of the girl, commented on the case. “The health and safety of young girls is far more important than Planned Parenthood’s desire to make money on an abortion,” said ADF Senior Counsel Steven H. Aden. “This lawsuit was yet another clear demonstration of Planned Parenthood’s ongoing effort to put its profit margin ahead of the true needs of young women. If they truly cared about the girls who enter their doors, they would not be ignoring Ohio law and allowing statutory rape to occur so they can make money killing a baby. They also wouldn’t be trying so desperately to keep all of their records secret.”

Montana News Association: “No one should have their free speech rights threatened just because they advocate a position that some consider politically incorrect. Stifling the advocacy of attorneys is simply unconstitutional,” said ADF Senior Counsel Gary McCaleb. “Our legal system promises all of its citizens the freedom to fully and fairly debate the important questions of our day. This proposed amendment needlessly undermines that constitutional guarantee within the very profession that protects constitutional rights.”

World Net Daily: ADF Senior Counsel Brian Raum said no one “should have to choose between their religious beliefs and their job.” “The law – and New York’s highest court – affirms this fundamental principle of freedom,” he said . “It’s outrageous that officials are threatening criminal prosecution for clerks who exercise their lawful right to delegate the issuing of same-sex ‘marriage’ licenses, especially when the law requires the accommodation of their religious beliefs. We encourage all clerks to affirm their rights under New York State law.”

Religion News Service: Not everyone, however, invoked religion to make their point. Austin Nimocks, a lawyer for the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, testified in support of DOMA on the grounds that same-sex couples cannot procreate. “As put by the famous philosopher, Bertrand Russell, a self-described atheist: ‘But for children, there would be no need for any institution concerned with sex,”‘ Nimocks said.

Paul Stanley at the Christian Post: Austin Nimocks is senior legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund and was asked to testify at today’s hearing. “We were able to clearly articulate that marriage is a building block of society and that marriage between one man and one woman has been a cornerstone of society since the beginning of time,” said Nimocks. “Obviously, there were some several people in the room today that have a view of marriage that is less than traditional.”

Washington Post: Every summer, Iranian police get tough on women who violate the country’s strict Islamic dress code by adjusting their veils and long coats to try to cope with the rising temperatures.

CBS: Sources familiar with the decision said that Emanuel’s son and two daughters will be enrolled in the private and prestigious University of Chicago Lab School in Hyde Park.

However, rather than allow the religious fliers to be sent home with students as ADF specifically requested, the board chose to no longer allow any outside community groups to distribute fliers in classrooms.

LifeNews.com: Members of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives are considering an appropriations bill that would, in part, restore the Mexico City Policy preventing the funding of groups that promote or perform abortions overseas.

SouthFloridaGayNews.com: Testifying against the bill will be Austin Nimocks, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, and Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

OneNewsNow.com (AP): Alliance Defense Fund attorney Austin Nimocks, who sees little public support for the repeal of DOMA, told the committee the Defense of Marriage Act is still needed. “To repeal DOMA sends a profound public policy message that marriage between a man and a woman, which we know naturally builds families and gives hope that the next generation will carry that family into the future, …that that ideal is no longer important or necessary,” stated Nimocks. “But we know that kids need secure attachments to their mothers and fathers.

“Americans have unanimously voted that marriage should be one man and one woman,” said Austin Nimocks, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defense Fund. “That should be a resounding statement to Congress that the American people, the experts on marriage, believe that marriage is one man, one woman, and that should be preserved in federal law,” he told lawmakers.

Yahoo! Finance: China, long known for producing counterfeit consumer gadgets, software and brand name clothing, has reached a new piracy milestone — fake Apple stores.

CitizenLink: My friends at the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) were already working on that angle, it seems, because last Friday they released a memo to New York’s city and town clerks outlining their religious rights under New York law. ADF’s press release has more details.

Raymond Ibrahim at Middle East Forum: Because the conference spanned two days, I spent lots of time surrounded by Christian minorities. The casual anecdotes I heard, spoken not with outrage—the province of the privileged—but simply as backdrops to more mundane stories, revealed how endemic anti-Christian sentiment is to the Muslim world, so much so that Christians themselves have almost become immune to it, expecting it, reserving their actual complaints for times of physical persecution (including but not limited to Islamist-inspired theft, kidnapping, rape, church attacks, etc.).

OneNewsNow.com: he head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Dr. Richard Land, is taking issue with GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain’s criticism of a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

OneNewsNow.com: “Government officials cannot use broad commercial reasons to favor non-religious businesses or membership organizations over religious ones. The city’s actions here left this small congregation with a mortgage to pay on a building it could not use for two years and at the same time it had to pay for another meeting place,” explains Babione.

OneNewsNow.com: An expert on terrorism says Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was right on the mark in his concerns about the construction of a mega-mosque in Tennessee.

Mike Shedlock at Townhall: The key question appears to be question number two: “LAST WEEK, did you do ANY work for (either) pay (or profit)?” Anyone selling trinkets on Ebay or selling any products in multi-level marketing companies is likely to answer yes. If so, they are “employed” but they certainly are not covered by unemployment insurance. The implications of the above charts and commentary should be obvious. Things are much worse than the BLS presents.

Marybeth Hicks at Townhall : Not only has our culture devolved into a celebration of diverse and widespread tastelessness, but those of us who yearn for bygone days of common social mores are loathe to even mention such things, for fear of offending the people we find offensive.