Daily Archives: August 12, 2011

ADF attorney Byron Babione appeared on the Mike Janocik Show to discuss the controversy.| MP3 audio 29:21 mins

The Christian Institute: A Labour MP and a prominent national newspaper columnist have warned that an absence of fathers is a key factor in the riots which have blighted English cities this week.

LifeSiteNews.com: Carleton University’s effort to quash a lawsuit against them by pro-life club Carleton Lifeline has failed.

The Salt Lake Tribune: That’s according to a poll released Thursday by the Human Rights Campaign, which kicks off a national bus tour in Salt Lake City on Friday to promote civil rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) population.

LifeSiteNews.com: Reports have emerged of an Alaska abortionist maintaining a family planning clinic on Catholic hospital grounds, days after pro-life leaders protested similar ties at a Colorado hospital.

LifeSiteNews.com: “You know, the Supreme Court of the United States in a recent case said that a man who committed rape could not be killed, would not be subjected to the death penalty, yet the child conceived as a result of that rape could be,” replied the former senator. “That sounds to me like a country that doesn’t have its morals correct.

LifeNews.com: One night in 1978 a student in Delhi’s most prestigious obstetrics program reported for his first delivery. Just then he saw a cat bound from the hospital room with a “thing…wet with blood, mangled” in its mouth. Unfazed, the doctors and nurses went on to perform more abortions than births, several at six or seven months of pregnancy. When the student finally asked a nurse why the aborted child was not treated with more care she replied flatly: “Because it was a girl.”

Glenn T. Stanton at National Review Online: It is a very sad thing to see seemingly smart people try to talk intelligently about things they misunderstand so horribly. This often happens when it comes to religion and politics. And it happened in last night’s Republican candidate’s debate from Iowa, when Byron York asked Rep. Michele Bachmann, because of her evangelical Christian faith, “As President, would you be submissive to your husband?”

David Campbell and Robert Putnam at WSJ.com: What’s the path to religious acceptance in America—and what can Muslims, Mormons and Buddhists learn from Jews and Catholics?

A divided three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday struck down the so-called individual mandate, siding with 26 states that had sued to block the law.

The Washington Post: In a unanimous decision Friday, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a liberal policy group’s lawsuit challenging certification of the issue, to be called the Health Care Freedom Amendment, on the grounds petitions carrying 69,000 signatures were flawed. | Rothenberg v. Husted, Slip Op. No. 2011-Ohio-4003

IRIN Africa: Authorities in Kano, Nigeria, recently announced people would be jailed or fined for refusing to immunize their children against polio, as cases increase in the northern state, but it is unclear whether this approach is working.

Reuters: When Chinese journalist Wang Keqin found himself cornered in the countryside two years ago by police who were trying to stop him looking into a rape case involving local officials, he looked online for help.

WSJ.com: In its early phases, Mr. Akyol says, Islam was a religion “driven by merchants and their rational, vibrant and cosmopolitan mindset.” But ultimately “the more powerful classes of the Orient—the landlords, the soldiers and the peasants—became dominant, and a less rational and more static mindset began to shape the religion. The more trade declined, the more the Muslim mind stagnated.” Applying this historical lesson today, Mr. Akyol claims that “socioeconomic progress in Muslim societies” may change Islam itself—leading to progress in “religious attitudes, ideas, and even doctrines.”

AP: Brette Stevenson, a parent of a Henley Middle School student, had complained that “A Study in Scarlet” is derogatory toward Mormons.

AP: The Bible tells wives to be submissive to their husbands. If she were president, would that apply to Michele Bachmann?

The European Court of Human Rights has granted the request of the Alliance Defense Fund to intervene to defend religious rights of conscience in four pivotal cases originating in the United Kingdom.

Andrew Cherlin and W. Bradford Wilcox at the Brookings Institution: This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four). Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy. We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most. But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds. Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.

TCPalm: Kevin Theriot, the attorney representing the churches and senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund in Kansas City, Mo., said churches have operated in the Southport Shopping Center for at least the past nine years. He said the city began enforcing the zoning code only when it received a complaint against the churches. “Generally speaking, non-profits are allowed to locate without obtaining licensing similar to for-profit commercial enterprises, so there really hasn’t been any problems with them,” Theriot said. “Essentially, what the city told me is until somebody complains they usually don’t do anything. They are pretty much a complaint-based system. There are some definite problems with the code as a whole.”

ADF attorneys Joe Infranco and Byron Babione at the NY Daily News: The lawsuit by American Atheists seeking to remove the World Trade Center cross from the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum badly distorts the meaning of the First Amendment, but it nonetheless provides an excellent opportunity for each of us to understand what the Constitution really prohibits as an “establishment” of religion.

OneNewsNow.com: Christians shouldn’t be threatened with arrest and censored by being quarantined to isolated expression areas when they want to share their beliefs,” contends ADF attorney Nate Kellum.
“The city ordinance mandating these zones effectively censors anyone wishing to express his or her beliefs through the distribution of literature. That violates the constitutionally protected right to free speech in public areas at a free event that’s open to everyone.”

Jennifer S. Bryson at Public Discourse: he frequency with which terrorists are found with pornography raises important questions about the possible effects of pornography on our national security.

ADF President and General Counsel Alan Sears at Townhall : Because the radical demands of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union run counter to common sense and the tenets of Western Civilization, they and their leftist allies and colleagues use fear, intimidation, and disinformation to accomplish their ends which generally mean a loss of liberty for everyone else. We see this in the way they rely on shame tactics, the court system, and behavior controls, like speech codes and “anti-bullying” regulations, to implement and protect their agenda.

Bloomberg: Confidence among U.S. consumers plunged in August to the lowest level since May 1980, adding to concern that weak employment gains and volatility in the stock market will prompt households to retrench.

Iowa Caucuses: “Iran is a threat because they have some militants there, but believe me … Iran does not have an air force that can come here — they can’t even make enough gasoline for themselves,” Paul said. “And here we are…we’re building up this case against them, just like we did with Iraq.”

AuburnPub.com: On the NYFCF website, there is a memo from the Alliance Defense Fund outlining how clerks can request an exemption to accommodate their religious beliefs. The memo cites a state law which requires employers to “accommodate an employee’s religious observance or practice.” For clerks, according to the ADF memo, this should allow them to delegate the signing of marriage licenses to a deputy clerk.