Daily Archives: August 19, 2011

LifeSiteNews.com: Equity policies purporting to combat “homophobia” amount to “ethical cleansing” that aim to eliminate opposing moral views, says the Catholic Civil Rights League of British Columbia.

LifeSiteNews.com: Alois of Liechtenstein, the hereditary prince of the tiny European nation, has declared his opposition to the depenalization of abortion, which is currently the subject of a popular referendum in his country.

LifeSiteNews.com: Texas Right to Life Legislative Director John Seago told LifeSiteNews.com that his organization called over 70 Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas and confirmed six additional closures in Arlington, Mesquite, Plano, Sherman, Terrell, and Waxahachie. All seven locations are scheduled to be closed by the end of September.

David Quinn at the Independent.ie: It is simply amazing that there are people who refuse to believe that lacking a father can have negative effects. No sensible person would deny that a child benefits from having a mother who loves them. Why are there so many people who deny that a child benefits from having a loving father as well?

The Australian has this report on marriage politics and polls down under.

Gay Politics: A new poll out today from Public Policy Polling finds U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin the “early favorite” among Democrats who are most likely to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisconsin.

NYTimes.com: Only nine couples were joined in a civil union in July, the first month civil union licenses were available, according to numbers obtained by the Associated Press on Monday.

NZ Herald News: Spanish police have foiled plans by 100 gays and lesbians to stage a kiss-in on the route the visiting Pope Benedict XVI took through Madrid, blocking the protesters before they could meet up.

StarTribune.com: Both sides in the fight over Minnesota’s proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage face major challenges.

By designing a relationship that doesn’t fit a typical married couple, Megan and Colin have joined a small but growing number of straight couples who are looking to gay male relationships as the model for long-term, nonmonogamous unions.

What’s it like to have a child with someone who’s a friend but not a lover? More and more people are doing just that, to satisfy their broodiness.

The Economist: A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all. Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be. Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapore, 27%. So far, the trend has not affected Asia’s two giants, China and India

LifeNews.com: Infertility can bring much heartache to couples desperately wanting a baby. Sadly, desperation opens the door for exploitation. Recently, two high-profile surrogacy attorneys, Theresa Erickson and Hilary Neiman, were caught exploiting surrogates, stealing from California taxpayers, and, most horrifically, selling babies.

LifeNews.com: For those keeping track, late yesterday NIH Director Francis Collins approved four more human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines for the embryonic stem cell registry.

OneNewsNow.com: Liberty Counsel Action’s Matt Barber attended the conference and says he felt he was on a different planet, as the presenting professionals aimed to remove pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). That would mean that pedophilia would no longer be considered a mental disorder.

WUWM: One measure lawmakers may debate would let voters decide whether to eliminate state Supreme Court elections, and instead have justices appointed to the bench. As WUWM’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports, the idea stems from concerns about recent judicial elections.

The Blog of Legal Times: The White House is ramping up its information campaign on President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, ahead of a possible push this fall to confirm more judges.
In a post on its official blog late on Thursday . . .

AP: Muslim women would have to remove their veils and show their faces to police on request or risk going to prison under proposed new laws in Australia’s most populous state to be introduced to parliament next week

AP: Religious processions and chants have become common at the re-election campaign rallies of leftist Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, who is highlighting his Christianity in his bid for re-election.

AP: Magazine editor Zhao Lingmin was suspended Monday because of a Q&A-style interview she did with a Taiwanese historian that portrayed modern China’s founding father Sun Yat-sen in an unfavorable light, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported Thursday.

AP: The fourth annual Asia Adult Expo kicked off Friday with companies showing off sexy products aimed at China’s growing middle class. The adult industry is looking to tap mainland China and Asian markets amid the downturn in the U.S. and Europe.

Religion Clause: Last month, Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission announced that it had petitioned to intervene in four religious discrimination cases being appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, all involving attempts by employees to obtain accommodation of their Christian religious practices or beliefs. The Commission suggested that it would urge the court to adopt a principle of reasonable accommodation.

Religion Clause: Court Says Illinois May Refuse To Renew Adoption and Foster Care Contracts With Catholic Charities: Yesterday, in Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Springfield v. State of Illinois, (IL Cir. Ct., Aug. 18, 2011), an Illinois trial court rejected attempts by Catholic Charities organizations in three cities to prevent the state of Illinois from refusing to renew their contracts to provide foster care and adoption services for the state.

WorldNetDaily: At the request of tea party leaders in Arizona, famed Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has promised to investigate the validity of Barack Obama’s purported long-form birth certificate in a determination of the president’s eligibility for the county’s 2012 election ballot.

ADF: ACLU’s ‘Don’t Filter Me Initiative’ should be renamed ‘Public School Porn Initiative’

BBC News: Illegal immigrants to the US who pose no threat to the public are likely to have deportation proceedings against them shelved, the Obama administration has announced.

Liberty Counsel: Jerry Buell, last year’s “Teacher of the Year” at Mount Dora High School, has been suspended from the classroom for a comment he made on his own personal Facebook page, expressing his disapproval of legalized same-s*x marriage in New York. Buell commented that homosexuality is a sin and that seeing two “grooms” kissing on a news story revolted him

ADF Attorney Brett Harvey on Family Policy Matters with Bill Brooks to discuss the litigation in Joyner v. Forsythe Co., North Carolina. | MP3 audio 14:16 mins

ADF Attorney Dale Schowengerdt on the Drew Mariani Show | MP3 audio 48:27 mins | Related: Alan E. Sears: Outing The Wildflower Inn

ADF attorney Daniel Blomberg appeared with Roland Lettner on KFUO to discuss challenges to DOMA. | MP3 audio 22:10 mins

Kevin Theriot with Roland Lettner on KFUO to dicuss: Good News! Americans United for Separation of Church and State admits the phrase “separation of church and state” not in Constitution | MP3 audio 24:55 mins

ADF attorney Holly Carmichael appeared on Drive Time with Bill Bunkley. | MP3 audio 12:10 mins

ADF Attorney Kevin Theriot on the Word of Truth Radio Program with Pastor Brad Brandon to discuss Kevin’s article: UK Riots and Church Attendance | MP3 audio 15:03 mins

Rasmussen Reports™: When it comes to social issues like abortion, public prayer and church-state topics: 36% say they are conservative, 29% moderate and another 32% liberal.

The Hill: Higher cost-sharing for employees is the primary way in which employers are trying to control their own healthcare spending, according to a new survey from the National Business Group on Health.

The Hill: “We have got a situation here where a minority of the people in this country are supporting everybody else,” Hatch said. “The only way to solve that is to bring tax rates down and spread the base so that more people participate.”

The Hill: Republican presidential candidate and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman on Thursday took to Twitter to offer his support for the theory of evolution.

The Hill (includes video): Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) told a young boy on the campaign trail Thursday that he thinks the theory of evolution “has some gaps” in it. “It’s a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one’s right,” Perry said during a meet and greet in Portsmouth, N.H.

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at Townhall: It doesn’t take courage to ride the wave of support for same-sex ‘marriage.’ It takes courage to stand against the surging tide. At the Wildflower Inn, so high in the Vermont hills, the water is rising fast.

National Secular Society: A conservative American religious group has been given leave to intervene in the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning alleged religious discrimination. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has obtained permission from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to intervene in four cases involving British people who claim to have suffered religious discrimination.

OneNewsNow.com: “A branch of UNC Wilmington, a branch of the … North Carolina state government is setting up lists of churches that approve or mirror its views on sexual morality. That’s really outside the balance of what state institutions are supposed to be doing,” contends Travis Barham of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) . . . “Universities are so intolerant in their attitude and unconstitutional in the way they operate,” the attorney contends. “Instead of being the marketplaces of ideas that they’re supposed to be, they’ve become these islands of intolerance; they will not tolerate any views that differ from theirs.”

LifeNews.com: “If Planned Parenthood truly cared about what’s best for women, they wouldn’t be repeatedly going to court around the nation to stop laws that allow women to make fully informed choices,” said ADF Senior Counsel Steven H. Aden, who argued before the Court of Appeals on June 14. “The court ruled rightly in this case in rejecting the arguments of the nation’s largest purveyor of abortion. The protection of women is not unconstitutional.” . . . “Everyone deserves full and accurate information before undergoing any medical procedure,” said Center for Arizona Policy Legal Counsel Deborah Sheasby, co-counsel and one of more than 2,000 attorneys in the ADF alliance. [more]

LifeNews.com: U.S. District Judge Nora Barry Fischer, this summer, granted a request from pro-life advocate Mary Kathryn Brown and ordered the city to pay $209,276 in attorney fees and costs, mostly to attorneys from The Alliance Defense Fund, a pro-life legal group that represented Brown. Fisher reduced the amount requested from Brown’s attorneys by $48,272, the Tribune Review reported . . . Alliance Defense Fund attorneys challenged the local law as unconstitutional for prohibiting speech and helped represent a pro-life nurse who took on the ordinance, which prohibited her from counseling and speaking with women.

SCOTUSblog has posted this list of Petitions to Watch at the U.S. Supreme Court.

NC Times: For the second time in a year, North County Supervisor Bill Horn has come under fire for directing a taxpayer grant to a group with strong religious ties.

SCOTUSblog: Dale Carpenter, Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, considers the political costs of litigating same-sex marriage state by state, starting with California’s Proposition 8.

Erika Bachiochi at Public Discourse: In response to pro-choice appeals to autonomy in support of abortion, we feminists should advocate that parents—both mothers and fathers—have binding duties to their unborn child as the product of their life-giving sexual act.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) provides these interesting numbers.

Heritage Foundation: But as NASA sends its shuttles to museums, China is making great strides in its space program—with preparations under way for the launch of a Chinese spacelab in the next few weeks. These advances are beginning to threaten U.S. space superiority and America’s ability to support its friends and allies and to deter aggression.

SCOTUSblog: Northwestern Law School’s Andrew Koppelman argues that the Supreme Court will probably declare the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

ABC News (includes video): housands of unemployed waited overnight, camping out in their business suits and office heels and braving the tormenting heat in Atlanta to stand in line for a job fair Thursday.