Daily Archives: August 30, 2011

A federal judge on Tuesday struck down key provision of Texas’ new law requiring a doctor to perform a sonogram before an abortion, ruling that the measure violates the free speech rights of both doctors and patients.

Catholic Culture: A 13-year-old Christian boy disappeared from a church in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and his family fears that he was abducted while attending Mass, in the latest of a series of kidnappings of young Christians.

Christian Post: “The concern here is that there were witnesses that spoke in favor of Proposition 8 and they are afraid that those witnesses will be retaliated against if the tape is made public and that homosexuals will come after them,” AFA general counsel Patrick Vaughn told The Christian Post.

In the latest skirmish in the battle between Kansas and Planned Parenthood, a judge has ordered the state to send taxpayer funds to the abortion business following complaints from it that it lost state public funding.

Chuck Colson at Breakpoint: Americans United for Life recently published a report titled “The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood.” It details the horror stories that have exploded in the news in recent years: Planned Parenthood employees assisting pimps and sex traffickers; misleading women about the dangers of abortion; refusing to comply with parental notification laws; and misusing millions in taxpayer dollars.

Catholic Culture: A Bapist minister has been murdered in Orissa, the eastern Indian state that was the site of massive anti-Christian persecution in 2008.

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at Breakpoint: “They provided a kind of political and theological cover to the moderate and conservative state senators,” as The New York Times explains it. In the words of Princeton history professor Julian E. Zelizer, “Politicians draw on clergy to give themselves moral authority when taking on these kinds of social and cultural issues.” What he means is, if a wolf is looking for sheep’s clothing, there’s no better place to get it than from a shepherd.

San Diego Gay and Lesbian News: The Rev. Tracey Lind, a married lesbian priest, is one of five finalist to become the next bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

We conclude that the district court erred when it concluded that the doctrine of in loco parentis did not apply . . .

ABA Journal: Law schools would have to publish on their websites the percentage of students whose scholarships are renewed under a proposal being considered by the ABA section overseeing accreditation. The ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar disclosed it is considering the idea in a second response to U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who has posed two sets of questions to the ABA about its oversight of law schools, according to an ABA press release.

Law.com: The public dialogue between U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and the American Bar Association continued this week, with the ABA responding to Grassley’s request for additional information about law school employment, student loan defaults and accreditation procedures.

The News-Sentinel: Frankly”, said Ginsburg “I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of, so that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.”

Fred De Sam Lazaro at PBS NewsHour : Brazil’s plummeting birth rate would seem like a triumph for the country’s women’s movement, which has long fought for information about, and access to, contraception. Today, in what remains the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, 80 percent of women of childbearing age are on some form of artificial contraception, long forbidden by the Church. The total fertility rate, which was six children per woman in 1960, is now 1.9. The rate is 2.05 in the United States.

New Europe: The first results of the new system aimed at speeding up the processing of cases at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) have proved positive.

CNN.com: “After he took the medication, he fell asleep really quickly. His body just relaxed. He went into deep snoring. There were tears, but also it felt like a real family gathering of support,” his daughter Katy, 61, remembers. “After he died you could pretty much feel the spirit kind of lift in the room. Thank goodness he’s free of that horrible suffering and pain.”

VOA Breaking News: Tens of thousands of Muslims gathered in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for worship Tuesday on Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

GoLocalProv : Same-sex Rhode Island couples aren’t exactly lining up to file for Civil Unions, according to the most recent numbers made available by the state.

ADF Attorney Jordan Lorence at the Speak Up Movement Church Blog: But the speech codes at many universities threaten student speech, especially the speech of students advocating unpopular views – nowadays, that frequently means students advocating for life, marriage, or the Christian Gospel. Speech codes also can “chill” student speech by pressuring them to self-censor their views so that they won’t get in trouble. Policies that “chill” the free exchange of ideas on campus are also unconstitutional. If you are experiencing any such problems, please contact us at the Alliance Defense Fund. A university campus should truly be a free marketplace of ideas.

Jim Garlow at the Speak Up Movement Church Blog: Who is the most courageous pastor in America? There are likely many candidates for this title, but I would nominate Pastor Ruben Diaz of New York City. After you hear what he stands for and what he has endured, you might want to nominate him, too.

ADF Attorney Travis C. Barham at the Speakup Movement University Blog: one of the biggest problems they will face. No, it is not the intellectual assault from atheist or agnostic professors on their Christian worldview, though that is unquestionably a problem. Instead, it is the rampant moral relativism that universities actively promote

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at the TellADF Blog: “Planned Parenthood has chosen to end their services rather than raise that standard of care to the same level as other medical care in the state,” says Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, a member of the ADF alliance which helped author the 2009 law.

Telegraph: Allegations that Kosovo’s prime minister led a criminal gang that sold the organs of prisoners captured during the country’s war of independence against Serbia are to be investigated by an American prosecutor.

The Washington Post: The role of religion in the public sphere is another key concern – at least in the media – both nationally and internationally. According to Gallup data, there may be some benefit in reconsidering this focus. Egyptians (Christians and Muslims alike) are generally receptive of other religions; after Lebanese, they are the most likely population in the Middle East and North Africa to welcome a neighbor of another faith.

LifeNews.com: Next month, some of the top pro-abortion activists will headline a fundraiser for the re-election campaign of pro-abortion President Barack Obama. The fundraiser is no surprise given the close relationships the president has maintained with them.

TribLocal.com: They’ve all given their lives to Jesus and dedicated themselves to serving him instead of a life of violence,” Mauck said. “They’re really trying to help the city and state do the same thing, which is get people out of the gangs.” The Alliance Defense Fund, a group that helps defend religious freedom cases, has provided a grant to help the brothers fight the lawsuit.

UPI.com: ay rights groups are concerned school administrators are blocking gay educational and advocacy Web sites, while conservative groups such as the Alliance Defense Fund say the ACLU’s “Don’t Filter Me” campaign could expose children to sexually explicit materials, The Washington Times reported Tuesday.

LifeSiteNews.com: Over 100 teachers, principals and trustees from the Ottawa public school board joined about 1,600 homosexual marchers in this year’s “pride” parade held in the nation’s capital on Sunday.

LifeSiteNews.com: The bishop of Terrassa, in the Catalonia region of Spain, is maintaining his silence in the face of the pro-abortion and pro-contraceptive policies of Catholic hospitals in his diocese, according to Fr. Custodio Ballester, a Barcelona priest who is leading protests against the institutions.

LifeSiteNews.com: The head of Britain’s largest pro-life group is warning that news coverage of a government plan to require abortion facilities to offer clients independent counseling before the deadly procedure has been “dangerously misleading.”

“I think my political assessment of his decision is it will lead to his defeat in 2012,” said Vander Plaats, who led the campaign to remove the three Iowa Supreme Court justices. “Obviously he’ll be a top target of ours.”

. . . “We’ve always said that domestic partnership was not an end to itself but a path toward marriage,” [Sen. Ed] Murray said.

Human Events: New rules regarding health care facilities will force numerous abortion clinics to shut down in Virginia.

The Times of India: t said that couples who cohabited before marriage were 45 per cent more likely to split than those who waited until after the wedding.

Sacramento Bee: Marriage is a fundamental tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But church leaders now face a matrimony problem within their flock: Young single Mormons are delaying marriage.

News-Record.com: Republican leaders in the N.C. House say it’s time for lawmakers to let the people decide whether to place a gay marriage ban in the state constitution.

LifeNews.com: Officials at the California-based Cypress College have settled a free speech case pro-life advocates brought against the college. Members of the Survivors, a pro-life group for young adults, filed the suit after Cypress College squelched their free speech in 2007.

LifeNews.com: The Kansas Attorney General’s office filed an appellate brief in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals asking it to halt the decision placing a temporary hold on enforcing the new law de-funding Planned Parenthood. State officials say it is not complying because there are no taxpayer funds to restore.

San Jose Mercury News: For all the controversy that has swirled around UC Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu the past two years, his confirmation hearing Wednesday for a spot on the California Supreme Court appears as if it will be a downright lovefest.

Goodwin Liu, the UC Berkeley law professor nominated to the state Supreme Court by Gov. Jerry Brown, drew raves Monday from a State Bar panel, which praised his “brilliant intellect … impartiality, integrity, collegiality, and a work ethic second to none.”

Religion Clause: AFP, reporting yesterday on these developments, points out that Kosvo is 90% Muslim, but has a tradition of moderate Islam.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

Phyllis Schlafly at Townhall: The media are absorbed with the race for the Republican presidential nomination — commenting on daily fluctuations in the polls and predicting who will win. But why are they omitting discussion of the elephant in the room — China?

Findlaw: A record 66 U.S. troops have died so far this month, eclipsing the 65 killed in July 2010, according to a tally by The Associated Press.

AP: n adult film performer has tested positive for HIV, causing porn producers to shut down shoots in Southern California as the diagnosis is confirmed through re-testing, according to an industry group.

The Christian Institute: The parents of a teenage girl are suing a prominent clothing store in America for selling t-shirts showing a sexually suggestive picture of their daughter. It is the latest development in a series of controversies surrounding the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood.

We physically abuse our children at staggering rates, we pump them full of antidepressants and other pharmaceutical drugs and we send them off to public schools that more closely resemble prison camps every single day.
Meanwhile, the economic decline of the America is hitting children far harder than it is hitting the adult population . . . The following are 30 signs that America has become a horrible place for children….

William McGurn at the WSJ.com: The other defense is more telling. Were religious leaders included, the mayor’s office would have to choose which leaders to invite and which not to invite. That, of course, is true of every invitation list. In this case, however, it may be just a clever way for a mayor whose reputation is not what it once was to avoid a fight over including a Muslim leader at the 9/11 ceremony.

AP: More than half of Muslim Americans in a new poll say government anti-terrorism policies single them out for increased surveillance and monitoring, and many report increased cases of name-calling, threats and harassment by airport security, law enforcement officers and others.

The Pendulum: Kirstin Ringelberg hopes to create an environment that celebrates, rather than tolerates, gender and sexual identities as part of her now position in the LGBTQ office. . . Mandatory diversity programming that already exists at Elon, particularly during New Student Orientation activities, will likely change in the coming years to include more discussion about LGBTQ issues, according to Ringelberg.

AP: President Barack Obama has embraced Indonesia as a crucial U.S. ally in Southeast Asia, but rights groups and critics in Congress say the administration is too eager to trumpet Jakarta as a democratic success story.

Action News 5 – Memphis, Tennessee: The debate over pre-game prayer at DeSoto County school football games continued Friday.

Southaven – Horn Lake News: . . . the Freedom From Religion Foundation has leveled new charges against the school district. The group now claims school officials allow people to pass out Gideon Bibles during class time according to reports.

AP: The White House says President Barack Obama will speak at an interfaith prayer service at Washington National Cathedral the evening of Sept. 11 to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the terror attacks.

ABA Journal: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told law students on Monday that the Supreme Court confirmation process has become so partisan that she probably would not be confirmed if the vote were held today.

OneNewsNow.com: The Alliance Defense Fund has entered the fray, writing to seven school districts urging them to reject the ACLU’s demand. “School districts shouldn’t be bullied into exposing students to sexually explicit materials,” argues ADF attorney David Cortman, adding that the ACLU’s “Don’t Filter Me Initiative” would be better named the “Public School Porn Initiative.”

Missouri Family Policy Council: The State Senate sponsor of new student protection legislation is defending the bill against criticism from members of the Missouri educational community. Senator Jane Cunningham says that attacks on the new statute, which regulates online student-teacher communication, are the result of misinformation and misinterpretation. The section in controversy is one paragraph in a 35-page bill designed to combat sexual misconduct between school district employees and students.

Ilya Shapiro at Cato @ Liberty: SCOTUSblog’s symposium on the constitutionality of Obamacare — to which I contributed, as did Bob Levy – provides a glimpse at the astonishing views of the law’s supporters. It particularly shows how divorced the legal academy’s leading lights are not only from basic constitutional text and structure, but from jurisprudential reality.

Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.

SCOTUSblog: Written by the University of California, Irvine’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, this is the final post in our online symposium on same-sex marriage. The whole symposium is available here . . . Brian Raum argued that it is based on the benefits of children having parents of different genders. He wrote: “Not only that, but mothers and fathers bring different gifts to the parenting table, and this complementarity is not fungible. Even the plaintiffs’ expert in Perry v. Brown agrees on this point. Dr. Michael Lamb, the ‘parenting expert’ who testified in that case, readily acknowledged in his book Fathers: Forgotten Contributors to Child Development that ‘[b]oth mothers and fathers play crucial and qualitatively different roles in the socialization of the child.’” But this totally misses the point, even if there were studies, and there are not, that children of heterosexual couples are somehow better off than those of same-sex couples. The issue (thankfully) is not whether to prohibit gay and lesbian couples, or even single parents, from having children. They will. The question is, once they do have children, will those children be better off with married or unmarried parents. A prohibition of same-sex marriage does absolutely nothing to increase the likelihood that children will have two parents who are of opposite sexes.

California Catholic Daily: “The university should be a marketplace of ideas, not a place where the purveyors of political correctness pick and choose who will be allowed to exercise their First Amendment protected rights,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman. “SDSU only requires religious clubs to operate with members and leaders who disagree with the clubs’ views and purpose. The university is not telling the Democratic club it must be led by a Republican, or the vegetarian club that it must be led by a meat-eater. But it is telling Christian groups that they must allow themselves to be led by atheists.”

Sarah Posner and Anthea Butler at Religion Dispatches: That’s too narrow, and I think has (1) opened a door for the dominionism deniers, and (2) caused people to overlook some of the real-world creations of dominionism. The religious right has, in so many ways, succeeded in creating institutions meant to supplant “secular” ones. One of the founders of Oral Roberts University law school (where Michele Bachmann earned her law degree) called this his “dominion mandate.” Look at Regent University, where Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell earned his graduate degrees, or Liberty University Law School, where students are taught to engage in “civil disobedience” when a court order conflicts, in their view, with “biblical law,” or the Alliance Defense Fund, a law firm created to take on cases that would result in overturning of Supreme Court jurisprudence on separation of church and state. That’s the sort of thing dominionism has actually accomplished, in the legal field alone.

Cheryl Wetzstein at Washington Times: But David Cortman, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which defends traditional values organizations, counters that “school districts shouldn’t be bullied into exposing students to sexually explicit materials.” The ADF recently sent letters to at least eight school districts, urging them to reject the ACLU’s demands and reactivate their filters on gay-related websites. “We want to make sure that schools don’t unnecessarily cave to the ACLU’s demands,” Mr. Cortman said.

Reuters: In contrast to the majority of the general public dissatisfied with the nation’s direction, 56 percent of the estimated 2.75 million American Muslims said they are satisfied, the survey showed. Seven out of 10 view President Barack Obama’s tenure favourably.

The Hill: Thirty-two percent of Republicans named Perry, who formally launched his presidential campaign about two weeks ago, as the candidate they’d most like to see win the Republican nomination.