Daily Archives: September 12, 2011

Turn to 10: The Rhode Island Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is seeking a permanent federal injunction to force the city of Cranston to remove a Christian banner in a school auditorium.

Secretary of State: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will release the 2010 mid-year Report on International Religious Freedom on Tuesday, September 13, at approximately 10:00 a.m. in the Press Briefing Room at the U.S. Department of State.

Center for Arizona Policy: Arizona’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, announced today that they would not appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court the Court of Appeals ruling which upheld the 2009 Abortion Consent Act.

CNSnews.com: Muslim-majority countries score worst across a range of measures in a comprehensive new study tracking government restrictions on religion as well as social hostilities involving religion around the world.

Pro Life Blogs: Today, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the federation of 50 state right-to-life groups and more than 3,000 local chapters, responded to a study on unborn pain published yesterday in the journal Current Biology. The following may be attributed to Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., NRLC director of state legislation . . .

LaTimes.com: Could the fight against gay marriage in North Carolina affect the broader fight over leadership of the free world?

Sky News: A six-year-old boy in the care of a Lesbian foster couple was dressed in girl’s clothing and had the pictures posted on Facebook.

EurekaAlert.org: Researchers at New York University and the University of Arizona will study the causes behind suicide risk for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth over a three-year period. Their study, under a $2.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, is also intended to discover avenues of interventions to lower the risk of suicide among LGBT teenagers and those in their early 20s.

One World South Asia: The more a society tries to curtail religious freedom, more is the likelihood of violence and minority persecution, says Brian Grim, co-author of The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution in the 21st Century. Through this book, Grim and co-author Roger Finke, offer a global profile of religious freedom and religious persecution. Grim and Finke find that persecution is evident in all regions and that government and the society at large serve to restrict religious freedoms.

Gregg Herman at Wisconsin Law Journal: But, before we go any further, a disclaimer: It is not my purpose to opine as to whether this legislation should be enacted by a state. Certainly, all divorce lawyers, from strictly a business point of view, should support such legislation. As the joke goes, the leading cause of divorce is marriage. This article does not seek to editorialize, but only to outline on the legal ramifications and discuss the pros and cons of the different means of ending relationships.

ACLU sued district over filter that screens out sexually explicit Web content

LifeSiteNews.com: An international gathering of pro-life leaders will take place in Costa Rica from October 28th to October 30th of this year, featuring speakers from The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), Human Life International (HLI), the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Ave Maria Law School, and various pro-life organizations in México and South America.

Tom Hambruger and Matea Gold at Tribune Washington Bureau via Kansas City Star (also in Sacramento Bee): As pastors speak out on political matters, they’ve drawn admonitions from groups such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which warns that such activism could jeopardize their churches’ nonprofit status. But the religious leaders are bolstered by well-funded Christian legal organizations supporting their cause. The most prominent – the Alliance Defense Fund, a group based in Scottsdale, Ariz., that spent $32 million in 2010 – is challenging a 1954 tax code amendment that prohibits pastors, as leaders of tax-exempt organizations, from supporting or opposing candidates from the pulpit. The fund sponsors Pulpit Freedom Sunday, in which it offers free legal representation to churches whose pastors preach about political candidates and are then audited by the Internal Revenue Service. (So far, no IRS investigations have been triggered.)

“Naturally, Canadians are grieved by an infant’s death, especially at the hands of the infant’s mother, but Canadians also grieve for the mother,” she added.

LifeNews.com: Life Decisions International has released a revised edition of The Boycott List, which identifies corporations that support Planned Parenthood, which does more abortions than any other business in the nation.

AP: The ROTC left prominent universities amid anti-Vietnam War sentiment in the 1960s. Colleges more recently kept it off campus because of the military’s policy on gays, which the colleges considered discriminatory.

The Volokh Conspiracy: I agree with most of co-blogger David Bernstein’s advice to aspiring law professors. In particular, David is absolutely right to reject the view that you can’t have a major impact on the scholarly and public debate in your field unless you’re at a top 15 school. I had the same fear when I was on the job market. But I was wrong.

NewsOK.com: The Democratic White House is struggling to find federal nominees that satisfy Oklahoma’s conservative senators.

Lindsay Miller at The Atlantic: Obviously, no one sits down and makes a rational decision about who to fall in love with, but I get frustrated with the veiled condescension of straight people who believe that queers “can’t help it,” and thus should be treated with tolerance and pity. To say “I was born this way” is to apologize for the person I am and for whom I love. It’s like saying I would be different if I could. I wouldn’t.

Above the Law: Obviously, law schools misreport information to the ABA so that they can make the same false statements to U.S. News for the benefit of the law school rankings . . . The latest school caught up in a scandal involving false data is the University of Illinois College of Law.

TIME: But what if courts had to act transparently — the way other parts of government do — and let us watch them deliberate? That is the question chief justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is asking. Last week she proposed a series of reforms for her court.

The Guardian: An international pressure group is to be launched in Britain on Tuesday to tackle the rise in homophobic violence around the world, with a focus on Africa and the Middle East. The UK’s three main political parties have declared their support for Kaleidoscope . . .

AFP: Republican Representative Peter King will become the first member of the US Congress to testify before a British Parliamentary hearing this week when he talks to MPs in London about Muslim radicalization, his office said.

Christian Newswire: Operation Rescue has released documentation which shows that the Sandia Foundation acts as landlord for Southwestern Women’s Options, a late-term abortion clinic owned and operated by Curtis Boyd and his wife, Glenna Halvorson Boyd. The Sandia Foundation is a respected non-profit corporation based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with roots in the Catholic Church.

Marie Claire: According to a draft resolution passed by a Council of Europe equal opportunities committee, doctors should be told to withhold information about the sex of the foetus.

Houston Chronicle: A doctor provided only the minimum care required when she referred patients as young as 10-years-old to Dr. George Tiller’s clinics for late-term abortions, an attorney for Kansas’ medical board said at a disciplinary hearing Monday.

Chuck Colson at LifeSiteNews.com: The study finds that cohabitation has increased fourteen-fold since 1970. This means that about 24 percent of children are born to cohabiting couples today. Meanwhile, another 20 percent are part of a cohabiting household at some point during their growing-up years. That means nearly half of all American children have lived in a home where the adults are merely living together rather than married.

he Department of Health and Human Services released a new Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for initiatives that promote healthy marriages — as long as those projects don’t include abstinence-education programs.

The Globe and Mail: A new study, published in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, found that students between age five and 10 who were home-schooled with a structured curriculum surpassed the public school peers on standardized tests.

SMH.com.au: A South Korean missionary working with North Korean refugees in China died suddenly in the street amid suspicions Pyongyang agents were involved, a newspaper and another missionary said Friday.

Persecution News: “Some parents don’t even tell their children about Jesus, because they are scared they will go to school and say something wrong…When her mother was asked why she did not teach her daughter about Jesus…, she replied, ‘If I tell her too much, she will talk about it on the street, and someone will kill her or charge her with blasphemy.’”

Are pro-life students being unfairly flagged during interviews for medical school? A professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, believes they are.

LifeNews.com: Prenatal testing for Down syndrome should not be considered preventive medicine. Such tests cannot prevent the presence of Down syndrome in a child; but they can decrease the likelihood of a child with Down syndrome surviving beyond the womb.

BBC (video): Chinese society is rapidly ageing and the one-child generation are looking for more flexibility in their family planning.

New study demonstrates that desire of Christians to keep gospel central does not equal desire for invasive IRS regulation

Bainbridge News Constitutional Speaker Returns: [Rebecca O'Dell] Townsend is an Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney and a member of its honor corps, has filed briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Liberty Counsel, Wallbuilders and William Federer (American Minute), and has been a featured speaker for various tea party, 9-12, and other citizens’ groups throughout Florida, Georgia, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia.

Democrat and Chronicle: The Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian organization, has represented the town pro bono.

OneNewsNow.com: A three-judge panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an Ohio law that regulates sexually-oriented businesses.

Religion Clause: In a little-noticed portion of his 73-page dissent, Judge Wynn rejected free exercise, RFRA and Establishment Clause challenges to the statute, saying . . .

Fox News: Sex therapists talk with their patients to help them confront their sexual problems and improve their sex lives. But some patients need more than talk therapy. They need practice in the bedroom, and have no spouse or partner to turn to.

Star Parker at Townhall: I have a great plan for “saving” Social Security. Today’s average U.S. life expectancy is 78 years. Let’s make the retirement age to collect Social Security 79. Presto. The “system” is saved (or until life expectancy increases, at which point we can raise the retirement age again). Pretty dumb? Sure. But if the goal is “saving” the system, nothing would work better.

Education News: Faith groups are ramping up protests against Muslim students praying in Toronto public schools as they vow to make the controversial practice an election issue in Ontario.

Education News: Supposedly, while impartial and objective, the report displays an underlying distrust and hostility towards independent and Catholic schools and a return to the old class battles and sectarian divide of the past.

Daily Mail: Protesters set fire to the U.S. flag outside the American embassy in London yesterday during a minute’s silence to mark the moment the first hijacked airliner hit the World Trade Centre. A group of 100 Muslim radicals, including members of Muslims Against Crusades, shouted ‘USA terrorists’ and brandished anti-American placards.

Religion Clause Blog: In Adgeh v. Oklahoma, (10th Cir., Sept. 8, 2011), the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in a brief opinion (after refusing to hear oral argument in the case) rejected as frivolous a claim that Oklahoma’s statute barring polygamy is unconstitutional.

AP: The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is in hot water from a study suggesting that watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.

Ed Meese at The Heritage Foundation: In that spirit, The Heritage Foundation is hosting an extraordinary series of events as we do our part to Preserve the Constitution. Heritage’s Preserve the Constitution Series will feature the nation’s most respected judges, legal scholars, and policy analysts as they discuss how to combat these attacks on the rule of law and the Constitution.

MSNBC.com: It may not be a crime to be poor, but it can land you behind bars if you also are behind on your child-support payments. Thousands of so-called “deadbeat” parents are jailed each year in the U.S. after failing to pay court-ordered child support — the vast majority of them for withholding or hiding money out of spite or a feeling that they’ve been unfairly gouged by the courts.

USATODAY.com: The first step to fixing a problem is honestly admitting there is a problem. America’s goal must be to fix Social Security by making it more financially sound and sustainable for the long term. But Americans deserve a frank and honest discussion of the dire financial challenges facing the nearly 80-year-old program.

Gedicks, Frederick Mark, Lynch v. Donnelly and the Terminal Silliness of Secularized Religious Symbols (September 5, 2011). Nevada Law Review, 2011. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1922802

Steven D. Smith, Constitutional Divide: The Transformative Significance of the School Prayer Decisions, 38 Pepperdine Law Review 945-1020 (2011)