Daily Archives: October 13, 2011

LifeSiteNews.com: A private members bill introduced into the Canadian House of Commons is seeking to delete the controversial “hate speech” provision in the Human Rights Act that has been used to silence Christians and conservatives who express politically incorrect opinions.

Today’s ADF Alliance Alert is under a reduced publication schedule. The ADF Alliance Alert will not be published on Friday, October 14th and Monday, October 17th. Normal publication will resume on Tuesday, October 18th.

Brian Faller at The Olympian: However, the full record of our nation’s history may provide the best reason for choosing judicial pragmatism or not. So far it suggests to me the risk of judicial tyranny from pragmatist judges is lower than the risk of judicial tyranny from originalist judges who would uphold irrational laws that deprive us of liberty or oppress unpopular groups.

TheDove.us Audio: ADF Attorney Piero Tozzi co author of Exiting a Dead End Road: A GPS for Christians in Public Discourse-Mr. Tozzi discusses Christianity vs. P.C., European Socialism.

LifeSiteNews.com: Law professors attending Argentina’s most important conference on civil law have voted to declare that the nation’s recently-passed homosexual “marriage” legislation is unconstitutional.

MiamiHerald.com: Gov. Rick Scott has approved a $45.6 million loan so Florida’s court system can avoid an impending deficit due mainly to a decline in mortgage foreclosure filing fees.

LifeSiteNews.com: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was pressed on abortion and homosexual “marriage” at a town-hall style meeting Monday. At the campaign event in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, Romney reaffirmed that he is “firmly pro-life” and that he views marriage as a “relationship between one man and one woman,” but said that he is in favor of same-sex “partnership agreements” that would afford certain rights.

NewsChannel5.com : Cheatham County teachers were told they couldn’t speak at an after-school prayer event on Wednesday night. Students organizing the service said that violates the Constitution.

CBC News: A St. Albert school, north of Edmonton, is struggling to find middle ground between parents who want the Lord’s Prayer recited each morning and those who say it has no place in public classrooms.

LifeSiteNews.com: For 41 years, Britain has lived with “a state-sponsored culture of death that has killed 5 million children” said Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue, emeritus bishop of Lancaster, in a homily at a pilgrimage for the unborn in Norfolk last week.
“We’re now surprised that some of the surviving children have turned out violent with no regard for the sanctity of life?”

LifeSiteNews.com: A committee of the Colombian National Congress has decided to reject consideration of a proposed right-to-life amendment to the nation’s constitution, despite a massive petition in favor of the measure signed by an estimated 10% of the country’s population.

NYTimes.com: This week, the four Republican state senators who provided the decisive votes to pass the marriage bill are to get a big financial boost from those donors, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. A fund-raiser planned for Thursday night in Manhattan is expected to raise about $1.25 million to help finance their re-election bids next year.

Montreal Gazette: Christians in Egypt are used to persecution, but the latest attacks threaten the country’s move to democracy, says Con Coughlin.

One of America’s most seasoned war generals expressed frustration at the silence of Christian churches as the U.S. military’s ban on open homosexuality fell to a repeal effort earlier this year.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg at NYTimes.com: Michele Bachmann was 22 and newly married when, in the fall of 1979, she and 53 other aspiring lawyers arrived on the manicured campus of Oral Roberts University here. They were the inaugural class in an unusual educational experiment: a law school rooted in charismatic Christian belief.

Most colleges not ready to ask about LGBT status – CBS News: But officials at other colleges, especially those that are large and well-known, say they don’t need to ask because they already have reputations for being diverse and inclusive, and a student’s sexual orientation would have no bearing on admission. Others wonder if some schools worry about the controversy such a question might generate.

LifeNews.com: The House approved a bill, the Protect Life Act, to stop abortion funding in Obamacare. Senate Democrats are not expected to approve the bill and, pro-abortion President Barack Obama is expected to veto the measure if it reaches his desk.

Joe Lieberman at The Washington Post: I have been watching the recent controversy over Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith through two prisms. One is the vision of the appropriate relationship between government and religion, as set out by America’s Founders; the other is my own experience in 2000 as the first Jewish American to be nominated for national office.

The New American: Speaking before the radically pro-abortion organization NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League), Sebelius accused Republicans of trying to “roll back” women’s rights and the “progress” they have made during the sexual revolution.

The Australian: SOUTH Australian Premier Mike Rann has demanded that same-sex marriage be made legal, challenging the Gillard government to change the commonwealth Marriage Act and describing anything less as a “halfway house”.

In what experts say is the first case of its kind, a disabled Navy veteran from Connecticut is challenging the constitutionality of two federal laws that define marriage as being between opposite-sex partners, saying the government denied her veterans benefits because she is married to a woman.

News from The Associated Press: House Democrats are advising Congress’ supercommittee to create jobs, raise revenues and avoid damaging cuts to crucial public works, education and health programs as the panel searches for ways to curb the government’s growing debt.

ACLU: A religiously based homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. will no longer require the homeless to attend religious services as a condition of getting food and shelter, and the D.C. government no longer plans to pay tax dollars to the shelter as a result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

WPRI.com: Cranston city officials and the Rhode Island ACLU will go before Federal Court Judge Ronald Lagueux Thursday at 2 p.m. in Providence to argue over the banner that’s hung in the gymnasium of Cranston High School West for decades . . .

Thomas Messner at the Heritage Foundation: According to Ward’s attorney: Rather than allow Julea to refer a potential client to another qualified counselor—a common, professional practice to best serve clients—EMU attacked and questioned Julea’s religious beliefs and ultimately expelled her from the program because of them.

Crosswalk Religion News Summaries: The Home School Legal Defense Association and the Alliance Defense Fund have been working to bring attention to the case and encourage the Swedish government to release Domenic back to his family. “The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling,” said ADF legal counsel Roger Kiska. “That’s bad enough. But now the state is going even further by attempting to get the parents out of the way altogether. This simply cannot stand.”

El Paso Times: But the lawyer, Joel Oster, said that did not mean the group violated Texas election law. And even if they did, the law is unconstitutional, he said . . . “We will concede,” said Oster, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, a national group dedicated to helping churches challenge legal limits to their political activity. “We admit that they had established in their petition clear and convincing evidence” of churches’ participation.

News from The Associated Press: A Saudi-backed interfaith center was inaugurated Thursday in Vienna, igniting debate over the subject of religious tolerance.

KVIA El Paso: Brown has maintained he did not break the law. Joel Oster, Brown’s newest attorney from the Alliance Defense Fund, argues that the Supreme Court decided that it is perfectly legal for the recall group to mount their campaign against Cook and the two city representatives because it falls under freedom of speech, even if that campaign was carried out through churches like Brown’s ministry. Brown’s attorneys also contend the election code itself is unconstitutional and should not be enforced.

Rasmussen reports.

Edward Feser at Public Discourse: While not explicitly denying the principle of proportionality, Tollefsen implicitly rejects it, leaving his argument not only counterintuitive but incoherent.

TheHill.com: Anti-war protesters waged an intense protest Thursday, interrupting testimony by Pentagon leaders before being forcibly removed by U.S. Capitol Police officers.

TheHill.com: The issue is politically sensitive for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) because it puts him between a rock and a hard place — the Wall Street reforms are more popular than the healthcare overhaul, and more complicated to explain to voters.