Daily Archives: December 9, 2011

Yahoo! News: The European Union will outline a strategy on Monday to support activists living under repressive governments who are using technology to organise, mobilise and exercise their rights, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Friday.

American Statesman: A state agency on Thursday approved a new “One State Under God” license plate displaying three Christian crosses that represent the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, sparking new controversy over so-called specialty plates.

Fox News: The average US household lost $21,261 of net worth this summer, the largest decline in family wealth in nearly three years.

NYTimes.com: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other international leaders urged countries and private businesses on Thursday to fight increasing efforts to restrict access to the Internet by repressive governments and even some democratic ones.

WSJ.com: Decades ago, Siraj Gazi’s grandfather changed his last name of Chowduli to the higher-caste Gazi. He hoped it would erase the social stigma of his low-caste roots.

Christian Concern: Dr Peter Saunders, Chief Executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship said, ‘This new Review by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC) shows that abortion does not improve mental health outcomes for women with unplanned pregnancies, despite 98% of the 200,000 abortions being carried out in this country each year on mental health grounds.’

Boston.com: Activists called on governments around the world to end homophobic bullying and violence, saying Thursday that gay rights are human rights that must be respected by all.

Our Sunday Visitor: What can clergy in the pulpit and Catholic nonprofits say about politics without fear of IRS retribution? The answer should be anything, said Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund, which supports “the legal defense of religious freedom, the sanctity of life, marriage and the family.”

Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog: This letter to the editor from a physician about the failure of Oregon’s doctor-prescribed suicide guidelines to protect a vulnerable patient is poignant, but ultimately, irrelevant. All that matters is a desire to die by the patient coupled (for now) with a terminal diagnosis.

LifeSiteNews.com: Carleton University has made yet another attempt to quash a lawsuit against the university by Carleton Lifeline, the university’s pro-life club.

The bill, which the Senate passed 93-7 last week, would repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that states any person who engages in “unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), asked Wednesday if he was aware of a provision in the National Defense Authorization Bill that repeals the ban on sodomy and bestiality in the military, told CNSNews.com: “No, I can’t say I was.”

Two Columbia University researchers, Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, were poring over U.S. Census data when they noticed a statistical anomaly: Americans from China, Korea and India have relatively few daughters.

Canoe.ca: A posh Montreal suburb has decided to remove a nativity scene and menorah from town hall rather than acquiesce to demands from a Muslim group to erect Islamic religious symbols.

OneNewsNow.com: Hiram Sasser of Liberty Institute tells OneNewsNow the couples are trying to twist state law to suit their own agenda. “These are two men who claim they want to get a divorce, and the proper remedy in this state is just to declare the marriage void. It’s the same result as if the marriage never happened,” Sasser explains.

CNSnews.com: The man pushing to get the military to install “atheist chaplains” in the armed forces told government-subsidized National Public Radio that military officers should not be praying with their men before going out on missions.

Canoe.ca: All Diane Pope and Brigette Klepy want for Christmas is to be allowed to decorate the school buses they drive.

ACLU Blog: Yet, current Department of Defense (DoD) policy still precludes women from being “assigned” to most combat units. This policy is wrong and should be changed as soon as possible.

LifeSiteNews.com: A review by the youth network of the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), found that out of 244 Catholic universities and colleges in America, 107, or 43%, recognize student clubs that favor the homosexual agenda, according to their official websites.

LifeSiteNews.com: Contraception has been a “clear factor” in the steep decline of parishioners at Catholic churches across the United States, says Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Michigan.

Townhall : As of the end of the U.S. federal government’s 2011 fiscal year on 30 September 2011, the United States’ total public debt outstanding was recorded to be approximately $14.790 trillion. . . . The chart below provides a preliminary look at who the biggest holders of all the U.S. government’s public debt outstanding were as of 30 September 2011 . . .

NCRegister.com: As some ask why Catholics seem to be the only ones fighting for religious freedom, a high-profile theological group prepares to issue statement in early 2012.

Catholic Culture: A committee of Parliament has questioned plans by the British government to amend the law that bars Catholics from the line of succession to the crown.

Sacramento Bee: Sponsors of an initiative to extend legal protections against discrimination to gay and transgender people in Anchorage on Thursday turned in a several-inch-high stack of petitions to the city clerk’s office to put the measure on the April city election ballot.

UKPA: More than 50,000 responses have been submitted to a consultation on same-sex marriage before it closed.

SJ-R.com: More than 3,700 couples have gotten civil union licenses in the six months since Illinois began offering the option

Findlaw: Ruling against a group of Latrobe Specialty Steel Co. employees who were fired for sending sexually explicit emails through their work accounts, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the workers had no basis in claiming that they were really fired because of their age. | Hodczak vs. Latrobe Specialty Steel Co.

The Hill: The National Labor Relations Board has dropped its controversial case against airline manufacturer Boeing, which had become a lightening rod for conservatives.

Spero News: Among fathers with a wife in the workforce, 32 percent were a regular source of care for their children under age 15, up from 26 percent in 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.

Education News: A Michigan teacher chose to censor the word ‘gay’ from the festive holiday tune ‘Deck the Halls’ and was met by a frosty response from parents.

The Republic: The promotional dollars are slot machine credits that casinos give away to entice people to play.

Telegraph: The number of couples divorcing has risen for the first time in almost a decade, with some experts suggesting that the recent recession could be to blame.

Natasha N. Jackson and Janin Kleid said in their lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court Wednesday that they tried to get a marriage license on Nov. 18 but the state Health Department denied them one because they are both women.

CSMonitor.com: Proponents of California’s Prop. 8 gay marriage ban say the 2010 ruling against it should be vacated because the judge failed to disclose that he was in a long-term gay relationship.

Fox News Radio 550 KFYI: Goldwater Institute wants to ban any government employee from working for a union while earning a government paycheck.

The Blog of Legal Times: The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved by voice vote the nomination of Kathryn Keneally for the top tax-enforcement post at the U.S. Justice Department, sending the nominee to the full Senate for consideration.

ADF Attorney Byron Babione appeared on the Victoria Taft Show. | MP3 audio 9:16 mins

The Hill: Senate Republicans blocked the latest installment of President Obama’s jobs plan — a bill to extend the payroll tax cut — for the second week in a row on Thursday.

One News Now: “A woman’s right to make a fully informed choice is more important than Planned Parenthood’s bottom line,” the attorney argues. “If Planned Parenthood truly cared about the well-being of women, it wouldn’t try to prevent them from being informed of the well-documented risks of depression and suicide that accompany abortion.”

News from The Associated Press: Among women with unwanted pregnancies, those who had abortions were no more likely to suffer from problems including anxiety or depression than women who gave birth, the analysis by the U.K.’s National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health found.

LifeNews.com: “The Obama administration’s track record on protecting Planned Parenthood raises the likelihood that the FDA decision is less about safety and more about making sure that Planned Parenthood retains a substantial share of the Plan B market,” Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter told LifeNews shortly after the decision Wednesday.

Washington Times: The catalyst for the amendment was the announcement last spring that the newest supply ship in the Navy’s inventory would be named after labor leader Cesar Chavez.

Reuters: For proponents of Proposition 8: Charles Cooper, David Thompson, Howard Nielson, Nicole Moss and Peter Patterson of Cooper and Kirk; Andrew Pugno of the Law Offices of Andrew Pugno; Brian Raum and James Campbell of the Alliance Defense Fund.

The Cheraw Chronicle: News the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Chesterfield County School District for unconstitutionally promoting Christianity hit the headlines, airways and Internet on Monday — before it hit the superintendent’s desk.

NCPA Policy Digest: China’s leaders want to make sure the young cadres they educate at the people’s expense actually find jobs in the private economy. Here in the United States, by contrast, where outstanding government guaranteed student loans have recently passed the $1 trillion mark, education policy is geared not toward maximizing the employability of graduates, but toward garnering votes for politicians, says Bill Frezza, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Lisa Correnti and Wendy Wright at C-FAM Friday Fax: The same week U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton told a conference in Senegal that family planning is a “basic right,” the U. S. Congress was investigating the Obama administration’s rejection of a highly qualified group to receive a grant to help trafficking victims because it does not offer contraception and abortion. The grant was awarded instead to a group that “had no plan on how objectives would be met.”

One News Now: That prompted the appeal to the higher court, where Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney Steven H. Aden was on hand as arguments were presented. “A couple of the judges were aghast at a suggestion by the lawyer for the five abortion clinics that it might be unconstitutional for the state to require abortionists to have licensed anesthesiologists, as opposed to unlicensed high school graduates administering anesthesia, as one abortion facility in Louisiana has done,” he reports. [more]

BernardGoldberg.com: The article I read in the NY Times said the lesbians are represented by a liberal organization, People for the American Way, and Mrs. Belforti is represented by the Alliance Defense Fund. I’m not sure if an actual lawsuit is pending because the NY Times article is so poorly written. But when I read it, I said to myself, “what more do these people want?”

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at Baptist Press: In a decision that, frankly, surprises me, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the 17-year-old case of the Bronx Household of Faith vs. Board of Education of the City of New York.

Christian Examiner: “No business owner may be forced to violate his sincerely held religious beliefs merely because someone demands it,” said Steve Amjad, an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund. . . . [more] “TimberCreek does not host civil union ceremonies for same-sex or opposite-sex couples, so the discrimination charge is baseless,” said ADF Senior Counsel Bryan Beauman. “TimberCreek has done nothing wrong, and their right to freely exercise their faith should not be threatened.”

NYTimes.com: From tribesmen to billionaire philanthropists, the social value of generosity is already well known. But new research suggests it also matters much more intimately than we imagined, even down to our most personal relationships. esearchers from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project recently studied the role of generosity in the marriages of 2,870 men and women.

Elizabeth Marquardt & W. Bradford Wilcox at The Atlantic: These modern day portraits of parenthood raise vital questions: Do women and men today experience parenthood differently depending on whether they are married or unmarried? And, if they are married, is parenthood itself an obstacle to a good marriage? In a new report “When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable” (PDF), just published in the latest issue of the State of Our Unions, we examined nationally-representative survey data, including a new, nationally-representative study of more than 1,400 married couples (18-46), to respond to these questions.

UPI.com: Three-fifths of young U.S. adults who cohabit eventually get married, researchers say.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey at :WSJ.com: What counts as a church? Chuck and Stephanie Fromm recently found out. After hosting several periodic Bible studies for up to 50 people in their home in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., the Fromms were fined $300 for violating a city ordinance that prohibits groups of three or more people from gathering without a permit.

Kimberly A. Strassel at WSJ.com: Rick Perry has God first and foremost on his mind these days. Unfortunately for the presidential aspirant, a lot of Iowans don’t—or at least not when it comes to voting. If there’s an untapped mine in Iowa, it’s the state’s cultural conservatives. That huge and influential electorate propelled Mike Huckabee to an Iowa victory in 2008, but today it remains fractured.

TheHill.com: A large group of Senate Democrats is fighting to stop plans by the U.S. Postal Service to shrink its services to address its multibillion-dollar operating deficit.

SCOTUSblog: The Supreme Court on Thursday spelled out a schedule for filing of written arguments in the three cases on the constitutionality of the new federal health care law.