Daily Archives: January 25, 2012

CBC News: The HPV vaccine for young males has been endorsed by a federal panel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean provinces and territories will pick up the tab.

Huffington Post: “There are certain things that government does that gives people privileges in order to promote activity that are healthy for society and are best for society,” Santorum said.

BaltimoreSun.com: Population increase is a natural sign of political health. By that measure, Baltimore has been sick a long time. Six straight decades of depopulation have reduced the city by a third. Seeking not only to halt this bad case of “the dreaded shrinks” but reverse it, the mayor has set the modest goal of increasing the city’s population by 22,000 people in 10 years.

Turtle Bay and Beyond – International Law, Policy, and Institutions: For years and years, the European Commission has been funding the activities of ILGA-Europe, a homosexualist lobby that, under the pretext of “fighting discrimination”, actually promotes a radical agenda and notoriously maintains close links to groups promoting pedophilia. Although this wasn’t exactly kept as a state secret, it somehow has escaped the attention of the wider public.

The Christian Institute: A senior academic from the University of Oxford has said courts in the West are putting equality issues before the right to religious freedom.

LifeNews.com: Yesterday, the Michigan’s Senate Transportation Committee unanimously approved pro-life legislation which would allow the state to offer drivers the ability to purchase specialty license plates with the phrase “Choose Life” on them. S.B. 60

Christian Newswire: On behalf of their client, Austin LifeCare, a pregnancy resource center that has been well serving pregnant women in Texas since 1984, civil rights attorneys for the Jubilee Campaign’s Law of Life Project, the Texas Center for the Defense of Life and the Alliance Defense Fund will urge the City Council of Austin at their meeting tomorrow to repeal Austin City Code 10-9, currently being challenged in Court, as recommended by their Law Department and not to enact Austin City Code 10-10 being proposed by two City councilmen that also unconstitutionally abridges Austin Life Care’s rights to freedom of speech, association and religious free exercise.

The Guardian: Prime minister tells Council of Europe that controversial rulings undermine public confidence in rights court

NPR: Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage says what states do now could influence the court’s decisions. “Given that we have a Roe v. Wade-type decision, the state fights become even more important because some of the justices don’t like to have the law be too far ahead of where the public is,” Brown says.

News from The Associated Press: House Republican leaders are drafting a bill to replace President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul if the Supreme Court strikes it down this summer.

LifeNews.com: Pennsylvania House Bill 1077, entitled The Women’s Right to Know Act, is advancing in the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The bill empowers women by offering truly informed consent before an abortion by providing the opportunity for a woman to view the ultrasound image of her child and observe the heartbeat.

NYTimes.com: The United States is one of the few countries that still routinely transfer more than two embryos during an in vitro fertilization procedure.

News from The Associated Press: With a flurry of coast-to-coast developments this week, same-sex marriage is back in the political spotlight and likely to remain there through Election Day as a half-dozen states face potentially wrenching votes on the issue.

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears has written an article published in Christian Counseling Today, Vol. 19 Issue 1 at page 23: Abortion in America.

Michael Brown at Townhall: Did you hear what happened to Aryeh Ralbag, chief rabbi of Amsterdam? He was suspended from his post by his own Orthodox Jewish community “for cosigning a declaration which said homosexuality was a ‘treatable’ inclination.” Oh the crime!

TBO.com: They all were united by a mission. And one by one, the speakers took the Hillsborough County School Board to task Tuesday over what they said was the improper teaching of Islam in a high school classroom last year by the leader of the local Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CNN: Starbucks has come out in support of a bill that would make Washington the seventh U.S. state to legalize gay marriage.

Education News: One in five children from broken homes lose one parent from their lives for good, official figures reveal.

CBS Miami: The state’s abortion battle was back in the spotlight as a House panel approved bills that would block abortions after 20 weeks, require 24-hour waiting periods and target abortions that might be motivated by the race or gender of the fetus.

Chicagotribune.com: There were 41,859 abortions reported in 2010, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Greeley Gazette: The mayors of two major cities along the Front Range are part of a group calling for legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the country.

WSJ.com: -Senate Republicans won’t launch a direct legal challenge to the White House’s contentious move to use recess appointments to install senior officials at a new consumer financial agency and the National Labor Relations Board, a senior GOP leadership aide said.

NJ.com: As a Senate committee advanced a bill that would allow same-sex marriage Tuesday, the effectiveness of the current civil union system was argued by both sides.

Voice of America: A series of bomb attacks by Nigeria’s radical Islamist sect Boko Haram is challenging President Goodluck Jonathan’s government. The pace of the bombings has picked up in recent weeks, with attacks on police stations in the northern city of Kano and a Christmas Day suicide bombing at a Catholic church near the capital, Abuja.

LifeSiteNews.com: The Mexican Supreme Court ruled this week in a 7-4 vote that the states of Jalisco and Baja California do not have a legitimate legal interest in their suit challenging Mexico City’s homosexual “marriage” law, which also allows same-sex couples to adopt children.

Billings Gazette: Jonathan Scruggs, an attorney for the Allied Defense Fund, who handled the WyWatch case, could not be reached for comment late Tuesday, when Freudenthal’s order was released.

Eugene Volokh reports on Montana Code § 13–35-218.

NY Archbishop Timothy Dolan writes at the Wall Street Journal (full access via Google): Religious freedom is the lifeblood of the American people, the cornerstone of American government. When the Founding Fathers determined that the innate rights of men and women should be enshrined in our Constitution, they so esteemed religious liberty that they made it the first freedom in the Bill of Rights.

Hot Air (includes video): Former Senator Norm Coleman joined the Mitt Romney campaign in September, but hasn’t made an impact until now — and Romney may have wished he hadn’t. In an interview Sunday for BioCentury, a health-industry roundtable forum, Coleman said that ObamaCare won’t ever be repealed “in its entirety,” and that “you can’t whole cloth throw it out.”

Liberty Counsel: Liberty Counsel is representing the Wegner family after school officials at Shawano High School censored and punished Brandon Wegner, a 15-year-old, for writing an op-ed article explaining the Biblical view of homosexuality and supporting natural mother-father adoption. Liberty Counsel sent a letter to the school demanding it apologize for its unconstitutional and irrational censorship and humiliation of Brandon.

Deirdre Cooper at Public Discourse: In order to win, do Republicans really need to stop talking about abortion and marriage?

LifeNews.com: As thousands were on the national mall in Washington, D.C. for the March for Life, Reuters reported on a study that suggests abortion is safer than giving birth. I find it odd that the release of such a study was timed to coincide with an event that celebrates and vows to protect the sanctity of life.

LifeNews.com: The nation’s biggest abortion business has purchased a new building in New York City that will become its national headquarters. New city records reveal Planned Parenthood purchased a commercial condo unit at 424 West 33rd Street for $34.8 million.

ADF Attorney Steve Aden at Townhall: There is something troublesome, to say the least, and disgusting, to put it plainly, about a so-called “right” to take innocent life on a whim. Moreover, such a “right” actually runs counter to those outlined in the Bill of Rights because those rights all have a limitation: they end where they begin to infringe upon the rights of others.

CBS Boston: New Hampshire business owners could soon have the legal right to decide who they serve.

News from The Associated Press: A panel of federal judges appeared skeptical Wednesday of the Atlanta police department’s decision to reject a job application from an HIV-infected man.

AllGov: Rather than deal with the complexities of U.S. tax law, Americans living overseas are increasingly renouncing their citizenship in order to avoid paying their income taxes.

News from The Associated Press: Spain’s new justice minister says he will reform the country’s abortion law to make parental permission obligatory for 16- and 17-year-olds looking to end pregnancies

News from The Associated Press: Democrats who have been boycotting the Indiana House in a battle over right-to-work legislation could each face a $5,000 fine if they stay away another day.

Washington Post

Wall Street Journal transcript.

Real Clear Politics reports and has the video of Pelosi.

Washington Times: “I have a simple challenge for Speaker Pelosi…you know, put up or shut up. I mean, I have no idea what she’s talking about. I don’t think she has any idea what she’s talking about, but bring it on,” he said.

Williamsburg Yorktown Daily: Landon Morrow told the board his club, One Desire, was singled out because it’s religious. He appeared at the meeting with a volunteer from the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization devoted to the legal defense of religious freedom.

Patrick J. Reilly at the Washington Times: Many religious liberty analysts agree that HHS has overstepped its authority. Attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund have written that the HHS exemption “violates the right to religious freedom protected throughout federal law,” including under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First and 14th amendments to the Constitution.

Eric Russell at Bangor Daily News: The bill took a circuitous route to passage. It was held over from the first session last spring when some groups, including the Maine Family Policy Council, formerly the Maine Christian Civic League, and another group called the Alliance Defense Fund, objected at the last minute . . . The Alliance Defense Fund is a national group headed by Alan Sears, author of a book titled “The Homosexual Agenda,” that has opposed same-sex marriage and equal rights for gays and lesbians.

The Republic (AP): Harris said he forwarded the proposed rules to his attorney, Joel Oster of the Alliance Defense Fund, and will decide how to proceed after consulting with him.

ADF President Alan E. Sears at LifeNews.com: It’s the time of year when thoughts turn more concertedly to the ongoing tragedy – and travesty – of abortion. Activists count back to the January 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and produce new calculations on how many lives have been ended prematurely through the deliberate choice of their mothers—and with the often enthusiastic cooperation of medical professionals who have found their own ways of reconciling the destruction of life with their Hippocratic oath.

Arkansas News: “In fact, we believe this is very fair. It requires that taxpayer funding not be used to pay for religious instruction. That’s what the Constitution calls for,” she said. Harris said he has been consulting with the Alliance Defense Fund in Scottsdale, Ariz., about the matter. He said a lawsuit is a possibility, but “my goal is not to sue the state. My goal is for the state to do the right thing.

God and Country : The band Aiden has announced it will be playing the atheist festival “Rock Beyond Belief” at Fort Bragg in March 2012, as the lead-in act to Richard Dawkins, the main attraction at the “concert.”