Daily Archives: March 15, 2012

AFP on Google: Italy’s highest civil court opened the way for homosexuals to have the same rights as heterosexual married couples Thursday, but it upheld a ban on gay marriage and said those celebrated abroad were not valid in Italy.

LifeNews: The Obama administration made it official today when HHS officials notified Texas authorities that the administration is killing a woman’s health program because the state prohibited Planned Parenthood and abortion businesses from involvement.

LifeSiteNews: While campaigning in the state of Oklahoma recently, former Pennsylvania Senator and current presidential candidate Rick Santorum signed a draft version of the Oklahoma Personhood Amendment petition.

LifeSiteNews (includes video): A homosexualist activist disrupted a Mass held in a parish in Teignmouth, Devon, with a video camera last week as a priest prepared to read a letter from the country’s bishops conference opposing government efforts to legalize same-sex “marriage.” The incident has prompted concerns that anti-Christian activists are becoming more bold and aggressive as the Church continues to oppose same-sex “marriage.”

San Francisco Chronicle: A day after Senate leaders ended a deadlock blocking Obama administration judicial nominations from moving forward, the Senate this afternoon approved Michael Walter Fitzgerald to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Washington Times: Tens of thousands of black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews staged mass demonstrations on Thursday to protest an Israeli Supreme Court ruling forcing the integration of a religious girls school.

LifeNews: South Dakota has become the fifteenth state to cut abortion funding in the controversial Obamacare health care legislation that requires states to set up health insurance exchanges and Americans to purchase health insurance.

Ruth Institute: As Daniel Foster notes, “When it was being debated, Democrats told you ACA [Obamacare] would cost $940 billion over ten years . . . But now . . . the CBO is out with new cost estimates. They ain’t pretty . . .

Cong. Chris Smith at the Christian Newswire: “The mass deception of the Obama 2010 Executive Order has finally been exposed,” said Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-04), Co-chair of the Congressional Pro-life Caucus. “The Executive Order implemented the same accounting gimmick, abortion surcharge and secrecy clause that was in the original text of the bill.

Seattle Post Intelligencer: The state’s Catholic hierarchy, in carefully weighted words, has weighed in to support a signature gathering campaign for Referendum 74, which would force a statewide vote on recently passed marriage equality legislation.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Hungary’s premier fired a new broadside in the country’s running battle of wills with the European Union, saying that Hungarians should be free to make their own laws without interference from Brussels.

Christian Institute: The Prime Minister and London Mayor have both indicated their support for Christians who are facing a legal battle over wearing a cross at work.

Barnabas Fund: A second church in the central Nigerian city of Jos has been hit in a suicide bombing in the space of two weeks; at least ten people were killed in the blast and violent aftermath.

IsraelNationalNews.com: The Palestinian Authority declared a Baptist Church in Bethlehem to be unlawful and said that it will no longer receive rights as a religious institution, Algemeiner reported.

Christian Institute: The Westminster Government has today started a consultation on its controversial plans to redefine marriage. In response to the growing opposition to the proposals, the Government has added a question that asks the public whether they agree with the idea.

Christian Institute: The Westminster Government’s official consultation on redefining marriage has been branded a “sham” which will ignore any opposition.

AP: China, the largest buyer of Treasury debt, increased its holdings . . .

AP: Sen. Dick Lugar has been ruled ineligible to vote in Indiana by a county election board. The partisan vote by the Marion County Election Board was 2-1.

AP: Senate Democrats fired the latest political shot in what they’re calling the Republican “war against women” . . .

NewsNet5.com: Anti-abortion activists plan to say prayers of exorcism outside a women’s clinic that performs abortions in southwest Ohio.

Watch live streaming video from abtlive at livestream.com

Findlaw: Charlize Theron’s adoption as a single parent may not have been possible even as recently as the 1970s, when such adoptions were illegal in some states. But that’s changed, and now single-parent adoptions are allowed in every U.S. state, according to the University of Oregon’s Adoption History Project.

King 5 News Report

ADF Attorney Steve Aden apeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show to discuss this: False claims and fraud: Lawsuit exposes Planned Parenthood deception. | MP3 audio 5:44 mins

Windy City Media Group: On Friday, a Delaware Superior Court in Wilmington issued a stipulated order that respects the private communications of a Delaware same-sex couple married in California prior to the effective date of Delaware’s civil union law . . . The case is Theil v. Dentsply Intern’l, Inc. and Dentsply LLC . . .

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at Townhall: When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, i.e., ObamaCare, was being debated in public and in Congress during 2010, Americans who supported life were told again and again that the legislation would not cover abortion. But like so many other aspects of Obama’s healthcare overhaul, what was promised and what was received turned out to be two different things – especially considering that many legislators read the bill only after they signed it into law.

Christian Post: “They can’t just stop there. There’s this unconstitutional policy that underlies this whole case,” said Sharp, as reported by OneNewsNow.com. “The school district-wide policy prohibits any credit for community service work done … if that community service work is done at a church.”

One News Now: Greg Baylor of Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) . . . “What’s really a head-scratcher is the fact that … Florida allows students to attend other religious schools in the state and still give them this grant,” he notes. “So it’s sort of perplexing why Florida is drawing this distinction between Florida Christian College and the other religious schools in the state.”

The HIll: As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Thursday.

AnnArbor.com: Ward sued EMU in 2009, but lost in the lower courts. Ward and her attorneys, the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal organization that works to uphold the rights of religious college students and faculty, appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District.

State-Journal: A bill to protect students from bullying by their classmates died Tuesday in the House Education Committee because some lawmakers worried it would give “special rights” to gay students. [report on the photo involving Hartman confrontation of Bryan Beauman and Andrew Walker]

George F. Will at Washington Post: This is a crucial difference between release-time provisions negotiated by private companies: In the private sector, unions are not effectively on both sides of the negotiation table. Collusion between the employer and the employees union is inherent in public-sector unionization, particularly because public-sector employers and employees have congruent interests in increasing government budgets.

UTSanDiego.com: Federal government wants review of 9th U.S. Circuit ruling that Mount Soledad landmark is unconstitutional

AL.com: Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore — who famously defied a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state courthouse — has roared back from the brink of political oblivion to the cusp of getting his old job back.

Jeff Jacoby at Townhall: N A NEW JERSEY COURTROOM on Monday, the defense rested in the trial of Dharun Ravi, the former Rutgers freshman accused of using a webcam to spy on his roommate’s intimate encounter with an older man. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, later committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge, and his death unleashed a national outcry about teen-age bullying and antigay persecution.

The Portland Press Herald: A Senate panel quizzes Portland attorney William Kayatta Jr., Obama’s choice for an appeals court seat.

LifeNews: The number of clinics run by the Planned Parenthood abortion business has declined again, according to a new survey conducted by a watchdog group.

Harold Cassidy at NJ Law Journal (subscription only): The New Jersey Supreme Court heard oral argument in a surrogate-mother suit, The Matter of the Parentage of a Child by T.J.S. and A.L.S., and exposed the case’s greatest weakness: the class of women with the greatest rights at risk was unrepresented . . . The birth mothers were not heard from. Of such stuff, bad law is made.

Religion Clause Blog: In what is seen as an important vindication of Native American religious freedom, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week issued a permit to allow the Northern Arapaho tribe to kill up to two bald eagles (without eggs or nestlings) this year for religious purposes.

Religion Clause Blog: Apparently the critical issue has become the White House’s narrow definition of religious organizations that are exempt from the health care insurance mandate: non-profit religious employers whose primary purpose is the inculcation of religious values and which also both employ and serve only individuals who share the groups’ religious tenets.

Religion Clause Blog: Gay Star News reports today that a trial court in Russia has backed last year’s decision by the Russian Ministry of Justice to refuse the registration of the NGO that planned to organize a “PRIDE House” for gay and lesbian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

AP: The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that France did not discriminate against a lesbian who was refused the right to adopt. | Gas and Dubois v. France

Steve Chapman at Townhall: Legal abortion may empower women, but it has also become a powerful method for the mass elimination of females.

Rebecca Hagelin at Townhall: And now, the advocates of death have stepped up the tempo. A new generation of ethicists has begun making the case in favor of so-called “after birth abortion.”

SCOTUS Blog: The following contribution is by Kristine S. Knaplund, Professor of Law at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California. Professor Knaplund has written extensively on the legal and ethical issues that arise when children are conceived and born years after a genetic parent has died, including articles in the Arizona Law Review, Kansas Law Review, the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, the Michigan Journal of Law Review, and the ABA Real Property, Trust and Estate Law Journal. She is an Academic Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and serves as Vice Chair of the ABA Elder Law, Disability Planning and Bioethics Group.