Daily Archives: November 8, 2012

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Legal Counsel Matt Bowman will be available for media interviews following his oral argument Friday asking for a court order to stop enforcement of the Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate against a Bible publisher.

Yahoo News (Reuters): Nearly half of Britons would vote in a referendum to leave the European Union and less than a third to stay in, according to a poll highlighting divisions facing Prime Minister David Cameron.

South Florida Gay News: A recent donation of office furniture by Wells Fargo to the Boy Scouts of America Cradle of Liberty Council has raised concern among some activists.

Guardian: Esquierdo confessed that he had fallen into an “uncontrollable rage” after Walker, who worked in a local hotel bar, had tried to comfort him after he admitted being unsure about his sexuality. The two men then had sexual relations in a local industrial estate, sparking off a violent, sustained attack on Walker by Esquierdo, who then set Walker’s body alight to conceal the evidence and then lied to police about the attack.

Catholic Culture: With police looking on, a crowd of 100 Muslim extremists occupied land belonging to a Coptic Orthodox diocese after Pope Tawadros II, the church’s new head, announced his opposition to the imposition of Islamic law in Egypt.

KDVR.com (includes video): Colorado House Democrats Thursday elected Rep. Mark Ferrandino to be the new Speaker of the House come January — the first time in state history that a gay lawmaker will preside over a legislative chamber.

Salon: “Rights should not be put to a vote,” Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry, told the Wall Street Journal. “While we have now shown we can do it, it doesn’t mean that we should have to do it, and it doesn’t mean that it is easy to do.” He added that “very few” states will be appealing as fronts to pursue more ballot measures, because of costs and the scale of organization needed.

Reuters: Speculation about the identity of a senior Conservative party member accused of child sex abuse could descend into a “witch-hunt” of homosexuals, British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday.

Blog of the Legal Times: In a dispute over religious practices, a federal appeals court in Richmond today upheld a ruling that has prevented a state prisoner from creating an “outdoor worship circle” featuring one thousand pounds of small stones. | Krieger v. Brown

Blog of the Legal Times: Two days after President Barack Obama won re-election, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said in remarks today in Baltimore he will assess whether he wants to continue his service at the helm of the U.S. Justice Department.

Heather MacDonald at National Review: Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. And California is the wave of the future. A March 2011 poll by Moore Information found that Republican economic policies were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican party on class-warfare grounds . . .

The Hill: “Conservatives and Tea Partiers are just sick and tired of Republican leaders compromising on the state and national level with Democrats that grow the size of government,” Viguerie said. “We are going to hold their feet to the fire.”

LifeSiteNews: A Conservative Party MP has accused the government’s Charity Commission of attempting to suppress Christianity after the group denied charitable status to the Plymouth Brethren, a small denomination of conservative evangelicals.

LifeSiteNews: Although 92 percent of Canadians oppose sex-selective abortion, a motion to condemn gendercide is being opposed by some pro-choice activists, according to MPs Mark Warawa and Joy Smith.

AP: A federal judge has blocked part of a voter-approved ballot initiative related to human trafficking, until a court hearing can be held later this month. The decision temporarily halts a provision of Proposition 35 that requires registered sex offenders to give authorities a list of their Internet providers and screen names. The initiative, passed Tuesday with 81 percent support, toughens penalties on those convicted of human trafficking.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: In Spain, the Constitutional Court has irremediably devalued the Constitution of which it was supposed to be the guardian by stating that the law that allows same-sex marriage was not unconstitutional.

LifeNews: Women’s Rights Without Frontiers President Reggie Littlejohn co-presented the feature-length documentary, “It’s a Girl,” at the European Parliament, together with the film’s director, Evan Grae-Davis. Littlejohn is featured as an expert on China’s One Child Policy in this powerful new documentary exposing gendercide and forced abortion. The event, hosted by MEP Gay Mitchell packed the auditorium.

LifeNews: Exit polling data from Tuesday’s presidential election shows the pro-life movement may have itself to blame partly as pro-life voters failed to either show up to vote in the election or did not support pro-life candidate Mitt Romney if they did.

LifeSiteNews: The debate about same-sex “marriage” in the UK is not, as the government and other supporters would have it, about “equality,” “rights” or “fairness,” but about “using law to change the meaning of the social institution of marriage.” So says Julian Rivers, a Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Bristol Law School.

Christian Institute: In a major new localised campaign, voters will put MSPs under the spotlight over Scottish Government plans to redefine marriage.

Christian Institute: Children suffer through to adulthood after their parents divorce, a new study has revealed . . . The report also warned about the consequences of changes to the traditional family structure of one mum and one dad . . . The report, which was funded by the Government’s Economic and Social Research Council, found the long-term damage of divorce on children was the same across different generations.

C-FAM: A recent article makes the case that any law which restricts abortion–such as waiting periods or parental consent–is the equivalent of China’s brutal forced abortion policy that victimized Mrs. Feng. The articlefrom the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the abortion group Planned Parenthood, says this because both represent  “coercion in reproductive decision making.”  According to their analysis, “forcing a woman to terminate a pregnancy she wants or to continue a pregnancy that she does not want both violate the same human rights.”

NJ.com: Even after historic Election Day victories for same-sex marriage in several states, New Jersey gay rights advocates Wednesday said they still don’t want to put the issue on the ballot here.

CNN (includes video): Conservatives and business groups often complain about the government’s growing numbers of regulations. Now CBN News has learned that government officials are using lawsuits to go after American citizens.

WLOX.com (includes video): Groups of pro-life activists spent the morning passing out anti-abortion information to Jackson high school students.

Seattle Post Intelligencer: A Tennessee Republican congressman won re-election on Tuesday overcoming revelations that he once had an affair with a patient and urged her to get an abortion.

USA Today: The reason, Mooney said, is that Devers is incarcerated at Kentucky State Reformatory, and state law has been interpreted to require the future husband and wife to both appear in person at the clerk’s office to apply for a marriage license.

Google News (AP): They came after dusk and chanted into the night sky “Kill the Hindus, kill the children of the Hindus,” as they smashed religious icons, ripped golden bangles off women’s arms and flashed pistols. It wasn’t the first time that the Hindu temple on the outskirts of Pakistan’s largest city was attacked, and residents here fear it will not be the last.

Jewish Press: France, which is home to an estimated six million Muslims, has the largest Muslim population in the European Union. There are now, in fact, more practicing Muslims in France than there are practicing Roman Catholics.

MyFoxDC.com: Egypt’s top prosecutor ordered government ministries on Wednesday to enforce a ban on pornographic websites, three years after a court denounced the sites as “venomous and vile.”

Washington Times: He added, “You cannot have a budgetary solution if you do not change what the role of government should be. As long as you think we have to please the world and run this welfare state, all we will argue about is who will get the loot.”

Dale Carpenter at the Volokh Conspiracy: The message fused conservative and libertarian themes and was honed from the experience of many losses and much research by groups like Freedom to Marry and Third Way. The socially conservative idea was that marriage enhances and cements the shared social values of love, commitment, and strong families. The libertarian argument was that government has no business limiting the freedom of gays and lesbians to make that commitment. We took the issue of gay marriage head-on. We didn’t avoid religion, but instead agued that the religious beliefs of many faiths were being attacked by the proposed ban.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy: As co-blogger David Bernstein notes, the two of us conducted anonymous online presidential polls of our Constitutional Law I classes. Here are my results, for a poll conducted over the weekend just before election …

First Things — See the Chart.

CNA: “We will continue to stand in defense of life, marriage, and our first, most cherished liberty, religious freedom,” said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

AZ Central: Judges are rarely voted off the bench in Maricopa County or in the Arizona appellate courts. And despite a campaign by “tea party” and other conservative groups to unseat certain judges in retention elections because of perceived political or judicial leanings, no judges were turned out this year, either.

LifeNews: Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Alan Sears tells pro-life advocates that they should expect more battles with the Obama administration over the controversial HHS mandate that forces religious employers to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs. [more]

Jess Bravin at WSJ: With the incoming leadership of the executive and legislative branches nearly a carbon copy of the current versions, Tuesday’s election could have the biggest effect on the sole unelected branch of government: the federal judiciary.

How Appealing links to a report and the opinion.

Adam Liptak at NYT: The victories for same-sex marriage on Tuesday, the first ones achieved at the ballot box rather than through courts or legislatures, are evidence of a remarkable shift in public opinion. They are also exceptionally timely data points for the Supreme Court . . . The justices tend to say they are not influenced by public opinion. But they do sometimes take account of state-by-state trends, and the latest developments will not escape their notice . . . “It bolsters our case,” said Brian S. Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage. “It’s very difficult to say you need a federal resolution of this question if states are resolving it for themselves.”

NewsOK.com: With President Barack Obama’s victory, the nominations of U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert E. Bacharach and Tulsa attorney John E. Dowdell should “fly through” the Senate, Sen. Tom Coburn said Wednesday.

FRC Action: But contrary to what the Left will say, the narrow margin for victory in these four states offers plenty of evidence that a solid majority of Americans still opposes same-sex “marriage.” Despite being outspent 8-to-1 in some of the most liberal states in the country, we witnessed record-setting petition efforts that crossed every racial, party, and socioeconomic divide. And while homosexuals may be celebrating an end to our movement’s perfect record, they still have a long way to go to match the 32 states where Americans voted overwhelmingly to protect the union of a man and woman. And that includes North Carolina, where President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex “marriage” likely cost him the state’s electoral votes.

Freedom from Religion Foundation: In letters to the Internal Revenue Service, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has reported possible illegal political campaign intervention by Catholic bishops in Green Bay and Madison, Wis. In a Nov. 1 letter to the IRS office in Dallas which oversees “exempt organizations classification,” FFRF Senior Staff Attorney told the IRS that Diocese of Green Bay Bishop David L. Ricken wrote an article Oct. 24 titled “An Important Moment” to be inserted in all parish bulletins.

Reuters: President Hu Jintao warned China’s incoming leaders on Thursday that corruption threatened the ruling Communist Party and the state, but said the party must stay in charge as it battles growing social unrest.

Religion Clause Blog: Pew Forum yesterday published its preliminary analysis, based on exit polls, of Tuesday’s presidential vote by religion, race and worship attendance.

AP: The lower house of Parliament has overruled an upper house veto and gave a green light to a plan by the center-right government to pay billions of dollars in compensation for property seized by the former totalitarian Communist regime

AP: In the end, President Barack Obama won re-election exactly the way his campaign had predicted: running up big margins with women and minorities, mobilizing a sophisticated registration and get-out-the-vote operation, and focusing narrowly on the battleground states that would determine the election.

Juan Williams at Wall Street Journal: The critical political message from President Obama’s re-election victory Tuesday is that he cemented a new coalition of Democrats, led by the Latino vote, which threatens to reduce Republicans to an afterthought in future national elections. Yes, Mr. Obama won with the same group of voters—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, young people and educated women—that brought him to power in 2008 . . . Demography is political destiny and today Democrats have the numbers to prove it.

AP: Going against a trend in Africa, Malawi’s government is moving to suspend laws against homosexuality and has ordered police not to arrest people for same-sex acts until the anti-gay laws are reviewed by parliament.

Ted McAllister at Public Discourse: We are witnessing, I believe, the collapse of a great modern project. The goal of this project was to form a democratic public, led by the most talented leaders and administered by enlightened public servants, but constituted by a deeply informed, engaged, and public-spirited citizenry. To produce such citizens, journalists served an almost sacred role of supplying all the disparate members of the public with “disinterested” information. Without information and knowledge, democratic deliberations are impossible, and without such deliberations there is no substantive “public,” only congeries of individuals and groups.

AP: Prime Minister David Cameron’s office says it will shortly announce the name of the next archbishop of Canterbury.

AP: Thousands of people are using social networks to mobilize a huge march Thursday night against President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, organizing what they hope will be the country’s biggest anti-government protest in more than a decade.

Newsday: President Barack Obama captured 71 percent of the Hispanic vote as he won a second term, according to a national exit poll. That translated to a 44 percentage-point advantage over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote — down from Republican shares of 31 percent in 2008, 44 percent in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000.

USNews.com: Looking at all 50 states, Obama won the youth vote 60 percent compared to 37 percent for Romney, according to exit polls.