Daily Archives: January 8, 2013

UpNorthLive: A conflict over religious public displays has forced the Cheboygan City Council to take action. At Tuesday night’s meeting they will add a committee to take a look at the current policies regarding the use of city property.

Heritage Foundation: Join us as authors Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George discuss about what marriage is, why it matters, and how to talk about it.

The Guardian: A Chinese man who agitated for an investigation into the suspicious death of an activist has been detained at an unknown location, his lawyer said on Monday, describing him as possibly the first to be held under a controversial new law that allows secret detention.

Robert Knight at Townhall: I want to switch gears here from politics to culture, because culture drives politics. Despite the flood of bad news, including 47 million people on food stamps amid a growing underclass, there’s a whole other America out there, swimming under the polluted media like a whale under a stormy sea. You know it’s there because a dorsal fin surfaces from time to time.

Detroit Free Press: Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway announced today she will retire from the bench Jan. 21 after the Judicial Tenure Commission filed a formal complaint calling for her immediate suspension from the bench for alleged “blatant and brazen violations” of judicial conduct rules the commission said were “unprecedented in Michigan judicial disciplinary history.”

Hartford Courant: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy nominated state Appellate Court Judge Carmen Espinosa on Monday to become the first Hispanic justice of the state Supreme Court.

NY Post: Mark Krolikowski claims he was branded as “worse than gay” and relieved of his responsibilities after he admitted to school officials two years ago that he was transgender, according to a new lawsuit.

Religion Clause Blog: In remarks published last Sunday, the eve of Christmas in the Russian Orthodox calendar, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, urged the Russian government to take a careful approach in new legislation to respond to insults against religion

Catholic News Agency: The petition reveals an “underlying agenda,” which is not simply to prevent violent crimes, but to “stigmatize any disapproval of homosexuality at all and essentially to silence us,” said Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.

Mark Bauerlein at Public Discourse: Sneering at persons who are not social constructionists has become commonplace. Until defenders of inherent virtues, natural laws, divine beings, and other things that transcend social reality learn to overcome this initial set-up, they will be forever on the defensive.

PRNewswire: Family Research Council’s (FRC) Ken Klukowski, J.D., has submitted an amicus brief on behalf of 49 Members of Congress supporting the Alliance Defending Freedom’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Town of Greece v. Galloway.

Supreme Court filings demonstrate breadth of support for historical practice of prayer before public meetings

Christian Post: On Jan. 1, the campaign group “Speak Up,” run by Alliance Defending Freedom, posted a letter to America’s pastors in anticipation of the Supreme Court reconvening, urging them to pray, stay informed and be prepared for “oppression and censorship of religious freedom,” if any of the cases go against traditional marriage supporters. “Now is not the time to be alarmist. The Church’s voice must be heard as our country wrestles with this issue. We must pray for the justices who will decide these cases and for the lawyers who will argue the cause of righteousness. And we must be prepared for any outcome,” ADF warns.

BioNews: Piero Tozzi, legal counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organisation of Christian leaders, said: ‘A preliminary reading of the ruling indicates that the Court elevated secondary rights-such as the right to privacy, a right to personal autonomy, and a right to sexual and reproductive health-above the right to life, which by necessity takes precedence over all the other rights’.

Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: “Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research. That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent,” Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which co-litigated the case for Drs. Sherley and Deisher. “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law—especially in burdened fiscal times like these.”

Baptist Press: “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law — especially in burdened fiscal times like these,” said Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which helped litigate the case against the Obama administration. “Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research,” Aden said in a news release. “That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.”

Cheryl Wetzstein at Washington Times: Congress passed legislation in 1996 “to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem-cell and other research,” said Steven H. Aden, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “We had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold [the law’s] clear intent.” ADF was one of the legal-defense groups representing plaintiffs Dr. James L. Sherley and Theresa Deisher, both scientists whose research uses only adult stem cells.

The Stokes News: Alliance Defending Freedom will come to the city’s aid in the case of Steven Hewett vs. City of King. The Alliance has agreed to provide counsel at no charge to the city. The King City Council unanimously approved the appointment of the ADF during a meeting Monday night. [more]

AP: The nation’s leading university for the deaf and hard of hearing has reinstated its chief diversity officer, who was suspended for three months after signing a petition circulated by opponents of gay marriage in Maryland.

AP: Lively’s lawyer, Horatio Mihet, called the case an attack on the U.S. Constitution and his client’s First Amendment right to free speech. Plaintiff’s attorney Pam Spees, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, said Lively conspired with others in Uganda to persecute gays.

Irish Times: Master of the National Maternity Hospital Dr Rhona Mahony said legislation should be broad enough “to allow regulation to provide the detail and flexibility necessary to deal with current and future circumstance”.

AP: The only female judge to sit on Egypt’s highest court says she has filed the first legal challenge against the country’s highly contentious constitution, which cost her the seat she held.

AP: Record unemployment and fraying social welfare systems in southern Europe risk creating a new divide in the continent, the EU warned Tuesday, when figures showed joblessness across the 17 EU countries that use the euro hit a new high.

Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg: In recent years, those who study federal courts have started to test these claims by analyzing many thousands of judicial votes. Armed with actual data, the researchers are finding that much of the conventional wisdom is wrong, or at least way off.

The HIll: “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments, and violate federal law — especially in burdened fiscal times like these,” said Steven Aden, senior counsel for The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian group that helped bring the case. “Congress designed a law to ensure that Americans don’t pay any more precious taxpayer dollars for needless research made irrelevant by adult stem cell and other research. That law is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.”

World Magazine: Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, who argued on behalf of the two researchers, said the success of adult stem cell research has made research on embryonic stem cells “irrelevant.” . . . The Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys challenging that policy on behalf of the two scientists argued that the guidelines gave incentive to destroy embryos, thus violating Dickey-Wicker. They also argued that the line between those destroying the embryos and the federal researchers using the destroyed embryos was fuzzy. But the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court rejected those arguments.

NBC: Steven Aden, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal center that helped litigate the case, criticized the decision Monday, saying the 1996 law “is clear, and we had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold its clear intent.” “Americans should not be forced to pay for experiments that destroy human life, have produced no real-world treatments and violate federal law — especially in burdened fiscal times like these,” he said.

Christian Newswire: Today, on behalf of the adult stem researchers it represents, the Jubilee Campaign’s Law of Life Project and their co-counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, expressed great disappointment that the United State Supreme Court declined to hear their petition for certiorari.