Daily Archives: March 5, 2013

Albert Mohler: The moral effects of pornography are, by now, well attested. The scourge of pornography has brought ruin and harm into the lives of millions of our friends and neighbors, destroying marriages, distorting sexuality, and poisoning minds. Even so, the pornography industrial complex continues to grow, representing one of the most lucrative segments of the Internet economy.

enowned medical experts and researchers will discuss groundbreaking findings on the most important factors in saving the lives of mothers in childbirth at a policy briefing and press conference Wednesday

Morning Star News: Suspected Islamic extremists in Somalia shot a Christian to death this month on the outskirts of the coastal city of Kismayo, sources said. (2/28)

Gary Ledbetter at Baptist Press: The reasoning of the U.S. Department of Justice is that no religious liberty issue exists with the Romeike case because the German law is not religiously orientated — all Germans are forbidden to educate their children, not just Christian ones.

Washington Times: Facing the stiffest Republican opposition to a judicial nominee in two years, the White House is pushing for a confirmation vote this week on Caitlin Halligan’s appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

LifeSiteNews: A motion asking the Parliament of Canada to condemn the practice of sex-selective abortions is scheduled to be debated in the House of Commons on March 28, 2013.

Alan E. Sears at the Alliance Defending Freedom: The Obama administration’s notorious abortion pill mandate – which forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception under threat of heavy penalties – is taking on water fast, as the reality sinks in with judges across the country that the measure is a massive legal assault on religious freedom.

Fox News: Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro says President Hugo Chavez has died.

Above the Law: These days, now that word has gotten out that employment in the entry-level legal sector has run dry, law school applications are on pace to hit a 30-year low. You’d think that given the gravity of the situation — not to mention the ebb and flow of class action lawsuits having to do with job statistics — law schools do their best to comply with the ABA’s standards, but apparently even that’s too hard to do.

Kristen Hatten at LifeNews: The horror of such a place is difficult for us to imagine, but it is a reality, every day, for over one billion people. How? How could such a nightmarish Orwellian state exist in 2012, when every day we pride ourselves on moving forward and becoming more and more enlightened? The answer is simple: Communism.

Mercury News: New introductions to the sections on eternal marriage and plural marriage emphasize monogamous marriage as the standard, says Valerie Hudson, a Mormon political science professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of “Sex and World Peace.” “In these new introductions, we see that ‘plural marriage’ (notice, not ‘plurality of wives’) is to be viewed as a principle and not as a commandment, and that the ‘standard’ of marriage is monogamy,” Hudson writes in an email.

San Francisco Chronicle: Alabama’s governor says he will sign tougher abortion clinic regulations if the state Senate approves them.

Washington Post: The Arkansas legislature has the votes to override a governor’s veto, and become the first state to ban abortions after as early as 12 weeks of pregnancy.

LifeNews: The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC), an intervener in the assisted suicide case at the BC Court of Appeal, wants the BC Court of Appeal to reverse the errors in the Carter decision concerning assisted suicide and euthanasia in Canada.

National Review: The U. S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public hearing on recent developments involving the intersection of religious freedom and anti-discrimination laws. The hearing will take place on Friday March 22, 2013, at 9:30 a.m. EDT at the Commission’s headquarters located at 1331 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, D.C.

LifeNews: The Arkansas state Senate has voted to override Gov. Mike Beebe’s veto of legislation that would ban abortions at 12 weeks of pregnancy if a fetal heartbeat can be detected via ultrasound.

Bruce J. Clemenger at Evangelical Fellowship of Canada: Recently a fertility clinic in the United States made news for not only selling human sperm and eggs, but human embryos as well. While many responded with disdain, National Post columnist Marni Soupcoff questioned the validity of the objections.

MPR News: Rep. John Lesch, DFL-St. Paul, who chairs the House Civil Law Committee, said he intends to hold a hearing next Tuesday or Wednesday. Lesch said he expects the hearing to be extended into the evening to ensure that the public has ample opportunity to testify.

Fox News: American voters are split down the middle over whether same-sex marriage should be legalized, with the exact same percentage — 46 percent — in favor as opposed to it, according to the latest Fox News poll.

KCRG.com: Republicans are again proposing a change in the Iowa Constitution to ban gay marriage.

NC Register: Catholics for the Common Good issues a ‘playbook’ for true marriage to combat attempts to redefine the institution.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: As the 57th session of the Commission on the Status of Women begins today, two news stories are already disingenuously implying that the Holy See, the Russian Federation, and Iran are effectively enablers of violence committed against women. These and several other UN member states oppose the inclusion of language that could be used to support a right to abortion – a topic that is always controversial within the UN system.

The Express Tribune: Babies born to Indian surrogate mothers for gay and single Australians may be left stateless and unable to leave the country after New Delhi changed the rules on surrogacy, an expert has said.

California Family Policy Council: This week we will focus on the six most egregious. Two of the bills were introduced earlier in the session and have been previously highlighted in This Week Inside the Capitol. Senate Bill (SB) 323, authored by Ricardo Lara (D-Long Beach), would trample on the rights of religious belief and free expression by yanking the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations and private colleges that discriminate based on gender or sexual orientation.

Human Events: Reuters reports a hitch in Governor Rick Scott’s plans to expand Medicaid coverage, as directed by the ObamaCare plan he once vowed to oppose . . .

WorldNetDaily: This war doesn’t involve only women who have volunteered to serve in our military. It’s a real war against all 18-year-old American girls, because for the first time in our nation’s history they will be required to sign up for the draft and be ready for a letter from Selective Service ordering them to report for military duty.

LifeSiteNews: All Western countries have birthrates below the replacement rates, suggesting that soon all countries will experience a graying of, and a decline in, population. Jonathan Last asks why this has happened in his new book, the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, putting demographic decline in a broader context.

Washington Blade: The U.S. Senate on Monday evening made history with little difficulty when it confirmed the first openly gay Asian-American for a seat on the federal bench. By a voice vote, the Senate confirmed Pamela Ki Mai Chen, a lesbian, for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

The Daily Caller: Mehlman announced that he was both gay and a supporter of same-sex marriage in 2010, more than three years after stepping down as chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has since apologized for not speaking out during the 2004 campaign.

ABC: Poland’s first gay and transgender lawmakers will sit on the front bench in Parliament this week in reaction to hostile remarks by former president Lech Walesa.

CBC.ca: A comic book shop franchise in Ottawa is taking a stand for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights by pulling the work of a writer who publicly opposes gay marriage off its shelves.

Ben Bull at Townhall: Some sentences are made of words while others are made of jail time. And home-schooling families focused on the former kind of sentences are increasingly finding themselves under the threat of the latter—even in America. For example, consider Uwe and Hannelore Romeike

A coalition of religious freedom advocacy groups will hold a parallel event at the 22nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva Wednesday to call upon all nations to respect universally acknowledged international standards.

LifeNews: California, a state with an aging population, falling birth rates, and rising welfare rolls, now has a super majority of Democrats in the state legislature with a Democrat as governor. The legislature has the best opportunity it has ever had to pass whatever legislation it wants. And, what it has wanted since at least 2000 is assisted suicide.

Canadian Constitution Foundation: Last week, in an unanimous decision in the case of Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, the Supreme Court of Canada struck a blow against freedom of speech.

LifeNews: When it comes to babies who are diagnosed with some sort of fetal abnormality in the womb, the pressure is high from doctors, family members and society to have an abortion. That’s why approximately 90 percent of babies with Down syndrome, for example, become victims of abortion.

Chicago Sun Times: In an email to the vast network of supporters he created during the mayoral campaign, Emanuel created a vehicle for gay marriage proponents to pressure their state representatives with the click of a mouse.

Chicago Sun Times: Mayfield said she scheduled the meeting at the behest of Chicago-based Equality Illinois. The group sent ACLU attorney Khadine Bennett to explain the bill, which offers same-sex couples the full rights, benefits and responsibilities, Bennett said, of civil marriage. But members of the audience, which included numerous pastors and church members, balked at Bennett’s insistence that Senate Bill 10 “is about equality,” that it does not “require any religious group to marry a couple they don’t want to marry.”

CNN: They’re all pro-marriage territory,” says NOM spokesman Thomas Peters. “You know gay marriage proponents will claim that gay marriage is inevitable, but all they’ve managed to do is pick up a few blue states.”

Jerusalem Post: NRWA says ‘disappointing’ decision comes after Hamas-ruled Gaza imposed ban, run had aimed to raise funds for Gaza children.

WREG.com: Philadephia physician is accused of running a “house of horrors” where he performed illegal abortions past the 24-week limit prescribed by law. He used scissors, authorities say, to sever the spinal cords of newborns who emerged from their mothers still alive.

Akron Beacon Journal Online: An abortion-rights advocacy group says some Ohio crisis pregnancy centers are providing misleading or inaccurate information on abortion risks.

LifeNews: One of the top pro-life concerns when multiple pregnancies occur is the advice doctors routinely give to mothers to consider an abortion in order to “save” one or more other children. Never mind that mothers frequently give birth to multiple children without complications — doctors still give the advice anyway. But, not every mother has a “selective reduction” to kill one or more of their unborn children in abortion.

LifeNews: If the sequester was supposed to grind government to a halt, you wouldn’t know it by the volumes coming out of Health and Human Services (HHS). On the first afternoon of the President’s doomsday, HHS was unusually productive–pumping out more than 700 new pages of ObamaCare regulations.

MPR: The DFL-controlled Minnesota House has passed a key part of the Obama administration’s health care law — a state-based health insurance exchange. The bill’s chief author called the measure the most significant health reform in 50 years. But abortion restrictions adopted last night could run into trouble with Gov. Mark Dayton.

Christian Post: According to National Right to Life (NRL), among the 1,502 people who answered the Pew Research Center’s January poll questions about Roe. v. Wade: “Only 62 percent knew it dealt with abortion.”

WorldNetDaily: The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported Feb. 27 the rate of metastatic breast cancer in women ages 25 to 39 nearly doubled between 1976 and 2009, from 1.53 to 2.9 per 100,000. The American Council on Science and Health calls the increase “slight.” But Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, points out there has been no corresponding increase in older women. | Incidence of Breast Cancer With Distant Involvement Among Women in the United States, 1976 to 2009, Rebecca H. Johnson, MD; Franklin L. Chien, BA; Archie Bleyer, MD
JAMA. 2013;309(8):800-805. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.776.

Hot Air: In a little under an hour, three members of the House Republican caucus will announce a new legislative effort to undo the HHS contraception mandate’s infringement on freedom of religious practice, and prevent the next incursion as well.

Middle East Forum: Last week’s news of four Christian missionaries in Libya placed under arrest, possibly facing the death penalty for “proselytizing,” is apparently the tip of the iceberg. Yesterday, Arabic media reported that over 100 Christian Copts from Egypt, who appear to have been living and working in Libya, were recently arrested in Ben Ghazi—also on the accusation, or pretext, of being “Christian missionaries.”

Egypt Independent: Salafi Preacher Safwat Hegazy said on Monday that Shia Islam “will never exist in Egypt,” reacting to the recent visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

VPR.net: But the traditional prayer will not be revived, a judge ruled against the town, and the prayer had to be dropped. While prayers may have once been common, many towns left them behind years ago.

Rome-News Tribune: Members of the Cave Spring City Council have tentatively agreed to forgo saying the Lord’s Prayer at their meetings, a turnabout from their previous vote.

Melodika.net: “With another phony compromise, the Obama Administration continues to insult the intelligence of the American people and trample our Constitutionally-guaranteed rights,” said AUL’s President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest, as the Health and Human Services Department released additional regulations for Obamacare. “Our Freedom of Conscience, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment has been violated by Obamacare and these new regulations do not resolve the offense.”

WSOCTV.com: A national nonprofit is threatening to sue Union County officials over invocations at county commissioners meetings.

Volokh Conspiracy: That’s H.F. No. 826, which requires schools — including private schools that get any “public funds or other public resources” — to ban, among other things, “bullying” at school, defined as . . . .

Columbia Law School: Amicus Brief Argues U.S. Supreme Court Should Consider Example of Other Liberal Democracies, Which Have Determined Excluding Gay Couples From Marriage Violates Their Fundamental Rights

Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg: The Department of Justice argued last week that in the context of marriage (and everywhere else), courts should treat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation with essentially the same hostility they apply to discrimination on the basis of race and sex. To understand the importance of that argument, detailed in a brief opposing a 2008 California law banning same-sex marriage, we need to step back a bit.

Religion Clause Blog: The Center for Inquiry last week released a 36-page position paper titled For God and Country: Religious Fundamentalism In the U.S. Military.

Religion Clause Blog: In Thompson v. Commissioner, (USTC, March 4, 2013), the U.S. Tax Court faced the question of the extent to which a taxpayer entering an installment agreement for the payment of back taxes should be allowed to continue to tithe to the Mormon Church.

Missouri Family Council: A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Missouri’s new religious liberty amendment. U.S District Judge Howard Sachs has ruled against a challenge filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of two inmates incarcerated in state prisons.

AP: A Mennonite pastor who helped a still-missing woman and her daughter flee the country – and a custody fight with the woman’s former lesbian partner – joined his supporters in song Monday after being told his 27-month prison sentenced could be put on hold while he appeals his conviction.

AP: Sixteen Democratic senators are calling on the Veterans Affairs Department to keep granting waivers so that same-sex spouses can be buried in national cemeteries.

Wall Street Journal: The Supreme Court has allotted an hour and 50 minutes of argument time for one of the two gay-marriage cases it is hearing in late March, nearly twice the usual length of arguments at the high court.

Blog of the Legal Times: The Senate will vote Wednesday morning on Caitlin Halligan, the embattled nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, as part of a recent Democratic push to fill federal judicial vacancies.