Tag Archives: Country: United Kingdom

The Guardian: A Christian street preacher told two gay men they were “sinners” who would “burn in hell” as they walked past him on a busy high street, a court has heard.

Burton News & Staffordshire Newspape: PRIME Minister David Cameron should take back control of more than 100 crime and policing laws from the European Union, two Conservative MPs have said.

The Guardian: General Synod puts off split over ordination of female prelates by delaying legislation for fine tuning until final approval in July.

The Christian Institute: Nearly two thirds, 60 per cent, of the public think that the curbs should be scrapped.

News from The Associated Press: British lawmakers from across the political spectrum voiced anger Tuesday at a court decision to release an imprisoned extremist cleric, saying the man described as one of Europe’s leading al-Qaida figures could be free during the London Olympics.

Telegraph: Two senior judges ruled it would be “manifestly unjust” to stop them helping him prepare a legal challenge to the law on assisted suicide – even if doing so could assist his suicide, which would be illegal.

ChicagoTribune.com: “This is a treaty outside of the EU,” British leader David Cameron insisted Tuesday at the House of Commons. “We are not signing it. We are not ratifying it. We are not part of it.” The decision by Cameron and Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas to reject the deal leaves Europe with a clumsy compromise and has thrown up legal questions about using EU-wide institutions like the European Court of Justice to enforce the pact.

News from The Associated Press: The only movie ever banned in Britain for blasphemy was finally approved for distribution Tuesday, 23 years after it was outlawed.

The Christian Institute (includes video): Marriage must remain a union between one man and one woman, the Archbishop of York has warned.

Christian Concern: Girls as young as nine are being forced to marry in mosques in Islington, according to the findings of a leading women’s rights group.

BBC News: wenty-five of the EU’s 27 member states have agreed to join a fiscal treaty to enforce budget discipline.

Andrew Brown at the Guardian.co.uk: In the end, the church may have to choose between communion and establishment. Sentamu has often, loudly, and rightly defended “Britishness” and British traditions. And if it comes to a choice between the Anglican Communion and the Church of England, British history, and British tradition, would then demand that the Anglican Communion be told, politely, to go away and commune with itself: that the archbishop of Lagos has no more jurisdiction in this country than the bishop of Rome.

The Christian Institute: The Government is set to stop men who are married to multiple women from claiming extra benefits payments. Last year it emerged that the number of polygamous relationships among British Muslims is increasing.

The Christian Institute: David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham in London, backed the right of parents to smack their children and criticised those who claim it is abuse, commenting: “There’s a big difference between abuse and parenting.”

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.

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

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!

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

Telegraph: Ministers are to bring to an end an “absurd” benefits regime which has seen husbands with multiple wives able to claim extra welfare payments.

Christian Concern: he Advertising Standards Authority has announced its decision to allow commercial abortion providers, which profit from carrying out abortions, to advertise their services on television and radio.

AP on My Way News: To try to ensure that whoever ends his life won’t be jailed, the 57-year-old Nicklinson recently asked Britain’s High Court to declare that any doctor who gives him a lethal injection with his consent won’t be charged with murder. This week, the court will hold its first hearing on the case.

Hertfordshire Mercury News : THE chief executive of a Hertfordshire charity supporting the elderly has defended current legal guidelines for helping seriously ill people to commit suicide.

Christian Concern: When an amendment aimed at giving women with unplanned pregnancies access to independent counselling was lost by 118 votes to 368 last year, things looked grim.

The Christian Institute: The number of weddings taking place in the Church of England has seen its biggest annual increase for a decade.

The Christian Institute: Parliament’s biggest bar is “virtually a gay bar now”, a homosexual Labour MP has said.

AP: “Three men have been convicted of a hate crime in Britain for distributing brochures calling for the execution of gay people.”

Christian Concern: Leading civil liberties organisation ‘Index on Censorship’ has called for the word ‘insulting’ to be removed from the Public Order Act on the basis that the word’s inclusion in legislation has “a corrosive effect on free speech” in the UK.

The Christian Institute: Mike Harris, head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, said it was not the role of police officers or magistrates “to protect citizens from insult”, and called on Government ministers to “roll back the culture of offence” in Britain. “A good start”, he argued, would be removing the word “insulting” from Section 5 – a change backed by organisations including The Christian Institute and the National Secular Society.

Christian Concern: Increasing numbers of muslims in Britain are making use of sharia courts to resolve family and financial disputes in line with Islamic principles, according to the BBC.

Christian Concern: Conservative MP’s are planning what could be the biggest ever backbench rebellion faced by Prime Minister David Cameron over his stated intention to legislate for full homosexual marriage.

The Christian Institute: A Muslim campaigner has lent her backing to a “pioneering” Bill which aims to tackle the problems caused by Sharia councils operating in England and Wales.

News from The Associated Press: An extremist cleric described as one of Europe’s leading al-Qaida operatives should not be deported to face terrorism charges in Jordan because of the risk evidence obtained through torture would be used against him, Europe’s highest court ruled Tuesday.

The Independent: Lord Wallace of Tankerness QC restated the UK Government’s view that the “Scottish Parliament has no power to deliver a referendum on independence”.

Guardian.co.uk: Last year the Church of England published a legal opinion that makes it quite clear that it believes it is legal to discriminate against John, not because he is gay, since he is also celibate, but because he is not in the least bit ashamed of being gay. That is what sticks in the craw of the conservative evangelicals who oppose him.

Christian Institute: An increasing number of women expecting multiple births are aborting one or more of their unborn babies.

Telegraph: Britain has lost three out of four cases taken to the European Court of Human Rights, new figures have shown.

The Christian Institute: A Christian radio station which was banned from airing an advert on Christian marginalisation has been given permission to go to court and challenge the decision.

The Christian Institute: A contentious plan which would allow terminally ill people to undergo an assisted suicide is not without risk, its own chief architect has admitted.

Mail Online: A group of Muslim men handed a leaflet out to the public that called for homosexuals to be ‘punished’ and given the death sentence, a court has heard.

The Guardian: Alex Salmond has revealed he plans to stage his independence referendum in the autumn of 2014 after he resisted UK government demands to set an early date for the historic poll.

MercatorNet: It is not the time — or the place — for the Conservative Party to legislate for same-sex marriage

News from The Associated Press: Britain’s government says it will give Scotland the power to hold a binding vote that would give it independence from Britain, turning back centuries of history.

The Christian Institute: Figures in the report show 22.1 per cent of all abortions in the UK in 2008 were carried out on under 20-year-olds – nearly twice the EU average of 12.0 per cent.

The Christian Institute: More British children are being raised by single parents because the tax and benefit system “encourages transient shack-ups”.

Peter Oborne at the Telegraph: The figures seem to bear this out. Church attendance — which stood at around 50 per cent in the middle of the 19th century – had declined to around 12 per cent in 1979, or 5.4 million. By 1998 it had almost halved to 7.5 per cent and when the most recent census was conducted in 2005, it was discovered that only 6.3 per cent of the population, some 3.2 million, were regular churchgoers.

Daily Mail Online: A report sponsored by the former Euthanasia Society was never going to come to any other conclusion: it recommends that assisted dying should be legalised.

free faith: For many Christians the answer is “no”. Homosexual relationships are not the same as heterosexual ones; traditional families are not the same as chaotic ones; mothers who sacrifice all for their children are not the same as mothers who don’t. This value judgement does not validate hostility towards those involved in such relationships — but it does draw a line between what Christians find acceptable and what they do not.

ChurchofEngland.org: The commission undertook a quest to find effective safeguards that could be put in place to avoid abuse of any new law legitimising assisted suicide. Unsurprisingly, given the commission’s composition, it has claimed to have found such safeguards. Unlike the commissioners, we are unconvinced that the commission has been successful in its quest.

Christian Concern: Lord Falconer’s ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ released their proposals today (5 Jan) and recommended that doctors should be allowed to assist terminally ill patients to kill themselves, as long as the patients had less than a year to live, and provided they meet certain criteria.

Ian McLean at VirtueOnline: The UK government has promised to launch a consultation on ‘how to make civil marriage available to same-sex couples’ in England and Wales. Note: HOW, not WHETHER. This reflects the astonishing social change in the last two decades in the UK and other liberal democracies.

The Washington Post: The British government’s latest Citizenship Survey reports that in the five years leading up to 2010, the percentage of declared Christians in the region dropped by 7 percent, although they nonetheless held solid at 70 percent.

Martin Parsons at Conservative Home Blog: As the Christian church remembers the visit of the magi, now is also a good time to reflect on the suffering of Christians in the region where Christianity originally emerged. The Middle East is unfortunately full of tyrants prepared to imprison, torture and even massacre anyone they think just might threaten their power . . . [country by country list tracks Sharia spread]

The Tory Diary: Islamic persecution of Christians is a massive global issue. It has grown with instability across the Middle East. The Middle East Forum’s record of violence and intolerance in November alone includes . . .

The Christian Institute: A High Court family judge has spoken out against Britain’s liberal divorce culture, encouraging couples to “mend it – don’t end it”. Sir Paul Coleridge . . .

Religion Clause Blog: Supermarkets have become ‘ashamed’ of selling Christmas cards with religious themes, Christian leaders said yesterday. They claimed a creeping ‘multicultural indoctrination’ had led to an aversion to Christianity, and that shops were worried about stocking cards that might offend other faiths.

UK – The Independent: A Muslim man who had a baby with an unmarried woman has been told that his daughter must remain with an adopted family because there is too great a risk that his love child could become the victim of a so-called “honour killing”.

The Christian Institute: In his speech to the think-tank Demos on Monday Mr Clegg said: “We shouldn’t take a particular version of the family institution, such as the 1950s model of suit-wearing, bread-winning dad and aproned, homemaking mother – and try and preserve it in aspic.

News from The Associated Press: British judges Wednesday gave the government four weeks to obtain the release of a Pakistani man held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan – a ruling that could make for prickly discussions between Britain and the U.S.

Guardian.co.uk: Appointment of Lord Reed and Lord Justice Carnwath dispels hopes that number of female justices on bench would increase

The Christian Institute: Christians are “evil” if they resist the redefinition of marriage to allow for same-sex marriage, the Head of Research and Development at Tesco.com has said.

BBC News: In a speech in Oxford on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the prime minister called for a revival of traditional Christian values to counter Britain’s “moral collapse”.

How Appealing links to the ruling and several reports.

Guardian.co.uk: General Medical Council says law is clear but additional guidance is needed to deal with any complaints against doctors

We are facing religious cleansing in parts of the Middle East and may be entering what might be thought of as an Arab winter for Christians, Jews and other minority groups alike on a scale that we have not hitherto seen.”

The Christian Institute: A new poll has found that two thirds of Britons think parents or guardians should be the main people responsible for teaching children about sex.

Roger Graef at BBC News – Panorama – Should everyone be allowed to have children?: The care system is letting down a growing number of British children whose birth parents cannot or will not support them and who have little chance of successful adoption, argues the distinguished documentary film-maker, Roger Graef.

News from The Associated Press: Britain’s unemployment hit its highest level for 17 years Wednesday, with women and young people bearing the brunt of the deepening jobs crisis in the wake of the government’s austerity measures and the economy’s general weakness.

Telegraph Blogs: Last Friday, according to publicity material (above) and its Facebook page, the mosque was due to host that conspicuous moderate, Sheikh Saad al-Beraik, who has reportedly stated: “Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?”

Mail Online: Human rights laws are being interpreted in a way that is ‘thoroughly bonkers’ – according to Britain’s own human rights chief.

Mirror.co.uk: But the Government has said it will not stop the controversial payments until 2013, when it will officially no longer accept group marriages for welfare handouts.

The Government, in 40 pages of legal arguments, said the UK was “entitled to conclude” that “other than in limited prescribed circumstances, religious belief does not justify discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation”.

NYTimes.com: senior European official said on Tuesday that Britain’s demands for measures to protect its financial services industry at last week’s summit meeting were impossible to meet and directly responsible for the collapse of e a Europe-wide agreement meant to help save the euro.

Christian Concern: The government has announced plans to introduce lessons on “transgender equality” in primary and secondary schools across the country.

The Christian Institute: Churches are not adequately protected by new regulations that allow civil partnerships to be registered on religious premises, Parliamentarians say.

The Christian Institute: A proposal that would allow future heirs to the throne to marry Roman Catholics raises questions about the monarch’s position as the head of the Church of England, MPs have said.