Abortionists have filed a lawsuit against the state of Louisiana over a law that the claim will force them to close.
HB 388 passed the Louisiana House of Representatives 88-5 and the Senate 34-3. The bill would require abortionists to obtain admitting privileges if a woman is injured during an abortion and require further medical care.
“On the date the abortion is performed or induced, a physician performing or inducing an abortion shall have active admitting privileges at a hospital that is located not further than thirty miles from the location at which the abortion is performed or induced and that provides obstetrical or gynecological health care services,” the bill reads.
The lawsuit claims that there is not a sufficient amount of time from the passage of the law until it goes into effect for the clinics to obtain the approvals necessary to stay open after September 1st.
Laws similar to the Louisiana law have been upheld in most other states including Texas, where at the end of 2014 it’s predicted only 6 of 41 abortion clinics will remain open.
A virulent anti-Christian organization is threatening a Mississippi school district after a pastor delivered a prayer and sermon at a convocation for teachers this month.
The American Humanist Association sent a letter to the superintendent of the Jackson Public School District on Monday claiming they were representing an anonymous teacher who attended the event. The AHA claims the teacher said attendance at the event was mandatory.
The speaker was Pastor Roy Maine, who works as an electrician in the district. He was invited to deliver an opening prayer and he offered words of exhortation during his invocation.
The anti-Christian group says their anonymous client described the event as “one long church service.”
Attorney Monica Miller of the anti-Christian group said that if the school does not bar the use of religious speech at events they could file a lawsuit.
“This letter serves as an official notice of the unconstitutional activity and demands that the school district terminate this and any similar illegal activity immediately. To avoid legal action, we kindly ask that you notify us in writing within two weeks of receipt of this letter setting forth the steps you will take to rectify this constitutional infringement,” Miller wrote.
The school district acknowledged receiving the letter but did not offer a public response to the letter’s content.
An anti-Christian organization is threatening to sue the Missouri National Guard because a display of Bibles was located on a base.
The anti-Christian American Humanist Association had a lawyer send a threatening letter to the Missouri National Guard demanding the removal of a display of Gideon Bibles from the General Services Administration building in St. Louis.
The AHA claims that the Bibles in a government building “represents a clear breach of the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.”
“The machinery of the U.S. military … is being used to distribute Bibles,” the letter claims. “ … The religious endorsement is particularly egregious in this case because unlike in many of the school cases where private citizens distributed the Bibles, the government is the entity distributing the Bibles here.”
The Bibles are available for someone to take if they want them but they are not given to soldiers nor are soldiers required to take them. Various courts have permitted similar placement of Bibles across the nation.
However, the anti-Christianists say the mere existence of the Bibles is coercion.
The city of Overland Park, Kansas has learned a very expensive lesson about violating the religious freedom of Christians.
The city has paid $50,000 in legal fees after a court ruled the violated the rights of Christians who were handing out materials about their soccer camp at a city-owned soccer complex. The city had banned Victory Through Jesus Sports Ministries from handing out flyers on the sidewalk. The U.S. District Court ruled that there was no difference between those sidewalks and any other public sidewalk.
Gordon Hunjak of Victory Through Jesus Sports Ministries filed suit after they were threatened with arrest for continuing to hand out the materials. The city then passed a law saying that the soccer park and surrounding area was “a non-public forum.”
The city’s defense to the court was that they were trying to control litter and the flow of pedestrian traffic into the facility. The court said if that was really the case, the response of the city was excessive.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Hunjak, said in a statement that the case should warn other cities that it is important to respect the religious freedom of citizens.
A federal appeals court has told a group of anti-Christianists that “the cross at Ground Zero” is not an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.
The group American Atheists had demanded the cross be removed because it violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.
“American Atheists contend that the Port Authority and the foundation impermissibly promote Christianity in violation of the Establishment Clause and deny atheists equal protection of the laws by displaying the cross at Ground Zero in the museum unaccompanied by some item acknowledging that atheists were among the victims and rescuers on September 11,” read the opinion.
“American Atheists acknowledge that there is no historic artifact that speaks particularly to the loss of atheists’ lives or to atheists’ rescue efforts … we conclude that American Atheists’ challenge fails on the merits. Accordingly, we hereby affirm the judgment in favor of appellees.”
The president of American Atheists says it’s not fair that a cross is in the 9/11 Museum and his group can’t put up some kind of tribute to atheists, even though the “cross” wasn’t given by any Christian group but rather discovered as part of the debris of the Twin Towers.
“They’re trying to Christianize 9/11 with this cross and it’s not American and it’s not fair,” said David Silverman.
The anti-Christianist group will likely appeal the decision.
Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese Christian woman who had been sentenced to death for not renouncing her faith in front of a Sudanese court, is free.
Italian vice-minister for foreign affairs Lapo Pistelli posted a picture of himself with Ibrahim and her family on Facebook with a message that read “with Meriam, Maya, Martin and Daniel, a few minutes from Rome. Mission accomplished.
The family will meet with the Pope before flying to the United States to start a new life.
The move was a surprise to everyone associated with the case and there have been no details released yet regarding how Italy was able to get Ibrahim and her family out of the country. Unconfirmed reports say the Italian government and the Vatican entered negotiations two weeks ago to free the family.
Ibrahim’s attorney Mohaned Mostafa told Reuters not only did he not know the she was leaving the country, but that the charges the government was using to keep her from leaving have not been dismissed.
Her family had also been keeping her in the country by suing to have a court declare her a Muslim against her wishes but that suit was dropped earlier this week.
The family of Meriam Ibrahim, who had brought a lawsuit in an attempt to have her declared a Muslim by Sudanese courts, announced they have dropped their lawsuit.
The development could allow the persecuted Christian woman to finally leave the country with her husband and two children for the United States.
Attorney Abdel Rahman Malek would not give a reason that the family was dropping the suit.
The Sudanese government is still holding charges over Ibrahim’s head that she tried to leave the country on false travel documents; however, the family’s attorney says he has evidence to show that the papers are legal under international law.
A New York City area church said this week they would be willing to provide housing, food and other necessities to Ibrahim and her family so they could begin a new life in the United States.
The Sudanese government has not responded to multiple requests from American groups and political leaders to release the family.
A federal judge threw out a lawsuit this week from an atheist group angered over not being able to give uncensored pornographic material to students when Bibles were given out without censorship.
Senior Judge Kendall Sharpe said he threw out the lawsuit because of a change in school policy that allowed the atheists to eventually distribute their book “An X-Rated Sex Book: Sex & Obscenity In The Bible.”
The school had been permitting World Changers of Florida to deliver Bibles to students without interference or censorship when the atheists discovered the program and launched a series of complaints. The radically hostile anti-Christian group Freedom From Religion Foundation backed the atheist group.
The Central Florida Freethought Community says they plan to flood schools with more anti-Christian publications as a result of the court ruling.
The anti-Christian groups said despite the dismissal, the situation was a win for advancing the cause of removing Christians from society.
The Islamists family members of persecuted Christian Meriam Ibrahim are attempting to get the death sentence against her reinstated by trying to prove she was “born a Muslim.”
The family contends that because she’s a Muslim, her marriage to a Christian man is illegal under Sudan’s Sharia Law.
The lawyer hired by the family says they are going to ask Khartoum Religious Court to review the case and declare Meriam Ibrahim “belongs” to the men in her family.
Ibrahim is in hiding at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum with her American husband and two children. She has been unable to leave the country because of the government’s special police charging her with using illegal documents to leave the country.
Ibrahim’s lawyer Mohanem Mostafa said that the court has not officially notified her of the lawsuit but that he believes the court will dismiss the case.
While the Supreme Court ruling for Hobby Lobby was a major victory for Christian business owners, other lawsuits against the mandate continue to move forward dealing with other questions related to the mandate.
The Little Sisters of the Poor are continuing in their case against the Obama administration’s demand the Sisters sign an “accommodation” to the mandate that their employees can use to obtain contraceptive coverage. The Sisters say that accommodation makes them complicit in something that goes against their faith, namely, abortion.
However, the ruling makes the lawyers for the Sisters believe the court will favorably view them.
“The court’s language indicates the accommodation’s days are numbered,” Daniel Blomberg, legal counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told the Christian Post.
Blomberg says that he feels confident the court will carry the logic through to his case.
“When it comes to complicity, the government doesn’t get to decide, the religious believer gets to decide,” Blomberg said.
