World News: Jan. 13, 2010

January 13, 2010

Reading: World News: Jan. 13, 2010
Print This Article


  • Numerous media sources report that gay rights advocates, having tried and lost on the state level in California to overturn Proposition 8, are now trying to use another lawsuit in a federal courtroom described as a “treacherous avenue that ends at a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by conservatives.” “It’s a high-stakes poker move,” says Jane Schacter, a professor of constitutional law at Stanford University. “I think the calculation for a long time has been that it’s hard to count five votes in favor of same-sex marriage on the current Supreme Court.” Meanwhile, lawyers defending Proposition 8 and its ban on same-sex marriage were successful in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to block video and YouTube coverage of this week’s trial in San Francisco. The trial “has the potential to become a media circus,” notes attorney Charles Cooper. “The record is already replete with evidence showing that any publicizing of support for Prop. 8 has inevitably led to harassment, economic reprisal, threats and even physical violence. In this atmosphere, witnesses are understandably quite distressed at the prospect of their testimony being broadcast worldwide on YouTube.” Opponents of Proposition 8 had sent petitions signed by more than 140,000 people urging TV coverage. The Alliance Defense Fund asked for “fervent prayers” of marriage traditionalists across the nation. Some observers see the outcome of the trial as the “Roe v. Wade” of the marriage battle. If the courts rule that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, it could ultimately lead to the overthrow of dozens of state amendments and laws passed defending traditional marriage and to the erasure of years of effort by traditional marriage activists.
  • Same-sex marriage legislation is dead in New Jersey for at least the next four years, reports World. The state Senate voted down a bill 20–14 last week. Pro-homosexual activists say they are going to fight for gay marriage in court, responding to the Senate defeat.
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey has warned that the merged House-Senate bill on health care will “contain the Nelson-Reid abortion funding language instead of the Stupak amendment,” the latter which prohibits abortion funding. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D.-Mich.) says he is prepared to block passage of the health care bill if the Nelson abortion funding and not his ban is included. “It’s not the end of the world if it goes down,” Stupak told the New York Times about the defeating of the bill over abortion. Stupak says he and 10 or 11 other representatives could vote against a final bill that doesn’t meet his criteria concerning abortion.
  • The Alliance Defense Fund reports that a radical atheist group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation has filed a lawsuit to abolish the National Day of Prayer scheduled to be held May 6. Congress established the day, and President Harry S. Truman signed it into law in 1952. The Obama White House did not participate last year, and the ADF is urging citizens to let the White House hear from them that the “important national event should not be banned.”
  • Organizers for the annual March for Life, which each year draws tens of thousands of participants to the National Mall, have this year secured a permit for 3,000 marchers to hold a first-ever flashlight vigil in the park across the street from the White House on the evening before the main event Jan. 22. The additional event is being held in view of the fact that the current U.S. president is an abortion rights supporter. Participants are also being encouraged to visit their congressmen and senators.
  • A report by Rowan Scarborough in Human Events indicates that dishonesty in government is getting more and more attention of the American people, with people charging that “what was championed by Democrats a year ago as a high-minded endeavor to reform health care instead descended into a grotesque piece of legislation larded with pork, payoffs, back room deals and huge tax increases.” “We have former members of Congress in jail and a lobbyist in jail for this sort of behavior,” notes David Williams, who has been tracking pork-barrel spending for 15 years for Citizens Against Government Waste. “People are really fed up with it.” “The secret deal making is just getting revved up. When House and Senate leaders hold private negotiations next month to reconcile their bills, House members, envious of the deals Democratic senators extracted from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are sure to demand their share of pork favors in exchange for floor votes,” wrote Scarborough.
  • Religious persecution in China is continuing to mount, according to ChinaAid.org and Christian NewsWire. Nineteen Christians were recently arrested, and farm leaders and police broke into homes and burned Christians’ Bibles and other property in a huge bonfire. Five elderly Christians were arrested without cause and fined 5,000 Yuan each.
  • National cancer researcher Louise Brinton has admitted that abortion raises breast cancer risk in a study that also fingers oral contraceptives as a probable cause of triple-negative breast cancer, reports ChristianNewsWire. Brinton was the chief organizer of a workshop several years ago on the abortion-breast cancer link, which falsely assured women that the nonexistence of the link was “well established.”
  • Kevin Jennings, President Obama’s “safe schools czar,” is president of the board of the Tectonic Theater project, reports WorldNetDaily. The Project created The Laramie Project, a play about the 1998 murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The murderers were accused of killing Shepard because he was a homosexual, though the motive for the killing is still being debated. The play condemns traditional Biblical views on homosexuality as hateful and bigoted. The play, which was performed by dozens of colleges and high schools around the nation, ridicules a Baptist pastor for preaching the Biblical perspective on homosexuality as a sin. A Mormon leader is also portrayed as a bigot because he believes that “God has set boundaries.”
  • A new study finds that the British public are concerned about the rise of Islam, with more than half of the population indicating that they would be strongly opposed to a mosque being built in their neighborhoods, reports Telegraph. Only a quarter of Britons feel positive toward Muslims, and more than a third reports that they feel “cool” toward them. There was far greater opposition to Islam than to any other faith, and most were willing to limit freedom of speech in an attempt to “silence religious extremists.”
  • After a court in Malaysia ruled that Christians can use the word “Allah,” police have been investigating at least eight serious incidents of violence, reports Bloomberg. Attacks on three churches and one convent constituted some of the violence, and molotov cocktails were used. “These outrageous incidents are acts of extremism and designed to weaken our diverse communities’ shared commitment to strengthen racial unity,” says Home Ministry Secretary General Mahmood Adam. “These were not just attacks on houses of worship, they were attacks on the values and freedoms all Malaysians share.” Muslims argue that “Allah” is exclusive to Islam, and its use by Christians would confuse Muslims and tempt them to convert to Christianity.
  • Sen. Charles Grassley (R.-Iowa) is questioning whether the federal government did an adequate job policing the “Cash for Clunkers” program for waste, fraud, and abuse, reports onenewsnow.com. He suspects a substantial amount of fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars. He says that although uncovering fraud in the Clunkers program would be the equivalent of “locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen,” learning details of the program’s effectiveness will be useful when a similar program is proposed in the future.
  • When Fox News veteran Brit Hume recently pronounced on two occasions his own faith in Jesus Christ and “boldly suggested that Tiger Woods might find ‘forgiveness and redemption’ for his serial philandering should he ‘turn to the Christian faith,’ ” sharp criticism of Hume followed. Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel says MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann accused Hume of attempting “to threaten Tiger Woods into converting to Christianity” and demanded that he “keep religious advocacy out of public life.” Olbermann compared Hume to a terrorist, suggesting that the worst example of this kind of “proselytizing” are jihadists. Unbridled hate also boiled over in the left-wing blogosphere, notes Barber. One commentator implied that Hume had sexually molested his own child. Barber commented, “Nothing makes the left lose its collective noodle like an open proclamation of Christian faith. You don’t see it when Muslims proselytize in government schools; the ACLU doesn’t sue when Wiccans share their witchy ways; militant ‘gay’ activists don’t picket Buddhist temples with bullhorns while inhabitants grasp at Zen. No, there’s something about Christianity that just drives ‘em nuts. Always has. Always will.”
  • Chuck Smith, 82, was hospitalized after suffering a minor stroke, according to WorldNetDaily. Smith is pastor of Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, Calif., and is known as the father of the “Jesus People” movement of the 1960s and ’70s.
  • An appeals court declined to review a ruling last summer of a three-judge panel allowing a case challenging taxpayer funding of a Baptist children’s home to move forward. The Sunrise Children’s Services, formerly known as Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, planned to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. A lawsuit filed originally claims the ministry is using taxpayer funds unconstitutionally to indoctrinate children with religion who are wards of the state.
  • Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has said that this year America will experience God’s wrath, according to Associated Baptist Press. He said that God gave him the message of general warning of judgment for America’s acceptance of abortion, gay marriage, and secularism. “You can’t have your courts turn against me,” Robertson said the Lord told him. “You can’t have legislation that is anti-God. You can’t foster in your midst things that I call an abomination. You can’t do that. And if you do, sooner or later judgment’s going to come.” Robertson cited the fact that 50 million babies have been slaughtered in abortions. “It exceeds the slaughters of antiquity.” Robertson said he also received a clear word about the economy: “We are engaged in a slow time of financial ruin. This country will be ultimately bankrupt. It’s just a question of how soon.” Robertson said God didn’t want to hurt people but to bring about revival. Robertson also said that he has a good record of his predictions. However, he also had misses such as his prediction that Russia would invade Israel in 1982 and that Sen. Jay Rockefeller would be elected president in 1996. In 2007, Robertson predicted a terrorist attack, possibly involving nuclear weapons, but when it didn’t happen Robertson attributed it to the people of God praying, and “God in His mercy spared us.”
  • In his Sunday sermon on Dec. 20, Anglican priest Tim Jones recommended that poor people shoplift from major stores, reports Friday Church News Notes. He claimed that this was not breaking the eighth commandment, since it is permissible for people to take food so that they wouldn’t starve. Jones has said he reads Karl Marx more than the Bible, to which someone remarked, “No wonder that a recent survey found that 93 percent of people in England had no plan to attend church this Christmas.”
  • The next president of the National Council of Churches is a woman, Kathryn Lohre, 32, a member of the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She has served in that denomination as a representative for the World Council of Churches.
  • A man reputed to be the strongest in the world, Joe Rollino, died Monday after being struck by a minivan, reports MSNBC. He would have been 105 in March. He got his start as a strongman in the 1920s and was a decorated World War II veteran. He was said to have been a model of health. A vegetarian he was, and he didn’t drink or smoke and exercised daily. He once lifted 3,200 pounds at Coney Island during its heyday, and he was still bending quarters with his fingers at age 104. Rollino hobnobbed with Harry Houdini, watched Jack Dempsey knock out Jess Willard, and was friendly with Mario Lanza.