The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled against a baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, arguing that baking a cake was an artistic act and that by forcing him to do so, he was being subjected to forced speech, thus violating his First Amendment rights. The court disagreed.
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You may recall Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, whom I have been writing about because she refused to let her office issue all marriage licenses because she objected to doing so for same-sex couples since, of course, Jesus told her she would be a bad girl if she did so. Naturally she was taken to court and just today, US District Judge David Bunning, who is described as a “conservative judge who was appointed by President George W. Bush”, ruled that she had to comply. Despite that, a couple said that they had been turned away again this morning.
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Maryn McKenna shares the excellent news that midnight August 11 marked one full year with no cases of polio reported in the whole of Africa. It takes three consecutive years of absence for a region to be designated as polio-free but this step is significant nonetheless, given the opposition by Muslim imams in a few countries that nullified the World Health Organization’s goals of making the entire globe polio-free by the year 2000,
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Five women were killed by fellow villagers in India who accused them of practicing witchcraft and held them responsible for poor crops and other misfortunes. Apparently such killings for such reasons are not uncommon in rural parts of India where belief in witchcraft still survives.
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Bernie Sanders has been scheduled to speak next month at Liberty University. For those not familiar with it, Liberty University was founded in 1971 by the late Jerry Falwell and is a fundamentalist Christian evangelical institution. Take a look at its Mission Statement.
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The origins story of the Mormon church, like all religion origins stories, is a real riot. Founder Joseph Smith claimed to have been led by the Angel Moroni to gold plates buried in a field containing strange writing that he called ‘reformed Egyptian’ but was able to interpret and translate into English by peering into a hat and using a magic stone that he called a ‘seer stone’. This document became what is called the Book of Mormon, their bible.
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The ACLU of Indiana has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a seven-year old boy identified only as A.B. who, when asked during recess by a classmate if he attended church, told her that he did not because he did not believe in a god.
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Who would have thought that Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a sleepy little town in the Ozarks, would end up viciously persecuting Christians in the vilest possible way. The opponents of same-sex marriage warned us that this would happen if we allowed such marriages and their dire predictions have come true.
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The efforts to fight polio vaccination in some Muslim-majority countries has been a scandal, fueled by a mixture of wrong-headed beliefs by some Muslim clerics about the effect of vaccines and by fears that it is part of some kind of plot by the CIA and other western spy agencies. The latter charge gained credibility because of the shameful use by the US of a fake vaccination scheme to try and find Osama bin Laden but even then there is absolutely no excuse for harassing or murdering workers administering vaccines or preventing children from receiving one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that has eradicated a deadly disease from almost the entire world.
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On Monday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected an attempt by Mary Fallin, the Republican governor of the state, to reconsider its earlier ruling that the presence of the Ten Commandments monument on the capital grounds violated the state constitution and had to be removed, with the chief justice John Reif writing, “We carefully consider the arguments of the commission and find no merit warranting a grant of rehearing.”
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