California School District Sued over Threat to Terminate Principal for Endorsing Prayer Breakfast

From LifeSiteNews

An elementary school principal is filing a lawsuit against the Goleta Union School District after it threatened to end his contract for appearing in a short video promoting the 52nd Annual Community Prayer Breakfast to honor teachers.

Foothill School Principal Craig Richter, an evangelical Christian, was disciplined by his district after a district board member saw the promo video on YouTube and reported it to the board, according to the complaint. The school district said that Richter’s 30-second speech in the video violated the line of separation between church and state.

“Personally endorsing a prayer event that invites people of all faiths to honor teachers should not be twisted into a constitutional violation,” said William Rehwald, Richter’s lead counsel in the case. “Principal Richter did a good thing, not a bad thing, and should keep his job.”

Rehwald is an attorney with Rehwald, Glasner and Chaleff in Woodland Hills, California, who is also supported by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian public interest firm, in the case against the Goleta Union School District.

Richter himself did not participate in the prayer breakfast, which was open to all religious faiths. The event’s organizers decided that this year’s theme would be to honor teachers. Organizers of the prayer breakfast designed the video to promote the prayer breakfast to local business owners who might also wish to honor teachers.

Richter made the ad in March and appeared for 30 seconds along with a Santa Barbara-area school superintendent and a local teacher.

However district officials claim that Richter identified himself in the video as a principal of the school district, implying their official support. The suit contends that Richter only represented himself as a local educator, the principal of Foothill School.

According to the complaint, Richter and other Foothill School educators did not attend the prayer breakfast because the district decided not to participate. Additionally, it says the district cited traffic safety concerns, possible lateness from teachers returning to their classrooms, but gave no indication that they had concerns about promoting religion.

“It’s ridiculous to punish and fire a Christian administrator simply because he wanted to honor teachers at an event that includes prayer,” commented Joseph Infranco Senior Counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is supporting the case. “Principal Richter did absolutely nothing wrong by appearing in the ad, which welcomed all Santa Barbara community members to join the half-century-old community event. The district’s contention that he was somehow violating the Constitution is not only unfounded, but absurd, as the video itself demonstrates.”

Obama Justice Department Appeals DOMA Rulings

From LifeSiteNews
By Peter J. Smith

The Obama Justice Department on Tuesday filed a terse notice to a federal appeals court in Boston that it is appealing a U.S. district judge’s ruling striking down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

The appeal notice submitted by Assistant Attorney General Tony West does not mention any reasons for the United States’ defense of the 1996 federal statute, which defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman under federal law. It also protects states from having to recognize marriages performed in other states that would not be valid within their own respective jurisdictions.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is challenging the rulings of U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro, who gave two separate opinions in July, Massachusetts v. Health and Human Service and Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, that DOMA violates the principle of equal protection guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (see coverage)

Tauro said that DOMA constitutes “irrational prejudice” and “encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state,” violating the Tenth Amendment.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley sued in the Massachusetts case, and the Gill case was brought forward by the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD).

Although President Barack Obama says he supports a repeal of DOMA – a goal shared by his many allies on the left and in the homosexual movement – he has advocated for a legislative solution in Congress. This has chagrined many of his supporters who view the federal courts as the fastest and surest way to repeal DOMA.

"The Justice Department is defending the statute, as it traditionally does when acts of Congress are challenged," said Tracy Schmaler, the DOJ’s spokeswoman in a statement. "As a policy matter, the president has made clear that he believes DOMA is discriminatory and should be repealed. The Department of Justice has a long-standing practice of defending federal statutes when they are challenged in court, including by appealing adverse decisions of lower courts."

However, both defenders and opponents of DOMA point out that not all U.S. administrations have defended federal laws they disagreed with or thought were unconstitutional.

Andy McCarthy of National Review Online noted that in the Dickerson v. United States (2000), the Clinton-Reno DOJ refused to defend a little-enforced statute (18 U.S.C. § 3501) enacted by Congress in 1968 intended to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Miranda v. Arizona (1966). Miranda established that criminals in custody needed to hear certain warnings first from police before interrogation, in order for statements made during interrogation to be admissible as evidence in court. Instead the U.S. Supreme Court had to bring in a 3rd party, conservative law professor Paul Cassell, to argue that Miranda was a flawed ruling which Congress had the right to correct.

World’s First Global Atheistic Civilization Headed for Disaster: Former Czech President

From LifeSiteNews
By Hilary White

The world’s first global and deliberately atheistic civilization is heading for disaster, the first president of the modern Czech Republic told an audience this week. Vaclav Havel, one of the most respected political and literary figures in recent European history, said that the West “has lost its connection with the infinite and with eternity,” with the result that “endless consumer collectivism is giving birth to a new type of loneliness.”

The West’s disconnection from eternity, he said, “is why it always gives priority to short-time profit over long-term profit. It is important whether an investment returns within ten or 15 years, it is less important how it will influence the life of our descendants in one hundred years.”

Havel, a playwright, essayist and anti-communist dissident who was a key figure in the defeat of Soviet communism, served as the tenth and last President of the Soviet Bloc state of Czechoslovakia and as the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993–2003. Speaking at the opening of the Forum 2000 conference in Prague this week, Havel said that unless mankind comes to its senses and becomes more humble, its global, atheistic civilization is doomed.

The pride of the global civilization, he said, is “not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilization, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don't yet know we'll soon find out, because we know how to go about it.

“We are convinced that this supposed omniscience of ours which proclaims the staggering progress of science and technology and rational knowledge in general, permits us to serve anything that is demonstrably useful, or that is simply a source of measurable profit, anything that induces growth and more growth and still more growth, including the growth of agglomerations.”

The world’s current financial crisis, he said, is the result of pride, he said, calling it “a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility.”

“It is a warning against inappropriate self-confidence and pride of modern civilization.”

“Human conduct is not entirely unpredictable as many creators of economic theories and concepts believe. It is even less true of the conduct of firms and institutions or whole communities,” he said.

“With the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness there disappears respect for mystery and along with it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions.”

The Forum 2000 conference in Prague, founded by Havel, “aims to identify the key issues facing civilization and to explore ways in which to prevent escalation of conflicts that have religion, culture or ethnicity as their primary components.” The theme of this year’s conference, which closed on Tuesday, was “The World We Want to Live in.”

Alvin Greene, The Face of the Democrat Party in South Carolina

This is painful to watch, but at least this Democrat is American-born and eligible to serve (unless he's convicted on pending obscenity charges).

De-population and De-Christianization Leading to Cultural Islamic Jihad: Catholic Apologist

From LifeSiteNews
By Hilary White

The de-Christianization of Europe, the “removal of Christian principles and institutions from the daily life of a country,” has created a religious and social vacuum that is being filled by Islam, a prominent U.S. Catholic speaker said on Thursday. Raymond de Souza, the Program Director for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International told an audience of the world’s pro-life and pro-family leaders that “Europe … is being culturally Islamized.”

“The world in general, and the West in particular, is undergoing a tragic process of de-Christianization. Christian principles, values and institutions have been extirpated from our social, economic, political, legal, educational structures. Sometimes publicly, sometimes stealthily, the process has wrought havoc in Europe and the countries that descended from them.”

De Souza is the founder and director of Saint Gabriel Communications, an international Catholic apologetics organization and a popular program host on EWTN. He said that the failure of Christianity in Europe, has led to “the greatest Jihad ever carried out by Islam,” which takes the form not of physical battles, but as a “silent Jihad” through demographic take-over.

The cause underlying this “silent Jihad,” he said, is the “most crucial aspect” of Europe’s de-Christianization - de-population. “Europeans do not even replace their countries populations.”

“As one Moslem mullah said to an Anglican priest in London, ‘By the end of this century, all great English Cathedrals will be mosques. Why? Because we have children, and you don’t’.

“Contraception promised a freedom without responsibility, abortion promises the right to do one’s own thing with one’s own body, homosexual marriage promises respect for different orientations … result: the end of civilization as we knew it.”

De-Christianization, he said, is not a new phenomenon, but had its start “centuries ago” with the social, economic and philosophical upheavals that resulted in the Protestant Reformation.

De Souza, a professional Catholic apologist, said bluntly that the solution is the “reunification of all baptized Christians under ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ in the one Church of God, the pillar and mainstay of the truth.”

“Why re-unify? Because as long as our separated brethren-in-baptism remain fragmented into thousands of denominations with a wide variety of creeds and moral codes, all claiming to derive their interpretations from the Bible, Christianity will not stand a chance against Islam. It is already sorely weakened by the influence of secularism and the Culture of Death.”

The cultural revolution, he said, is reaching a “climax, in which governments from virtually all countries in the world declare war against human nature, exemplified in the family.”

“The Culture of Death … today reigns supreme. Its weapons are Contraception, IVF, abortion, euthanasia, experimentation with human embryos, homosexual marriage.”

He called for “prayer, study and action” aimed at opposing the “dictatorship of relativism” in society as a whole and in the churches, and the promotion of “true ecumenism” to “bring all peoples together into one faith, not all faiths together into one people.”

Lindsey Graham, Lonely Cap-and-Trade Crusader

Obama's Three Stooges

The New Yorker has the story about how South Carolina's rogue Senator, Lindsey Graham, conspired to impose staggering new taxes on the American people through cap-and-trade legislation and cripple the US economy. And National Journal reports that Graham only abandoned his quest when he could not interest a single Republican Senator in his socialist plot, not even his mentor, John McCain.

ACLU: Religious Hospitals Should Be Required to Perform ‘Emergency’ Abortions

From Catholic World News

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services to require religious hospitals to offer “emergency” abortions.

Former Senator Rick Santorum’s recent Philadelphia Inquirer column on the issue draws wider attention to the ACLU’s action, which was taken this summer. Citing Bishop Thomas Olmsted’s opposition to a Phoenix Catholic hospital’s decision to permit an abortion, the ACLU said that “the government must ensure that the well-being of the patient does not take a back seat to religious beliefs.”

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Rick Santorum: A reckless liberal attack on nation's religious hospitals (Philadelphia Inquirer)
• ACLU Asks Government To Ensure That Religiously-Affiliated Hospitals Provide Emergency Reproductive Health Services (ACLU)
• Bishop Olmsted Statement in Response to Abortion Performed at St. Joseph's Hospital