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RICHMOND -- A federal judge has ruled that a southeastern Virginia school district didn't violate a teacher's free-speech rights by removing Christian-themed postings from his classroom walls. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith rejected arguments that York County school officials deprived William Lee of his First Amendment rights when they ordered the removal of postings that included articles about President Bush's religious faith and John Ashcroft's prayer meetings with his staffers when he was attorney general. "This case is not about what free-speech rights Lee has as an individual expressing himself on private property," Judge Smith wrote in her opinion...

ROME -- The American debate over intelligent design versus evolution is merely stuff for Sunday school scholars. An Italian court is considering whether the Roman Catholic Church is breaking the law by teaching that Jesus Christ walked the earth 2,000 years ago. The case pits against each other two men in their 70s, who are from the same central Italian town and went to the same seminary school in their teenage years. The defendant, Enrico Righi, went on to become a priest writing for the parish newspaper. The plaintiff, Luigi Cascioli, became a vocal atheist who, after years of legal...

Subject: Laus Deo Laus Deo I thought that you and others may like to see this. One detail that is not mentioned in Washington, DC, is that there can never be a building of greater height than the Washington Monument. With all the uproar about removing the ten commandments, etc... This is worth a moment or two of your time. I was not aware of this historical information. On the aluminum cap, atop the Washington Monument in Washington DC, are displayed two words: Laus Deo. No one can see these words. In fact, most visitors to the monument are totally...

Does the Fourteenth Amendment make the entire Bill of Rights a restriction against the States? If so, which amendments or clauses? What did both "due process of the law" and "equal protection" mean to the Congress who produced the Amendment? Does the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee State paid education to aliens? [snip] I hope everyone reads this because for me it was the most important reading of the year. One of the most wonderful discoveries you will find from reading is where equal protection of the laws came from and how it was defined to mean by the author of the...

Court Allows Church to Rent Space in Public Schools Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005 Posted: 12:11:25PM EST Religious groups may rent spaces in public schools for meetings just as other organizations can, a federal judge ruled recently. The decision by Judge Loretta Preska of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, N.Y., allows the evangelical Bronx Household of Faith church to rent space in a public school for four hours every Sunday. “The government may not treat activities that are similar to those previously permitted as different in kind just because the subject activities are conducted from a religious perspective," Preska wrote...

'Tis the season not to offend anyone? Friday, December 10, 2004 Kaeley Hay is your typical fifth-grader from Garwood, N.J. Kaeley and her classmates were given the assignment of writing a Thanksgiving Day poem. Who would have thought that such a traditional classroom exercise would trigger a Constitutional crisis? But, according the Newark Star-Ledger, that's pretty much what happened. Kaeley's verse was such a hit with her classmates that her rhyme was posted on the hallway bulletin board. The problem arose when school officials decided that the literary work of a 10-year-old violated the sacrosanct "separation between Church and State."...

The All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, a very, very liberal church, is being investigated by the IRS to see if their tax exempt status should be removed. The LA Times has been covering this story with the church as a victim. If this had been an evangelical or fundamentalist protestant church the LA Times and the news networks IMO would have taken a different tone, but that's beside the point. For those of you that are interested in this controversy the sermon that caused this controversy is available on-line at: http://www.allsaints-pas.org/all_saints_church.htm You'll need to click on the archives link...

The American Civil Liberties Union has found a sympathetic ear for its latest assault against the Boy Scouts. At issue is the famous Jamboree, held since 1981 at Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia and indirectly receiving support from the Army in billeting, infrastructure, and so forth. The ACLU argues that this arrangement breaches the First Amendment's separation between church and state. A federal judge in Chicago concurs, declaring government aid for the Jamboree unconstitutional. Because the Scouts require members to "privately exercise their religious faith as directed by their families and religious advisors," the ACLU petitioned the court to...

My wife and I were just discussing the erosion of Christian values throughout the country, namely the decision to ban the Ten Commandments from the courtroom. Has there been an attempt to remove the Bible from the courtroom? As far as I know, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, with a hand on the Bible is still the practice. Interesting that this practice has yet to be attacked as a violation of Separation of Church and State.

...In van Orden v. Perry, the Court allowed a six-foot granite monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas capitol. But in McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, it decided that a display of framed copies of the Ten Commandments inside two Kentucky courthouses was going too far. ...Reading through the majority opinions, it seems that the difference boils down to such "context" dependent issues as the fact that the granite monument was old -- it had been there since 1961 -- while the Kentucky commandments were of newer vintage and therefore possibly a product of the...

When told that India was the most religious country in the world and Sweden the most secularized, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger is said to have replied, "Then the United States must be a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes." The remark wittily expresses the profound split between the religious and the non-religious in America, but it doesn't suggest the ongoing, irreconcilable conflict between the two camps. Now, disturbingly, that conflict is being fought out again on the familiar battleground of the Supreme Court. At the start of its new term last month the court said that it would consider...

Religious conservatives, emboldened by President Bush's re-election and confident of their political clout, are not interested in merely overhauling the judiciary. Ideally, they are seeking a judiciary that would remove the wall of separation between church and state. This ambition is stated clearly in numerous legal briefs currently on file at the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with a pending case; they seek removal of "a Berlin wall" that is "out of step with this nation's religious heritage." In fact, their leaders argue in interviews that the church-state barrier is a "myth" invented by the high court in 1947, thanks...

Howard Dean, the chief screamer and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, thinks he has the formula for a Democratic revival: Jesus, guns and balanced budgets. He told Arkansas newspaper columnist John Brummett on the eve of a meeting of state chairmen in Little Rock that he wants Democrats to speak up for "values." "We need to talk about Christian values and how they're Democratic values," he said. "Jesus taught to help the least among us. He spent his life reaching out to the disenfranchised. The Democratic Party is the party of that value, not the Republican Party."

(CNSNews.com) - A religious watchdog group is blasting the Bush administration for re-submitting the nominations of judges the group has urged the Senate to defeat. On Monday, Bush re-nominated 20 failed judicial nominees, some of which have been denounced by liberals as "right-wing extremists." Americans United for Separation of Church and State Tuesday criticized the Bush administration's "stubbornness" for re-submitting William Pryor and Janice Rogers Brown for nomination to the federal bench. "This administration is bent on radically re-making the federal bench," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, in a press release. "No one can take...

I am looking at the front page, top center story in the Sacramento Bee for Friday, December 3, 2004, the gist of which is that a Christmas tree was erected in the rotunda of the Federal courthouse in Sacramento. Soon after, an attorney donated a Menorah to the display to commemorate Hanukkah, which almost immediately aroused a controversy, as a result of which both the Menorah and the Christmas tree were removed, which aroused another controversy, whereupon the Menorah and the Christmas tree were restored to the rotunda, and ever since a debate has raged whether it is permissible to...

While Chanukah and Christmas are two very different holidays, this year they both had something in common. Some people tried to take them away from us!

We all know that the ACLU makes its living in the destruction of traditional American values. So its no surprise that once they were successful at removing Christ from the classroom, and then from public square, that there would be more to their ill conceived agenda. But removing Christ from Christmas? Has anyone bothered to look up the definition of Christmas? In case you haven’t, here it is…according to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000, Christmas is simply “A Christian feast commemorating the birth of Jesus, December 25, the day on which this...

State-imposed atheism -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: December 14, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com This whole church-state debate is being miscast. The degenerates at the American Civil Liberties Union will tell you they are trying to make sure government doesn't favor one religion over another when they hunt down Boy Scouts meeting on public property like they were war criminals. Meanwhile, the other side in this debate makes a pathetic defense of the Scouts and other victims of his radical secular jihad. This isn't a conflict over whose view of the First Amendment is correct. It's a conflict in which one...

A Georgia principal who read a satirical ditty about how kids today can elect pregnant prom queens and dress like freaks but can’t mention God in school was accused of breaching that pesky line between church and state, reports the Associated Press. Tommy Craft, principal of Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, apologized for reading a poem entitled called The New School Prayer over the school's intercom. He said he just wanted to provoke a little thought. But because the poem sounded sorta like a prayer and mentioned God, some parents complained. “Basically, I found the poem offensive, but even...

By Tim Ewing It has been noted that there are over 4,000 displays of the Ten Commandments and related Judeo-Christian symbols (such as the Nativity Scene, depictions of Moses, etc) in government owned establishments throughout the United States of America.  Have you ever stopped to wonder why there are so many symbols of Christianity in our country?  Our Pledge of Allegiance contains the affirmation that our country is "One Nation Under God."  Have you ever wondered why those words found their way into the Pledge?  Why does our nation's currency promote an allegiance to God via our nation's motto, "In...