State and Local News That Matters
Joe Biden issued an executive order Wednesday that will attempt to force taxpayers to fund abortions on demand, including for women who travel to pro-abortion states to obtain late-term abortions.
The nation’s first class action lawsuit for healthcare workers fighting COVID vaccine mandates has led to a $10.3 million settlement agreement, filed Friday, for the workers who were denied religious exemptions from the COVID shot mandate and terminated when they did not comply.
Liberty Counsel settled the lawsuit on behalf of more than 500 current and former healthcare workers from NorthShore University HealthSystem in Illinois who argued they were victims of religious discrimination.
The abortion industry and its allies in politics, the media, and establishment medicine have made the false claim that women’s health is endangered by state pro-life laws because abortions cannot be performed in these states when the life of the mother is at risk.
Legal and medical experts, however, are explaining how that claim is false and constitutes “misinformation,” since pro-life laws in all states clearly articulate the lives of pregnant women are protected under them.
The Biden administration will once again sow its seeds of division by proposing a rule to “protect” those claiming “gender identity” discrimination in federal healthcare programs, a move that is expected to generate religious freedom disputes.
The Biden Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Monday its proposed rule will implement Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to affirm that “protections against discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity” are “consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Bostock v. Clayton County,” and to reiterate “protections from discrimination for seeking reproductive health care services.”
A judge has temporarily blocked two Kentucky laws that would effectively ban abortion in nearly all circumstances, claiming the idea that life begins at conception is a “distinctly Christian” view and that the notion that a disproportionate number of abortions occurs among black women is suggestive of eugenics is “baseless.”
Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Mitch Perry sided with the abortion providers Friday, granting them a temporary injunction against the state enforcing its Human Life Protection Act and Heartbeat Law, referring to the measures as the Trigger Ban and Six Week Ban, respectively.
LGBTQ activist organization the It Gets Better Project has awarded $10,000 in grant funds to 50 school districts across the country to promote gender ideology.
The project was founded by LGBTQ activist Dan Savage as an organization that provides anti-bullying support for LGBTQ teens, but Savage has a history of bullying teens himself – particularly, those who identify as Christian.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said Thursday he would vote in favor of a bill that would enshrine same-sex marriage into federal law, even though he believes the legislation is “unnecessary.”
In a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Johnson said about the legislation Democrats have titled the Respect for Marriage Act, “Prior to the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, I supported civil unions.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, the abortion industry and its allies in the media and the medical field “are having to defend their actual position” regarding their claim that women are in danger as a result of the ruling, but “have no scientific evidence to back it up,” leaving them to “rely on spreading” lies, OB/GYN Dr. Christina Francis told The Star News Network in an interview Thursday.
Francis, a board member and CEO-elect of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), testified Tuesday before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce in a Democrat-led hearing titled “Roe Reversal: The Impacts of Taking Away the Constitutional Right to an Abortion.”
A three-judge panel of a federal appeals court ruled unanimously Wednesday that Georgia’s 2019 Heartbeat law that bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected may take effect.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled the Georgia law (HB 481), known as the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act may proceed to take effect after a federal judge blocked it in a decision that found the law violated the right to abortion created by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
The Democrat-led House passed a bill Thursday, with the support of eight Republicans, that would create a federal right to access contraception, a measure that most Republicans say violates religious freedom.
The legislation (HR 8373), dubbed the Right to Contraception Act and sponsored by Rep. Kathy Manning (D- NC), passed by a vote of 228-195. The measure would guarantee a right to all contraceptive drugs and devices, as well as sterilization procedures, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Earlier this year, my brother told me about Alisa Childers, who recently wrote a book about Christian apologetics. Not only that, she was a former member of the contemporary Christian music group ZOEgirl back in the early 2000s and she was married to someone with whom we attended college.
A Catholic church in Madison, Wisconsin, was vandalized over the weekend with anti-pro-life and anti-police graffiti.
Police are investigating the defacement of St. Bernard Catholic Church on Atwood Avenue in Madison, believing the spray-painted graffiti defacing the church’s front door and signage occurred overnight from Friday into Saturday, reported NBC15 WMTV News.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Planned Parenthood, and a group of Ohio abortion facilities filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Ohio Supreme Court that seeks to overturn the state’s heartbeat law which began being enforced soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
The pro-abortion groups claim in the lawsuit Ohioans have a “fundamental right to abortion” under the Ohio Constitution, “as guaranteed by the Ohio Constitution’s broad protections for individual liberties under Article I, Sections 1, 16, and 21, and the equal protection guarantee under Article I, Section 2.”
Biden Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra laughed Monday as he suggested his agency is considering using taxpayer funds to transport women to pro-abortion states so they can end the lives of their unborn babies.
During an interview with NBC News following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and return the issue of abortion to the states, Kate Snow asked Becerra, “What are you doing concretely in response to the Court’s decision, to try to help women?”
Ohio’s heartbeat abortion law that bans the procedure once a fetal heartbeat can be detected was in effect soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.
The state’s nine abortion clinics, six of which perform surgical abortions, are still open, however, according to a report Monday at WKSU public radio.
More Headlines…
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in a 6-3 opinion the expressions of a high school football coach who prayed by himself at midfield after games are protected by both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that coach Joseph Kennedy was fired “because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks.”
The Arizona affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion Saturday that seeks to block the state’s “personhood” law which, they argue, could make all abortions illegal in the state.
The abortion rights groups filed an emergency motion one day after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, returning decisions about abortion to the states.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III announced his office has asked the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the district court’s injunction and allow the state’s heartbeat law to go into effect as soon as possible.
The attorney general’s request to allow the state’s law banning abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected – generally at six weeks’ gestation – is a temporary measure until, in 30 days, the state’s 2019 Human Life Protection Act, a law that bans most abortions at any time, except those to save the life of the mother, can be enforced.
As reactions abound in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, many on the left expressed their outrage by claiming the ruling will harm black and other minority women, but pro-life women of these communities wholeheartedly disagree and applaud the Court for “finally” righting their “wrongly decided law.”
“The Justice Department strongly disagrees with the Court’s decision,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “This decision deals a devastating blow to reproductive freedom in the United States. It will have an immediate and irreversible impact on the lives of people across the country. And it will be greatly disproportionate in its effect – with the greatest burdens felt by people of color and those of limited financial means.”
In a major decision for religious freedom and school choice, the Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a Maine law that barred taxpayer tuition assistance funds from families choosing religious schools.
The Court ruled, 6-3, in Carson v. Makin, the Maine law that governs its tuition program’s exclusion of religious schools, while accepting other private schools, is a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and is, therefore, unconstitutional.
National and state teachers’ unions condemned the Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday that held a Maine tuition assistance program that bars families from using the taxpayer funds for religious schools is in violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
Union officials denounced the ruling as one that “attacks public schools,” “erodes democracy,” “harms students,” and undermines “the separation of church and state.”
A bishop has revoked the “Catholic” status of a Jesuit middle school in Worcester, Massachusetts, for defying his order to stop flying flags supporting the LGBTQ “pride” and Black Lives Matter (BLM) movements.
“The Nativity School of Worcester is prohibited from this time forward from identifying itself as a ‘Catholic’ school and may no longer use the title ‘Catholic’ to describe itself,” Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester announced in a decree Thursday.
A former apostolic nuncio, or papal ambassador, to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has warned Catholics that several of the bishops Pope Francis has recently elevated to the College of Cardinals support leftwing causes and oppose the Church’s traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass.
“Pope Francis has chosen his new cardinals for their ‘corruptibility,’” the outspoken Viganò wrote at LifeSiteNews last week.
Senior editor at the American Conservative Rod Dreher wrote Friday a “trusted source” informed him the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has notified Catholic bishops there are credible threats to the safety of Catholic clergy and churches should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade and return issues about abortion to the states.
“Violence has been called for beginning the night such a decision is handed down,” the source reportedly told Dreher.
A Roman Catholic Church in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, New York, was desecrated over the weekend when its antique tabernacle was cut out of its metal casing, its consecrated hosts scattered indiscriminately about the altar, and the angel statues that flanked it beheaded.
The Diocese of Brooklyn called the desecration of St. Augustine Church “a brazen crime of disrespect and hate.”
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R) signed a bill into law Wednesday that bans nearly all abortions in the state and allows private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” a woman seeking an abortion.
According to HB4327, abortions are prohibited in Oklahoma unless it is “necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency,” or the pregnancy “is the result of rape, sexual assault, or incest that has been reported to law enforcement.”
The president of a Catholic organization that keeps watch on the national culture writes in the wake of the Uvalde school massacre such mass shootings are likely to continue largely because the race and gun-obsessed establishment media are so politically entrenched they “are looking in all the wrong places” for potential remedies for the real causes of these tragedies.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) blamed Catholics who live out their beliefs on the sanctity of unborn human life for politicizing abortion, claiming they use abortion as a “cover” for their wider political agenda.
During an interview Tuesday on leftwing MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Pelosi, who was recently banned from receiving Holy Communion following her aggressive support for a radical abortion bill, said “this is not just about terminating a pregnancy.”
Wisconsin Bishops David Ricken of the diocese of Green Bay and Donald Hying of the diocese of Madison are among a growing number of Catholic bishops who have publicly expressed support for San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s declaration that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not be admitted to Holy Communion due to her continued “aggressive promotion of abortion.”
“I wish to express my strong support for Archbishop Cordileone’s decision stating he has publicly declared that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi not be admitted to Holy Communion,” Ricken posted to Twitter following Cordileone’s notification to Pelosi that she is not to present herself for Holy Communion.
A black, pro-life Democrat lawmaker who received national attention for standing up to her party in the Connecticut state House as she voted against its abortion expansion bill, now is facing a primary challenge for her seat by a young white liberal man.
Connecticut State Rep. Treneé McGee (D-West Haven) received praise from the national Susan B. Anthony List in April for her stirring words as she spoke about the harms abortion has brought to her black community.