Reading Time: 3 minutes For the second time in five years, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act is being challenged in the Supreme Court. Christian graphic designer, Lorie Smith, believes that it is her constitutional right to turn down customers who do not align with her religious beliefs. Smith is looking to start a wedding website design business but would like to […]
Supreme Court
Posted inLaw
Pew survey: More Americans realize Supreme Court is Christian Right’s ally
Reading Time: 3 minutes When it comes to the Supreme Court, atheists understand what most white evangelicals refuse to admit: the ultra-conservative court has become a powerful ally for the Christian Right—and religion in general. A new survey released by the Pew Research Center found that 74% of atheists, compared to only 20% of white evangelicals, say the Supreme […]
Posted inLaw
Supreme Court declines fetal personhood case
Reading Time: 2 minutes Personhood is a notoriously tricky philosophical term to define, let alone argue about in court. Indeed, the argument that a fertilized human egg has personhood is an incredibly difficult claim to establish. Nonetheless, it is an argument that anti-choicers have been desperate to see debated within the hallowed confines of the highest US court. Unfortunately […]
Posted inBooks
‘American Crusade’: How the Supreme Court is weaponizing Christianity
Reading Time: 6 minutes Three years ago, constitutional attorney, atheist, author, and “fake Christian” Andrew Seidel wrote about the threat of Christian nationalism in his book The Founding Myth, arguing that we were never a “Christian Nation” in any real sense of that phrase. Yet even though we weren’t founded as a Christian country, and even though we won’t […]
Posted inEducation, Law, LGBTQ, LGBTQ News
Yeshiva University shuts down all student clubs to thwart one LGBTQ group
Reading Time: 3 minutes Yeshiva University, a private Orthodox Jewish school with campuses in New York City, has decided to shut down all undergraduate clubs rather than allow an LGBTQ group to meet temporarily. It marks the second time this week that Orthodox Jews are in the news for making the worst possible decisions when they easily could’ve done the bare […]
Posted inEducation
Kenneth Copeland: Ending forced prayer in schools led to mass shootings
Reading Time: 4 minutes On a recent broadcast of the show FlashPoint, televangelist Kenneth Copeland told host Greg Stephens that the school shootings that occur in the United States can be blamed entirely on the 1963 Supreme Court decision that removed mandatory Christian prayer from public schools. COPELAND: … The devil has assignments. If you want to know what’s […]
Posted inLaw
Maine’s religious schools are choosing bigotry over taxpayer dollars
Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the Supreme Court’s biggest blows to church/state separation in the past term has effectively achieved nothing. The bang became a whimper because the conservative Christians in Maine who wanted taxpayer money to fund religious schools have now realized they’re better off on their own. Carson v. Makin involved a voucher program that allowed […]
Posted inNews
New report: Roberts lobbied Kavanaugh to save Roe before leak of draft opinion
Reading Time: 2 minutes Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts provoked furor from conservatives a decade ago when he voted to save the Affordable Care Act. Voting to save former President Obama’s signature legislation from a court challenge led Republicans to view the justice as an unreliable conservative vote on the court. Now, a report claims that Roberts lobbied […]
Posted inLaw
With the Lemon Test gone, a police-led prayer vigil may be legal again
Reading Time: 6 minutes The Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Lemon Test may lead to a government-sponsored Christian prayer vigil being declared legal. More specifically, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated an earlier (sensible) decision that respected church/state separation. What happens now is anyone’s guess. This saga began in 2014, when Greg Graham, chief of the Ocala […]
Posted inLaw
Scientology wants the Supreme Court to enforce religious arbitration
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Church of Scientology wants the Supreme Court to block a group of women from suing them on the grounds that they pledged to undergo religious arbitration when they expressed interest in the faith. The case involves a group of women who previously accused That ’70s Show actor and prominent Scientologist Danny Masterson of sexual […]