Free Republic

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a new clash involving religion and the rights of LGBT people. The high court said Tuesday it would hear the case of Colorado-based web designer Lorie Smith. Smith offers graphic and website design services and wants to expand to wedding website services, but she says her religious beliefs would lead her to decline any request from a same-sex couple to design a wedding website. She also wants to post a statement on her website about her beliefs, but that would run afoul of a Colorado anti-discrimination law. Smith had argued...

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with law enforcement in a pair of cases that implicated “qualified immunity,” the controversial legal doctrine that gives police broad protection from lawsuits. In a pair of unsigned summary rulings issued without noted dissent, the justices reversed two federal appeals courts that had permitted excessive force lawsuits to proceed against officers in separate cases arising from California and Oklahoma. The justices ruled the officers should be granted qualified immunity, which shields government officials from liability unless it is proven they violated a “clearly established” right, a difficult legal hurdle. Both lawsuits dealt with police...

AColorado web designer is appealing a ruling made Monday by the 10th Circuit Court that rejected her challenge of Colorado's anti-discrimination law and requires her to create wedding websites for same-sex couples despite it violating her religious beliefs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled 2 – 1 the state can force Lorie Smith of studio 303 Creative to design and publish websites promoting messages that go against her personal religious beliefs. The law at issue also prevents Smith from explaining on her company's website what sites she can create that are consistent with her beliefs. By...

A federal appeals court on Wednesday backed a lower court’s ruling that a Kansas voter identification law crafted by former Secretary of State Kris Kobach is unconstitutional and violates the National Voter Registration Act. The law heralded by Kobach took effect in 2013 and mandates that people provide documentation proving U.S. citizenship before being allowed to register to vote. The decision from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes after a federal district court struck down the law on the same grounds. The judges said the state had failed to provide convincing arguments in its appeal that Kansas was...

Kansas cannot demand that new voters who register under the federal Motor-Voter law prove citizenship before their applications will be accepted, a U.S. appeals court ruled Wednesday. The two judges of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Kansas at best proved only a few noncitizens registered to vote each year, and said that wasn’t as bad as more than 30,000 would-be voters who were prevented from registering because of the citizenship requirement. “The significant burden quantified by the 31,089 voters who had their registration applications canceled or suspended requires us to increase the ‘rigorousness of our inquiry,’ …...

A New Mexico judge on Friday ruled that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's stay-at-home order does not violate an Albuquerque church's First Amendment rights. The church, First Legacy, sued after Lujan Grisham added churches to the state's list of nonessential activities in an emergency health order on the day before Easter, meaning that no more than five people can gather at a service. In the church's filing, it alleged that the order violated the First Amendment because the church needs more than five people to put on a service. First Legacy asked for a temporary restraining order on Lujan Grisham's executive...

Under orders from pro-abortion Governor Laura Kelly, Kansans can be punished for going to church because of the coronavirus, but abortion facilities in the state continue to jeopardize lives by killing unborn babies. However, a court put a temporary stop to that over the weekend. Kelly’s executive order, issued just before Easter, bans religious services of more than 10 people. It also allows religious leaders and their congregants to be punished with fines of up to $2,500 and 12 months in jail for violations. Meanwhile, abortion businesses, including one in Wichita that kills unborn children in late-term abortions, can remain...

OKLAHOMA CITY (KOKH) — The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a lower court’s decision temporarily blocking Gov. Kevin Stitt’s ban on abortion care in Oklahoma during the coronavirus pandemic. This means abortion providers in the state can continue providing essential, time-sensitive abortion care. Abortion providers will now seek a preliminary injunction from the district court which will continue to block the ban from taking effect until the case concludes. “Today Oklahomans can breathe a temporary sigh of relief. But the fight is not over. Instead of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Stitt is wasting valuable time and...

U.S. District Court Judge Carlos Murguia will resign from the bench effective April 1, 2020. In a resignation letter addressed to President Trump, Murguia wrote, “I have been honored to serve in this position since 1999, and my tenure on the Court has been the highlight of my professional life. In recent months, it has become clear that I can no longer effectively serve the Court in this capacity.” Murguia, a native of Kansas City, Kansas, was publicly reprimanded Sept. 30, 2019, by the Judicial Council of the Tenth Circuit. The Council found that Murguia “gave preferential treatment and unwanted...

The debate over how to sift out illegal voters from legal ones has reached the federal appeals court level, making it possible the Supreme Court eventually will rule whether a state can demand a birth certificate to register to vote. The case before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver centers on a 2011 Kansas law, the Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC). In June, a district court judge struck down the law, with biting criticism of analysts who contend a large number of noncitizens nationwide vote illegally, tilting close elections to Democrats. Judge Julia A. Robinson said the Kansas...

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday referred more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints filed recently against Brett M. Kavanaugh to a federal appeals court in Colorado. The 15 complaints, related to statements Kavanaugh made during his Senate confirmation hearings, were initially filed with the federal appeals court in Washington, where Kavanaugh served for the last 12 years before his confirmation Saturday to the Supreme Court. The allegations center on whether Kavanaugh was dishonest and lacked judicial temperament during his Senate testimony, according to people familiar with the matter. Last month, a judge on the U.S. Court of...

A federal appeals court on Monday dismissed a landmark decision that decriminalized polygamy in Utah, marking a legal defeat for the family from the reality TV show “Sister Wives.” Kody Brown and his four wives cannot sue the state over its ban on plural marriages because the family never faced charges and local prosecutors later said they would not prosecute consenting adults with multiple wives, according to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

Update: Hall ignored the deadline and proceeded to issue unconstitutional marriage licenses. As reported by The Denver Post: "This was not a hard decision. I'm proud to do this for my community," Hall said Tuesday afternoon, adding, "it's not about politics. This is about people who love each other." Hall's office has issued 88 marriage licenses to same-sex couples since Wednesday, when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals struck Utah's ban on gay marriage.

Guess which ObamaCare case will be headed to the Supreme Court next? At least, that’s the option open for the Little Sisters of the Poor and their defense team at The Becket Fund for the restoration of a temporary injunction against compliance with the HHS mandate. The 10th Circuit handed the nuns a defeat this morning, vacating the earlier temporary injunction ordered by a lower court: Moments ago, in a departure from the U.S. Supreme Court’s protection of the Little Sisters of the Poorlast year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that the Little Sisters...

It appears that, until the nation’s highest court decides to protect the expressly enumerated Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as strongly as it does non-enumerated rights like gay marriage and abortion, law-abiding American gun owners are simply left to watch lower courts unravel the Constitution and our fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms in decisions like Bonidy.

The 10 Circuit heard oral arguments last Monday on whether an unsecured, unmanned post office was a "sensitive place" where the U.S. Government could ban  people from exercising their second amendment rights, under the Heller decision. A district judge had awarded a partial victory to the 56 year old architect when it declared that the particular post office parking lot was not a "sensitive place" where weapons could be banned.   Both Bonidy and the Federal government appealed the decision.   From the AP story: Bonidy's attorney Steven Lechner of the Mountain States Legal Foundation told the judges the lobby is...

Eighty legislators from Utah have submitted an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in which the legislators warn the Court that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to the legalization of incestuous and polygamous marriages. The brief comes following the request for a writ of certiorari from both Utah's Attorney General, Sean Reyes, and the plaintiffs in Kitchen v. Herbert, the case that found both both a district court and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of marriage equality in Utah. As Joe.My.God points out, "the brief is signed by 22 of the 29 members of the state...

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that states outlawing same-sex marriage are in violation of the U.S. Constitution. By upholding a Utah judge’s decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals became the first appeals court to rule on the issue, setting a historic precedent that voter-approved bans on same-sex marriage violate the Fourteenth Amendment rights of same-sex couples to equal protection and due process. But the court stayed the implementation of their decision, pending a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeals court upheld U.S. Judge Robert Shelby’s December decision, which struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage. The...

Former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican, is making the case for a “live and let live” approach to same-sex marriage in a new television ad buy targeting Western states, just as a federal appeals court in Denver prepares to take up the issue later this week. “Whether you’re gay or lesbian or straight, if you love someone and you want to marry them, marry them,” Simpson, of Wyoming, says in the spot. The six-figure buy, sponsored by the pro-gay marriage group Freedom to Marry, is slated to start airing on Tuesday on national cable channels, as well as locally in...

A conicted illegal's lawyer claimed that the prior conviction should be overturned because of the 2nd Ammendment,