Free Republic

Every workday for the past six months, Alan Blackburn of Pequot Lakes has parked a quarter-mile down the road from the state Department of Revenue office in Brainerd, Minn., and walked the rest of the way to his job there. Blackburn, 48, doesn't necessarily need the exercise. But, according to a lawsuit filed against his employer this week in U.S. District Court in St. Paul, his car has been barred from the state parking lot as long as it carries the religious and political messages he's posted on it. The suit, brought by a Virginia-based nonprofit legal center founded by...

Stockholm (ENI). A Swedish court has sentenced a pastor belonging to the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, Ake Green, to a month in prison, under a law against incitement, after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon. Soren Andersson, the president of the Swedish federation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (RFSL), said on hearing the sentence that religious freedom could never be used as a reason to offend people. "Therefore," he told journalists, "I cannot regard the sentence as an act of interference with freedom of religion." During a sermon in 2003, Green described homosexuality...