Free Republic

Parents of students in the California public school system have filed a lawsuit against the state's Department of Education in an attempt to remove a chant to Aztec gods that's part of a new ethnic studies curriculum. The lawsuit was filed Friday by the conservative legal firm Thomas More Society on behalf of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, individual taxpayers and parents of current and former students after their Aug. 26 letter to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction demanding withdraw of the Aztec prayer from the curriculum went unanswered. The lawsuit says the “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” has...

California conservatives won a surprise victory this week, changing a state assembly bill that would have curtailed the freedom of private religious colleges. “We literally were able to see tens of thousands of people mobilize to make calls and to write their legislators, and to participate in the political process,” William Jessup University President John Jackson told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “We were hearing from legislators who said that they had gotten hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of phone calls on just this one piece of legislation,” he added. “And I think that’s a tremendous, tremendous encouragement...

Rose Marie Belforti is a 57-year-old cheese maker, the elected town clerk in this sprawling Finger Lakes farming community and a self-described Bible-believing Christian. She believes that God has condemned homosexuality as a sin, so she does not want to sign same-sex marriage licenses; instead, she has arranged for a deputy to issue all marriage licenses by appointment. But when a lesbian couple who own a farm near here showed up at the town hall last month, the women said they were unwilling to wait. Now Ms. Belforti is at the heart of an emerging test case, as national advocacy...

Police in Lancashire have told the owner of a Christian café to stop displaying Bible texts on a video screen, because it breaches public order laws. Officers attended the Salt & Light Coffee House on Layton Road, Blackpool, on Monday 19 September, following a complaint about “insulting” and “homophobic” material. The café’s owner, Mr Jamie Murray, says the officers did not specify which Bible texts had caused the offence. He says the officers told him that displaying offensive or insulting words is a breach of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, and told him to stop displaying the Bible....