A federal judge in the US has sided with a photographer who declines to shoot same-sex weddings.

U.S. District Judge, Justin Walker, ruled that a local Government anti-discrimination ordinance could not be used to penalize Chelsey Nelson for advertising on her website that she only photographs and blogs about opposite-sex ceremonies.

“America is wide enough for those who applaud same-sex marriage and those who refuse to,” Walker wrote in his opinion finding in favor of Nelson. “The Constitution does not require a choice between gay rights and freedom of speech. It demands both.”

Quoting the majority opinion from the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized marriage equality, the 38-year-old Walker added: “Just as gay and lesbian Americans ‘cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth,’ neither can Americans ‘with a deep faith that requires them to do things passing legislative majorities might find unseemly or uncouth.’”

Because art is a form of speech, Nelson cannot be compelled to photograph same-sex weddings in violation of her personal religious or political principles, Walker added. While photography is wordless, “so too is refusing to salute the flag or marching in a parade, both of which the Supreme Court has said are protected forms of speech.”

A new report has underlined the value of marriage for family stability and positive outcomes for children.

The Centre for Social Justice in the UK found married couples are four times less likely to split up than their cohabiting counterparts.

On the other hand, it found that 70 per cent of young offenders come from families where parents have separated.

The report adds that the benefits of marriage are not shared equally across society.

Some 83 per cent of high earners are married and only 11 per cent cohabit, while among the poorest only 55 per cent marry and 21 per cent cohabit.

A leading rugby international recommended the report and called on the UK Government to incentivise marriage.

Courtney Lawes, who has made 80 appearances for England, referenced his own life when he said that marriage can help bring stability to a family.

Writing in The Telegraph, he revealed his own half-brother did not enjoy that same stability and ended up in jail.

He asked if his brother’s life might have been different had he “grown up in a stable home”.

Schools have no legal basis to compel students to attend religious instruction classes, according to a report to be published this week.

Sometimes there is no supervisor for a child who is opted out of RE meaning he or she has to remain in the class.
Atheist Ireland has sent a 21-page legal opinion to the Department of Education on the right to opt out of religious instruction under provisions contained in the Constitution.

The group has long maintained that children in State-funded schools are either forced to attend religious instruction or face obstacles in opting out of these classes. The legal opinion by barrister James Kane states that pupils have a right to not attend religious instruction, under article 44.2.4 of the Constitution.

Mr Kane’s view is that schools are obliged to use their State funding to facilitate this right which encompasses, at the very least, the right to leave the classroom during religious instruction while remaining supervised. The document states that there is “decent legal argument” that these pupils must be taught another subject.

A group of prominent actors, writers and campaigners, has come out against a new Hate crime bill planned for Scotland. Atheist group, the Humanist Society, has also expressed concern, as has the Catholic Church in Scotland.

The bill would criminalise the ‘stirring up of hatred’, but without requiring any proof of intent to do so.

In a letter drafted by the Humanist Society, the signatories, including Rowan Atkinson, who plays Mr Bean, say the bill would frustrate the free exchange of ideas.

They say it could stifle both those who would express religious and other beliefs, and also those who would criticise those same beliefs.

“As currently worded, the Bill could frustrate rational debate and discussion which has a fundamental role in society including in artistic endeavour. The arts play a key part in shaping Scotland’s identity in addition to being a significant economic contributor. The right to critique ideas, philosophical, religious and other must be protected to allow an artistic and democratic society to flourish.”

The Argentine government will be postponing its bill to legalise abortion until 2021.

President Alberto Fernández vowed to legalise abortion during campaigning for last year’s election and committed in his March 1 state-of-the-nation speech that a bill would enter Congress within the following 10 days.

In the ensuing months the government announced more than once that the bill was ready for presentation, despite the coronavirus pandemic, but there was no consensus within the Cabinet, according to reports.

On Monday, Cabinet Chief Santiago Cafiero said that “although the government’s intention was always clear with respect to abortion,” the idea was to debate the bill without restrictions in either Congress or the public arena, with full social participation.

Until the pandemic could be brought under control, the legalisation of abortion could not be a priority for the government, said Cafiero, underlining that this position was supported by Vice-President Cristina Fernández Kirchner, as well as the Cabinet.

Last Saturday marked the second anniversary of the Senate’s rejection of the abortion bill previously approved by the lower house Chamber of Deputies. The initiative enjoys considerable social support, but is also strongly resisted by pro-life sectors.

A leading human rights group is warning that the persecution of Christians in Africa is getting worse during the Covid-19 crisis.

Open Doors, a leading charity working to help persecuted Christians around the world, says the pandemic has also created more opportunities for persecutors to target believers where they are already vulnerable, leaving them even more exposed.

“Though many factors determine the vulnerability of populations to Christian persecution and to Covid-19, a common thread between the two vulnerabilities has surfaced in Niger,” explained Open Door’s Paige Collins.

“Here, some Islamic extremist voices have propagated the message that the coronavirus is a Western invention against Islam or Allah’s punishment against those who have accepted Christianity and departed from Islam. Christians are reporting increased harassment as a result of the rumors, which are likely driving additional exposures to the virus as well,” she told Crux.

“While Christians in many African countries, including Nigeria and Ethiopia, have experienced discrimination for some time, their need for food, shelter, and medical care has significantly increased due to the coronavirus. Relief discrimination is making a bad situation worse for Christians and other religious minorities,” Collins said.

The outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic has exposed the limits of science and the capacity for technological solutions to all problems, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

Up to this, people felt “that the progress of modern science and culture would quickly be able to respond to any global health crisis by rapidly producing a cure or a vaccine that would resolve the question and allow us to continue in the way we lived,” he said.

“Now we realise that a pandemic can emerge and spread and indeed reappear. We also have realised that in public health terms, medicine, cures and vaccines, actions from somewhere in society cannot alone resolve our problems,” he said.

Speaking in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral, he advised that “in the months and years to come we will have to face and live with the challenges that the pandemic has brought and will leave us with. People will be insecure. Jobs will be lost at all levels in society. Precariousness will affect so many of the things that in the past gave us a sense of security.”

In such a scenario, the church “must find ways of witnessing to the fact that society needs care and love,” he said.

Two Catholic Cardinals and a former archbishop of Canterbury are among more than 70 faith leaders publicly declaring that the Uighurs are facing “one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust”, and that those responsible for the persecution of the Chinese Muslim minority must be held accountable.

The incarceration of at least a million Uighurs and other Muslims in prison camps, where they are reported to face starvation, torture, murder, sexual violence, slave labour and forced organ extraction, is a potential genocide, say the clerics.

The statement, signed by five serving Church of England bishops, the Coptic archbishop of London, the Dalai Lama’s representative in Europe, plus cardinals, imams and rabbis, says the plight of the Uighurs “calls into question most seriously the willingness of the international community to defend universal human rights for everyone”.

It adds: “The clear aim of the Chinese authorities is to eradicate the Uighur identity. China’s state media has stated that the goal is to ‘break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins’ … High-level Chinese government documents speak of ‘absolutely no mercy’. Parliamentarians, governments and jurists have a responsibility to investigate.”

The faith leaders say: “After the Holocaust, the world said ‘Never Again’. Today, we repeat those words ‘Never Again’, all over again…. We make a simple call for justice, to investigate these crimes, hold those responsible to account and establish a path towards the restoration of human dignity.”

Their statement comes after comparisons were made last month between the Holocaust and atrocities against the Uighurs in a letter from the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, to the Chinese ambassador in Britain.

Pro-life voices in the US have criticised the selection of Sen. Kamala Harris as former vice president Joe Biden’s running mate for the 2020 election.

Fordham University professor Charles Camosy, who left the Democratic Party earlier this year over the party’s stance on abortion, said that for Catholics “in favor of prenatal justice, and of government defending these children from terrible violence, we must say that Harris is a deeply flawed candidate”.

“Unreserved praise of her VP candidacy is, in effect, yet another example of erasure of the prenatal child,” Camosy said on Twitter.

Democrats for Life of America said in a statement that she “does not provide pro-life Democrats with any assurances and will, in fact, further alienate 21 million Democratic voters who have been left out of the party for quite some time.”

Michael Sean Winters, a writer for the National Catholic Reporter, was critical of Harris’ 2018 questioning of a judicial nominee over his membership of the Knights of Columbus, calling her treatment of Brian C. Buescher “embarrassing in both its ignorance and its bigotry.”

National Review writer Alexandra DeSanctis made a similar observation, saying Harris’s time on the Senate judiciary committee had shown “reprehensible anti-Catholic bigotry, and there’s no reason to believe her views have changed.”

Several commentators from across the political divide also noted Harris’ noted support for unlimited access to abortion.

A Belgian study has shown overwhelming support among doctors surveyed for infanticide when a newborn baby has a serious disability.

Medical personnel involved in abortion decision‐making at eight Neonatal Intensive Care Units in Flanders were surveyed for the research.

Almost nine out of ten respondents (89.1%) agree that “in the event of a serious (non‐lethal) neonatal condition, administering drugs with the explicit intention to end neonatal life is acceptable”.

Additionally, the research showed that “Behavioural intentions indicate that even in situations with an unclear diagnosis and unpredictable prognosis, 85.6% of professionals would still consider late TOP [termination of pregnancy]”.

Catherine Robinson of Right to Life UK called the findings “profoundly disturbing”.

“Less than ten years ago, there was a strong condemnation of the idea of ending a baby’s life after it had been born, regardless of whether or not it had a disability, when this idea was floated by academics in the British Medical Journal.

Tragically, she added, “it now appears to have gone from an outlandish academic thought experiment to be seen as something that is morally acceptable”.

“It is profoundly disturbing that these healthcare professionals, who should be upholding the right to life and giving every baby the best possible chance at life, are hugely in favour of ‘after-birth abortions’ and infanticide of babies with a disability.”