LifeSiteNews.com Life, Family and Culture News

HOWELL, Michigan, May 18, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The testimony of a Catholic teen and his mother has shed light on the story of how one high school teacher managed to spark a national media blitz that led to their branding as “maliciously anti-gay Catholic bigots” - all because the teen disclosed his religious beliefs about homosexuality in a classroom altercation.

Daniel Glowacki and his mother Sandy from Howell, Michigan tell of how high school economics teacher Jay McDowell was launched to national hero status after the latter began spreading his story of “confronting homophobia” on radio interviews and elsewhere.

Both Daniel and school officials say McDowell sparked the conversation in a Howell High School classroom in 2010 when, after telling a female student to remove her Confederate flag belt buckle, he explained the purple “Tyler’s army” shirt he was wearing was meant to promote tolerance of homosexuality.

“I rasied my hand and I asked him what the difference was between him wearing a purple shirt and explaining that to us, but Danielle couldn’t wear her rebel flag belt buckle,” Daniel told the National Organization for Marriage’s Marriage Anti-Defamation Alliance. “He asked me if I was really against the homosexual lifestyle and I told him that the homosexual lifestyle was against my Catholic religion.”

An altercation ensued, and Daniel says he quietly left the classroom after McDowell told him “we lost our right to free speech once we stepped inside his classroom.”

“As I was walking out into the hallway he came running out after me, calling me a racist and a bigot, telling me he’s going to get me suspended for bullying and harassment against gays,” said the teen. “When he started yelling at me, I was just kind of in shock, I didn’t know how to react to it.”

Sandy Glowacki told NOM she talked to McDowell afterwards and said her son would apologize for engaging in the dispute. Ms. Glowacki described her surprise when news later trickled in that the story had been on the radio: McDowell had taken to local airwaves to tell his version of events, which she says are false.

“There was Mr. McDowell on the news saying that this kid came into the classroom spewing homophobic and racial slurs, and I’m listening, and I’m like, that’s not what happened,” said Ms. Glowacki, fighting back tears. “He just kept going ... just telling lies about what had happened, and turned it all into ‘Daniel is this terrible kid who busted into the classroom.’ He just wouldn’t let it go.”

The story hit national news after a video of 14-year-old Graeme Taylor defending McDowell before the school board went viral on gay rights blogs and other media.

“This teacher ... finally stood up and said something .... There’s a silent holocaust in which an estimated 6 million gay people every year kill themselves. Is this really the environment we want for our school?” said Taylor, who was awarded a $10,000 scholarship on The Ellen Degeneres Show.

A petition on Change.org, a website that has hosted major progressive petitions, hosted one supporting McDowell that stated in part: “Imagine that a student comes bursting through the classroom doors, wearing a big, bright, shiny Confederate flag as a belt buckle, and telling the entire class that he doesn’t accept gay people. Would that student then deserve to be disciplined?”

School officials had suspended McDowell without pay, citing several student witnesses confirming that the teacher improperly lost his temper against Glowacki, but later paid McDowell and took a reprimand out of his file - a reversal Ms. Glowacki said made her feel “physically sick.”

The Glowackis have taken McDowell and school officials to court.

PUEBLO, Colorado, May 18, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Sarah Nelson, 22, was going through a challenging chapter in her faith journey in 2001 as she served in leadership at a successful megachurch in Denver, Colorado. She and her fiancee Brennon loved their church and the fellowship it provided, but Sarah could not shake off the feeling there was something missing.

At her Christian church, one thing that was impressed upon her was that abortion was wrong. For as long as she can remember, Sarah had always considered herself “very pro-life and absolutely against abortion.”

One day, while praying for an end to abortion on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade which legalized the killing of babies in the womb in 1973, Sarah suddenly experienced the voice of God saying to her:

You have the spirit of abortion.

The young woman remembers being stunned. ‘How could this accusation be true,’ she remembers reasoning vehemently with God, when she was clearly against the horrible crime of ending an innocent life in a mother’s womb?

Again, Sarah experienced the convicting voice of God:

You have the spirit of abortion in you because you do not value children as you ought. You see them as a burden and something that would inconvenience your life.

As Sarah pondered the word she had received, it dawned on her that God was entirely right. She had believed that it was wrong to kill children through abortion, but she now realized that a deeply rooted contraceptive mentality within her had prejudiced her to not really value children or to even desire them.

“Up to that point, I had had no exposure to the perspective of contraception as a moral evil,” Sarah told LifeSiteNews. Growing up, I was extremely familiar with the fact that as couples were counseled for marriage in church, it was the assumption across the board that to be a ‘prudent newly wed couple’, you must contracept, and preferably for at least two years in order to establish a ‘stable marriage’.”

“Rarely were children talked about in terms of ‘abundance and overflowing joy’. In some circles it was strongly suggested that couples limit their family size for the good of God. Many couples saw two children as plenty.”

“I was not really open to having children, nor had I been encouraged to be so from my church leadership. From this flowed the natural conclusion that contraception was fine. And if contraception was fine, then I could see how the logic worked that allowed abortion (God forbid) to be fine because it got rid of an ‘inconvenience’”.

“I was horrified as I suddenly and instantly knew the horrible truth: being closed to life through contraception actually leads to the reality and horror of abortion.”

It was with sadness that Sarah realized that she had become a victim of the logic of contraception without even realizing it. “And sadly, this was where I had been up till that day,” she recounted.

As a consequence of her humbling experience with God, Sarah turned to the Catholic Church for answers and eventually became Catholic along with her now-husband Brennon. They now have two children and are hoping for more.

To this day, over a decade later, it fills Sarah with sadness that many of her friends cannot see what she calls the “real beauty of sexual union and the beauty of being totally open to the gift of life”. Nonetheless, she and her husband will hardly let an opportunity pass by to challenge their friends to think about the dimension of gift that is inherent in sexual union and that entails an openness to life.

“The gift God has given us, the ability to procreate with him, why would we not want to be part of that?,” the couple often asks their friends.

Sarah says that she will be forever grateful for the day that “God opened my eyes wide to this truth and I truly became pro-life. I’ll never forget that day. It is very much seared into my memory.”

LONDON, May 18, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A high court justice has launched a campaign against the “scourge” of divorce that he says is tearing apart British society. Sir Paul Coleridge, who sits in the Family Division, has said that marriage is the “gold standard for relationships” and that its erosion through easy divorce is “one of the most destructive scourges of our time,” particularly for children.

Sir Paul said he wanted the campaign to be “the start of a national movement with the aim of changing attitudes across the board from the very top to the bottom of society, and thus improve the lives of us all, especially children.”

He has launched an organization called the Marriage Foundation with the aim of lobbying for government policies that support married families and advocating for marriage by “strengthening the institution for the benefit of children, adults and society as a whole.”

Sir Paul said that 3.8 million children were caught up in the family justice system each year, and marriage rates have more than halved in the past 40 years with the number of single-parent households, usually headed by the mother, increasing by an average of 26,000 per year from the early 1980s to 2010. Between 2010 and 2011, divorces in England and Wales rose 5640, from 113,949 to 119,589. This represents a sudden jump after several years of decline with more couples cohabitating and avoiding both marriage and divorce.

Sir Paul told the Daily Mail, “There are very few people who have had as much experience of what is going on as the family judiciary.

“We have watched it get worse and worse and worse. The time for sucking our teeth is over. Waiting for government or others to take action is merely an excuse for moaning and inactivity.”

Others involved in the campaign include the country’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks; Baroness Butler-Sloss, the former president of the Family Division; Baroness Deech, chairman of the Bar Standards Board; and Baroness Shackleton, a prominent divorce lawyer.

Although some have criticised the judge for becoming involved in politics, some lawyers are saying the work is coming just in time as studies begin to show more clearly the harms done to children by the family court system.

A tenth of children who had been through the system said they felt suicidal, feeling “isolated” and “used” while some parents admit using children as “bargaining tools” in divorce proceedings, according to a poll of 4,000 parents and children. Commissioned by the law firm Mishcon de Reya, the study said a third of children from broken families were tempted to turn to drinking or drugs and 10 per cent eventually become involved in crime. One quarter said they had been asked to lie to one parent by the other and 15 per cent said they had even been called on to “spy” for their mother or father.

Sandra Davis, head of family law at Mishcon de Reya said, “The adversarial nature of the system invites people to come and use the courts system as a punch up and the children get used as pawns.

“It polarises parents and it puts children in the middle of the antagonism. Some fathers back off because it is too painful to carry on litigating, they give up.”

Tim Loughton, the Tory Shadow children’s minister, told the Daily Telegraph, “This is alarming evidence of the very detrimental impact it is having on the welfare of the children themselves.

“Clearly, the court system is failing and is positively encouraging conflict - and continuing conflict.”

PARIS, France, May 18, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Dismantling of the family, attacks against parental rights and times of trouble for faith-based, mainly Catholic schools are looming large in French politics since France’s new socialist president, François Hollande, took over office from Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday morning at the Elysée, in Paris.

Government nominations, as well as Hollande’s inaugural speeches, are making it clear that ideological choices have been made and can be expected to be implemented in the near future. The discussion of a law instituting gay “marriage” has been announced for the Fall by the new Family minister – that is, if the French legislative elections in June vote in a socialist majority, which is considered likely.

Hollande’s first public act after the official investiture ceremonies at the Elysée Palace in Paris, on Tuesday, was to drive over to the nearby Tuileries gardens to pay tribute to the founder of the French state school system, Jules Ferry, whose monument was erected there in 1910 by the secularist “Ligue de l’enseignement” (League of Education).

The timing and the symbolism of this first presidential act was seen as a clear indicator that Hollande aims to intensify the role of the state in education and to step up control over what remains of the private school sector.

The new president’s speech front of former education ministers – exclusively of the socialist variety – teachers and dozens of children, used military phraseology to make his point. “School is the weapon of justice. It is the weapon of republican equality,” he said. A weapon to force “equality”, or to put it more clearly, egalitarianism.

School, as François Hollande sees it, is “the locus of equality.” “Equality of opportunity,” according to the new socialist president, means equality that “knows no other measure of distinction than personal merit and effort, since birth, fortune and chance establish hierarchies which schools have the mission, if not the duty, to correct, and even to destroy.”

Interesting omissions and changes to the written speech were made by François Hollande in his spoken delivery at this point. He left out the word “talents” as a legitimate measure of distinction and changed the phrase saying that the mission of schools regarding these hierarchies is “if not to abolish, at least to correct” them, choosing the much more aggressive formula quoted above.

This agenda, to be implemented in a country where large sections of the poorer suburbs of many major cities are mainly populated by ethnic minorities, many of them Muslim, has already shown its limits: the level of general culture of most school-leavers has gone steadily down over the past decades in a system where exactly the same curriculum is supposed to apply to all pupils up to age 14 or 15. In state schools leftist teachers’ organizations and progressive pedagogues have had the upper hand since 1968. François Hollande clearly intends to enhance their power and to dismantle the few concessions made to parental rights by the Sarkozy administration, which gave families a bit more freedom to choose a state school for their children and stepped up financial aids to private, state-funded schools.

Secularism is also a master word for schools according to Hollande. He sees schools as the “locus of emancipation”: emancipation from traditions and “dogma” in view of the “sovereign liberty of the spirit,” of reason left to itself. And also of reason destroyed: in state-funded French schools, be they public or private, whole reading methods and other pedagogical aberrations are effectively preventing a large percentage of French children from learning to read and think independently.

This is a far cry from the school of Jules Ferry, which formed minds and intelligences effectively, albeit in open conflict with religious beliefs.

Jules Ferry himself was remembered by François Hollande for two laws: the one which instituted cost-free primary schooling for all in 1881, and the law which in 1882 made schools secular and compulsory. At the time these laws were accompanied with persecution of faith-based schools and Catholic teaching congregations, many religious being expelled from the country or driven into exile.

Over the years, elements of freedom were returned to parents and nowadays 20% of pupils go to private, mostly Catholic schools where state curricula are obligatory, and teachers are formed and paid by the State. Only a fraction of schools are completely independent, receiving no direct public funds but entitled to issue tax refund forms for donations. These tax refunds are at risk of being suppressed under Hollande’s period of office.

The French Republic has long seen secularist state education as a means to counter the influence of families and faith. Hollande’s first speech on the matter, from which the words “parental rights” and “liberty” were totally absent, has made it clear that securalism is back with a vengeance.

As regards families, the naming of Mrs Dominique Bertinotti, a close friend of François Hollande’s ex-partner Ségolène Royal, as delegate minister to the Family, is seen as an insult to its defenders. Wednesday morning, hours before taking up her new office, she committed herself during an interview with the nationwide news radio “France-Info” to reduce tax relief associated with the number of children for richer families – less tax is owed when more persons form the “fiscal home” – in order to increase social aid to poorer families at the beginning of the school years. This would break with the French tradition of compensating a fraction of the extra charge children bring with them, whatever the social status of their family.

Bertinotti immediately promised to work on legalization of homosexual “marriage” and homosexual adoption and to “redefine” the meaning of the word family which should include, she says, not only the “classic” type but also “recomposed, single-parent and homoparental families,” so that they can obtain “exactly the same rights and be seen the same way by society, whatever their way of life.”

Mrs Bertinotti also intends to step up availability of public childcare systems, and to increase the number of 3, and even 2 year-olds in State schools.

AUGUSTA, MAINE, May 18, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The state of Maine has defunded family planning services, depriving an organization affiliated with Planned Parenthood of $400,000.

Governor Paul LePage, a Republican, signed a budget Wednesday morning designed to erase the state’s $83 million shortfall. One of the structural changes deprived Family Planning Association of Maine of $400,000 in taxpayer revenues.

Maine Right to Life Committee was enthusiastic about the change. In an alert posted on its website Wednesday, MRTLC stated, “In final votes last night, the Senate passed the budget 19-14 and the House approved it 75-61. Governor Paul LePage signed the budget this morning. As you know, the Governor’s 2013 budget defunds Family Planning Association of Maine and Planned Parenthood in the amount of $400,000.” 

Planned Parenthood of Northern New England’s website explained the difference between PPNNE and Maine FPA. “Think of us as a family tree with different branches and leaves,” its website states. “In Maine, the Family Planning Association of Maine (Maine FPA) provides technical assistance, statewide lobbying, performs grants management functions, trains physicians to provide abortions, and provides family planning services in Augusta.”

“This is a great day for Maine’s unborn and their mothers, who are better served by providers not compromised by the wholesale destruction of innocent human life. Abortion is not healthcare,” Maine Right to Life stated. “We believe Maine women and their children deserve better.”

Governor LePage also approved the budget. His spokeswoman,Adrienne Bennett, stated, “The governor’s encouraged the Republicans are making some of these structural changes that will move Maine forward.”

(Click “like” if you want to end abortion! )

The state’s liberal and feminist forces disagreed.

Eliza Townsend of the Maine Women’s Lobby said, “The programs that were slashed today are effective, proven strategies that improve public health, reduce unwanted pregnancies, prepare young children to learn, allow low-income parents to earn a living, and support our most fragile elderly. Cutting spending in these areas is shortsighted and fiscally irresponsible.”

“What the debate demonstrates is the difference between the parties,” said Sen. Philip Bartlett II, D-Gorham, a critic of the move.

In addition to the defunding Maine PFA, the new budget would take 19- and 20-year-olds off the state’s Medicaid rolls, and shrink its Head Start and prescription drug budget.

The state’s fiscal year ends June 30. Because of the vote margin, these reforms will not take place until mid-August.

Maine Right to Life Committee is asking all readers to send Governor LePage a note of appreciation:

Governor Paul LePage
The Blaine House
192 State St.
Augusta, ME 04330

MIAMI, FLORIDA, May 17, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney scheduled a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser at the home of Phil Frost, the executive of the company that makes the Morning After Pill, on Wednesday night. Plan B One-Step is produced by Teva Pharmaceuticals, Frost’s company.

The pharmaceutical executive’s residence was one of several stops scheduled to increase Romney’s war chest during a two-day swing through Florida.

“It’s a huge disappointment,” Brian Camenker, director of the Massachusetts-based pro-family organization MassResistance told LifeSiteNews.com. “You wouldn’t see someone who was really pro-life doing a fundraiser with somebody who helped the abortion industry.”

Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, didn’t seem troubled by the fundraiser saying, “What matters is whether a President Romney will end all taxpayer support for abortion-inducing drugs, repeal unconstitutional mandates that force private institutions to cover such drugs, and whether he will make progress in building a culture of life.”

Despite repeated media denials that Plan B is an abortion-inducing drug, the manufacturer’s website admits Plan B “may inhibit implantation” of an embryo after conception “by altering the endometrium.” Federal health officials have made the same determination. Studies have linked its use to increased STDs and ectopic pregnancies.

Concerned Women for America CEO Penny Nance told The Daily Caller she hoped Romney would return the money. The event made her “question if Gov. Romney has a clear understanding of what it means to be pro-life.”

Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul did not respond to a request from Bloomberg News about the visit.

(Click “like” if you want to end abortion! )

Aside from a few scattered voices, the pro-life movement has been largely silent. The Christian Science Monitor noted, “By Wednesday, there wasn’t much chatter in the conservative blogosphere about the fundraiser.”

That dichotomy works to Romney’s advantage – and the pro-life movement’s downfall, Camenker warned. Romney is in the advantageous position of running against Obama, Camenker told LifeSiteNews, and that will solidify pro-life support behind him “because nothing he does is going to be as bad as Obama.”

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney vetoed a bill providing Plan B over-the-counter and requiring hospitals to furnish it. The legislature overrode his veto – unanimously in the state senate. Subsequently, Romney ordered Catholic hospitals to offer the Morning After Pill on the legal advice of his personal counsel, Mark D. Nielsen, although many legal experts felt he had no legal obligation to do so.

Facing social conservative Rick Santorum in the primaries, Romney pledged to “get rid of” Planned Parenthood and protect the conscience rights of healthcare providers who oppose distributing what he called “abortive pills,” such as Plan B. The fundraiser did not indicate a change in position on those issues.

However, pro-family advocates liken it to the governor’s longstanding opposition to same-sex “marriage” (although not civil unions). Several prominent Romney donors support same-sex “marriage” and exercise far greater influence than conservatives.

Romney attended at least five fundraisers in southern Florida Wednesday and Thursday, which are expected to raise $5-8 million for his campaign.

LONDON, May 18, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent British Christian conservative ‘blogger is under attack from a government agency, at the behest of a homosexualist activist group, for supporting the defence of traditional marriage. Going by the pseudonym “Archbishop Cranmer” the ‘blogger has become an influential, tongue-in-cheek voice for social and moral conservatism critiquing liberal Britain, and is particularly popular with social conservatives within the Conservative Party.

Cranmer came under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) when he posted an ad for the petition being run by the Coalition for Marriage that recently tipped over half a million signatures, including those of several members of the House of Lords. He has been given until May 21 to answer the accusations against him from an alleged 24 anonymous complainants. He wrote that he was “instructed by the ‘Investigations Executive’ of this inquisition to keep all this confidential”.

Cranmer revealed that among the complainants was the campaign group the Jewish Gay & Lesbian Group, who described the advert as “offensive” and “homophobic”.

Reproducing the advert several more times on his blog, Cranmer has asked the ASA to clarify some points including why he alone among all the conservative ‘blogs and websites carrying the ad his was the object of a formal investigation:

“One presumes it has nothing to do with the fact that ConservativeHome is generously underpinned by Lord Ashcroft’s £millions, or that Guido Fawkes isn’t without the means to call in the lawyers or lacking the rottweiler tendency to tell you where to go. Why have you chosen to victimise and harass the weakest, lowliest, and most utterly insignificant of the blogs which carried this advertisement?”

“Since it appears that only a few hundred complaints out of some 26,000 per annum are selected by the ASA for such treatment, could you also please explain why this complaint was considered to be of such gravity that you saw fit to escalate directly to the status of ‘formal investigation’?”

The ASA said in its correspondence, “We require you to explain your rationale for the ad and comment specifically on the points raised in the attached complaint notification.”

The specific points include accusations that the ad was deemed by 10 of the complainants to be “offensive” and “homophobic” and to violate the advertising standards code rules on “misleading advertising,” “substantiation,” and harm and offence”.

The ASA demanded, “robust documentary evidence to back the claims and a clear explanation from you of its relevance.”

The legal defence organisation, Christian Concern for Our Nation, a member of the Coalition for Marriage, is working with Cranmer to craft a legal response. Andrea Minichiello Williams, CEO of Christian Concern, said, “There is increasing hostility against those who hold that marriage is between a man and a woman. Holding to the current legal definition of marriage now appears to be classified as offensive and homophobic.

“How much worse will it get if same-sex marriage is actually introduced? Freedom of speech and freedom of belief are hanging by a thread.”

The Coalition for Marriage has also responded, saying that the attack by the ASA is “bullying” and “over the top”. “a troubling sign of what may happen if marriage is redefined. Will the authorities pounce on every utterance in support of traditional marriage?

“Will activists demand punitive action every time someone thoughtlessly uses the deeply offensive, heterosexist phrase ‘husband and wife’? Yes, the ASA has lost all sense [of] perspective. But a loss of perspective is what happens when ordinary people are ignored.”

Cranmer himself has responded by going on the attack, blogger-style, revealing that the Chairman of the ASA and former Labour MP Chris Smith, now appointed to the House of Lords as Baron Smith of Finsbury, moonlights as Vice President of The Campaign for Homosexual Equality.  Smith has been described by the homosexual news service Pink News as among the 30 most powerful homosexual people in British politics.

Cranmer wrote, “Naturally, His Grace apologises in advance to all those who find this educative illustration offensive and homophobic, for it is never his intention to be either offensive or homophobic. But those of you who do find it offensive and homophobic are free not to visit His Grace’s blog whenever you wish.”

Neil Addison, a barrister and expert in religious discrimination law, wrote that the only response to such attacks are outright defiance. Addison also posted the ad to his ‘blog and encouraged others to do the same.

“I get so fed up with the small minded little Hitlers who seem to infest organisations such as the ASA and the Equality and Human Rights Commission that I have added it to my Blog simply as an expression of solidarity with my fellow Blogger.”

“We in this country fought a war to defend our right to speak freely and express our opinions but clearly the ASA are not aware of that fact.”

Even the anti-Christian pressure group, the National Secular Society, has called the ASA’s action “authoritarian” and announced its support for Cranmer’s ‘blog. In a media release, the NSS said the “eccentric Christian blogger” is being martyred “all over again,” referring to the ‘blogger’s 16th century namesake, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the protestant author of the Book of Common Prayer who was executed by Queen Mary I.

Cranmer’s “wit and style is more than a match” for the ASA, the NSS said. Although they disagree with his goals, and called the Coalition a group of “the most extreme and unpleasant religious bigots in Britain” the NSS said the ASA is “overstepping the mark and posing a rather sinister threat to freedom of expression”.

“In a democracy we believe that they have the right to express their opinion so long as it doesn’t incite violence. The fact that some people find those opinions “offensive” is not reason enough to silence them.”

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 17, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Social issues continue to animate state legislatures across the country as many approach the summer recess. Pro-life measures are advancing – but so, too, are bills that would undermine the traditional family and even punish those who recognize traditional forms of sexual identity and appearance.

(Click “like” if you want to end abortion! )

South Carolina
After years of failed efforts, both houses of the South Carolina legislature have passed a born alive infants’ protection act. The House unanimously approved the bill, which says doctors must attempt to save any baby who survives an abortion, by a 107-0 vote. The Senate approved the bill by a decisive 27-3 margin last month. It faces one final vote, which the Associated Press describes as “perfunctory,” before going to the governor’s desk. Americans United for Life President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest called the measure “the most commonsense pro-life bill available. Surely all Americans can agree that a child–born, helpless and living–deserves the protections of the law and the compassion of all people.” The state bill mirrors the federal act, which passed in 2002. Barack Obama opposed protection for infants born alive as an Illinois state senator.

Ohio
After an amendment to a previous bill failed, a new stand-alone bill may place Planned Parenthood at the end of the line for state funding. House Bill 298, now before the House Health Committee prefers local health providers. The new funding formula threatens to cut off the $1.6 million Ohioans currently give Planned Parenthood’s 32 clinics statewide.

New York
The state of New York may amend all state anti-discrimination laws to punish employers or landlords who do not hire or rent to transgender people. The new standing would apply to employment and housing, as well. The Senate Rules Committee Under President Obama, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and HUD both interpret sex discrimination as including transgender discrimination – for instance, refusing to hire a transgender person for a public position or refusing to rent a room to a transgender person. The state Assembly has already passed the bill on an 81-59 vote. The Gender Expression and Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) bill has passed the Assembly five times. State Senator Daniel Squadron, D-NY, said he believes “the votes are there” if the bill comes before the full body. “It seems to be a core civil rights issue,” he said.

Louisiana
Two pro-life measures have advanced in the Pelican State. A bill introduced by State Senator Sharon Weston Broome, D-Baton Rouge, that would give women the opportunity to hear a fetal heartbeat before undergoing an abortion passed the House Health and Welfare Committee. The state senator testified in the other chamber on its behalf. One of the bill’s opponents, Jackie Hawkins, told the press, “No woman seeking an abortion would want these images and sounds replayed in her head day after day.” Meanwhile, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee unanimously supported a fetal pain bill introduced by Senate President John Alario, R-Westwego. It would end abortion at the time infants begin to feel pain, at 20 weeks after fertilization. 

Missouri
Missouri is one step closer to protecting the conscience rights of healthcare workers. The House passed a measure allowing pro-life individuals to refuse to distribute contraceptives or abortifacients that would violate their conscience by a 117-37 vote. Majority Floor Leader Tim Jones, R-Eureka, said the bill protected Missourians from “the onerous mandates contained in the federal healthcare takeover.” A joint House-Senate Committee will now try to reconcile two bills passed by the two chambers, which differ on numerous points.

On another front, crisis pregnancy centers will operate free of harassment if a bill passed by the Missouri House becomes law. State Representative Chuck Gatschenberger, a Republican, introduced a measure forbidding local governments from harassing the women’s centers. He said he acted to assure the cash-strapped healthcare agencies do not have to use their limited resources fighting lawsuits or unconstitutional laws infringing on their First Amendment rights. 

Alabama
A bill requiring more stringent health care standards from abortion clinics appears doomed. The state’s abortion mills would have to provide the same standards as ambulatory care clinics. The bill, introduced by State Representative Mary Sue McClurkin, a Republican from Pelham, passed the House by an overhelming 93-4 vote but died in the Senate Finance and Taxation-Education Committee. Rep. McClurkin promises to reintroduce the bill next February.

Colorado
Defenders of marriage are warning civil unions are not dead yet. Governor John Hickenlooper called a special session of the legislature to pass the bill on May 9. Although the bill – which would allow any two non-related people to declare themselves in a union and enjoy tax and other benefits – failed, it could be reactivated as long as the legislature is in session. “The civil unions bill is a vehicle by which gay activists who support same-sex marriage can file suit in federal court against Colorado’s marriage amendment, which was passed by 56 percent of voters in 2006,” Citizenlink spokeswoman Carrie Gordon Earll told the Catholic News Agency. 

New Hampshire
The House reversed itself on a measure that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks in the state of New Hampshire. After approving the measure on Thursday by a four-vote margin, the House voted it down by 183-95. The State Senate had shown no signs the measure would pass the provision, which was attached to a larger bill allowing physicians to detect brain injuries sooner.