Human Rights

On September 28, President Obama picked up the phone and called Iranian President Rouhani who was traveling back to JFK airport after speaking at the United Nations in New York. In addition to discussing Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program, the presidents spoke about Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen, who was arrested because of his faith while visiting Iran over a year ago. This was the first time since the Islamic revolution of 1979 that a U.S. President has spoken with an Iranian president. Secretary of State John Kerry and the U.S. Congress have also been calling for Pastor Saeed’s release.

On September 19, a bipartisan group introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives that would prevent the federal government from discriminating through the tax code against individual religious believers who hold the principle that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. According to bill author, Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID)H.R. 3133, the “Marriage and Religious Freedom Act,” “will ensure tolerance for individuals and organizations that affirm traditional marriage, protecting them from adverse federal action.” The bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Steve Scalise, Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC), and Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL).

By David Hamstra – It is tempting to resolve the question in favor of one or the other depending on what our moral intuitions tell us about the way the world should be, but to do so, as I will argue later, is to impose upon the weak the vision of morality held by the powerful, putting our society on a trajectory towards totalitarianism. Instead, I want to propose an principled way to approach these cases that will hopefully allow those on either side to find common ground.

Yesterday, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment does not protect a photographer’s decision not to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony even if it would violate the photographer’s deeply held religious beliefs.

Sajjad Masih, 29, was convicted of sending blasphemous text messages in 2011, despite his accuser’s subsequent retraction and prosecutors’ failure to produce any evidence of his involvement.

Today Australia faces a moral question for our age. This time it isn’t desperate European Jews searching for a sanctuary, it is desperate Iranians fleeing one of the world’s most repressive regimes. It is Iraqi Christians who have been murdered, bombed and beaten unmercifully since the invasion that we were a part of. It is shell-shocked Syrians caught between a despotic ruler on one side and jihadists on the other.

The story of Savonarola is not a lesson in the necessity of violence for a successful revolution, but rather a lesson in the dangerous consequences of speaking truth to power.

Although Bishop was the UC Davis scholar-athlete of the year in 2007, and was phenomenally successful on the course, even without Saturday play, he eventually gave up a promising career as a professional golfer in favor of a medical career because he knew that he could not continue to keep the Sabbath from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday and participate in professional tournaments.

Neither Hollingsworth nor Windsor demand that any church, even in states that allow gay marriage, be forced to conduct gay weddings. Moreover, these decisions do not affect the ability of churches to decry homosexuality or homosexual conduct as immoral.

An NIH-funded study at the University of Washington is intended to determine whether there are adverse effects of cannabis use by pregnant women on infants. The best case scenario is if the baby develops normally to the point of matching the “control group” that was not exposed to marijuana. At worst, they might be born underweight, have cognitive and behavioral disorders, or develop physical brain abnormalities identified in imaging studies, or fail to survive.