Category Archives: Religion

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, May 26, 2020: 

The letter sent to three Romanian Churches near Chicago from the city’s health commissioner was chilling: “If you continue to operate in defiance of the Executive Order [the “Stay at Home” order issued by Governor J.B. Pritzker], the City will pursue all available legal remedies, including … Summary Abatement.”

The three churches — Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church, Metro Praise International, and Philadelphia Romanian Church — received orders on Friday, May 15, not to hold in-person worship services until public-health officials deemed that it was safe to do so. On Sunday the 17th, they held in-person services anyway.

This generated a letter on May 22 from Allison Arwady, MD, Commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Public Health (CDPH) that was hand-delivered to each pastor. In it, she reviewed some history and refreshed her threats:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, March 11, 2020: 

For Joe Kennedy, the former coach of Washington’s Bremerton High Junior Varsity football team, it’s been a long five years. He coached the team from 2008 until his contract wasn’t renewed in 2015. For those seven years, after every game, he would take 15 seconds to go out to the 50-yard line and pray for his players.

And for seven years nobody minded. Nobody said anything. Nobody sued. Nobody even threatened to sue.

But when a school administrator paid a public compliment for how the coach was positively impacting the lives of his players, the school board told Kennedy to stop. When he didn’t, the board decided not to renew his contract.

Kennedy enlisted the help of First Liberty, a non-profit public interest law firm that specializes in such First Amendment cases. Together they sued the board, claiming it violated his First Amendment rights. And they lost.

So they appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And they lost again. So they appealed to the Supreme Court. And lost. But with a disclaimer: there were enough loose ends to the case that needed to be resolved at the lower court’s level to keep the court from reviewing Kennedy’s claim.

In the Supreme Court’s denial in January 2019, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh added a statement to the public record, explaining that “important unresolved factual questions would make it very difficult if not impossible at this stage to decide the free speech question that [Kennedy] asks us to review.”

The justices then excoriated the Ninth Circuit Court’s reasoning: “The Ninth Circuit’s opinion applies our decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos to public school teachers and coaches in a high tendentious [i.e., biased] way.”

That decision ruled that statements made by public employees in the normal conduct of their official duties are not protected by the First Amendment. It ruled that public employees are not speaking as citizens when they are speaking to fulfill a responsibility of their job. It held that the First Amendment does not prevent employees from being disciplined for making statements that are made “pursuant” to their professional duties.

But the Ninth Circuit stretched that ruling out of all recognition, according to the justices:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, March 10, 2020: 

U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Leighton ruled against Bremerton High School’s football coach Joe Kennedy last week, saying that “although the Court is sympathetic to Kennedy’s desire to follow his beliefs, the former must give way to the latter in this case.” The “latter” to which Leighton referred is the right of Bremerton High School to fire the coach when he took 15 seconds at the end of a football game to pray for his players on the 50-yard line.

Kennedy coached the school’s JV football team for seven years, and for seven years he took time after each game to pray for his players. And for seven years nobody minded. Nobody said anything. Nobody sued. Nobody even threatened to sue.

But when a school administrator paid a public compliment for how the coach was positively impacting the lives of his players, the school board told Kennedy to stop. When he didn’t, the board decided not to renew his contract.

Kennedy enlisted the help of First Liberty, a non-profit public-interest law firm that specializes in such First Amendment cases. Together they sued the board, claiming it violated his First Amendment-protected rights. And they lost.

So they appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And they lost again. So they appealed to the Supreme Court. And lost, but with a caveat: There were enough loose ends to the case that needed to be resolved at the lower court’s level to keep the court from reviewing Kennedy’s claim.

In the Supreme Court’s denial in January 2019, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh added a statement to the public record, explaining that

This article was first published at The Daily Signal on January 29, 2020. It was written by Chase Windebank, a high school student attending Pine Creek High School in Colorado Springs. 

How does a young man find himself standing behind the president of the United States in the Oval Office of the White House?

I invited a friend to pray with me.

Actually, I invited several friends during my freshman year at Pine Creek High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We had a free period in the middle of the school day. A lot of my classmates used the time to just hang out, or to text or talk about their plans for the weekend.

I thought it might be a good time to find an empty room and a few good friends who would enjoy praying together and encouraging one another in our shared faith.

We did that for three years. Gradually, word got around, and more and more young people joined us.

By the time I was a senior, some 90 other students were in that room twice a week. We enjoyed a strong sense of community as we met to pray for each other, our teachers and school, and even our nation.

During my senior year, however, something changed.