In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court Monday affirmed the freedom of Americans to pray according to their own beliefs at public meetings in the landmark religious freedom case Town of Greece v. Galloway.
Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court has acquitted an evangelical pastor on charges of “severe damage to health due to negligence” after praying for an ill man, but devoted Christians in another former Soviet republic, Azerbaijan, were awaiting whether a high court would ban their church.
Being a Christian in Uzbekistan can be costly. Just ask Galina Shemetova who was ordered to pay a fine of 2,486,750 som, 50 times the minimum monthly pay for giving a colleague a children’s Bible. This amounts to $60,320US, four times the yearly pre-tax salary of a 40 hour-a-week minimum wage earner. Miss Shemetova not only had to pay the fine, but she was also beaten physically by police, a fact known by the Tashkent Court of Appeals.
A Christian advocacy group expressed concern Monday, September 12 over “an unprecedented” decision by the United States to “deny asylum to a “house-church” Christian from Communist China.”
WASHINGTON (BP)–Threatened by fines, residents of a small town in Indiana say they were forced to remove a monument displaying the Ten Commandments from the lawn of the local courthouse after a federal judge ruled on behalf of the state’s civil liberties union.
ANN ARBOR, MI) – In the same week that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, a federal lawsuit was filed in San Francisco Monday after Christian students across California were forced to pretend they were Muslims for three weeks, praying in the name of Allah the Compassionate the Merciful, chanting Praise to Allah, picking a Muslim name from a list to replace their own name and to stage their own Jihad via a dice game.
WASHINGTON (ABP) — U.S. Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments Feb. 28 in a dispute over whether a Christian youth organization should be allowed to meet with children directly after school hours in an upstate New York public school. While the high court has before ruled in favor of religious groups using school facilities to discuss secular topics from a religious perspective, this raises new questions.
(Washington, DC) – The American Center for Law and Justice, an international public interest law firm, today filed a petition for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to hear an equal access case from Arizona and to overturn a federal appeals court decision that said the City of Tucson acted properly when it discriminated against a couple, Patricia and Robert Gentala, who organized a public event celebrating the National Day of Prayer in 1997.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (BP)–A 9-4 federal court ruling for Ohio’s motto, “With God, all things are possible,” is “an important victory for freedom and a sound defeat for those who want to strip our nation of its religious heritage,” constitutional attorney Jay Sekulow said.