The new session of the US Supreme Court starts soon with the first meeting of the justices on the 29th of this month and they already have seven petitions on same-sex marriage submitted to them as a result of Appeals Court verdicts. These cases consist of three from Virginia, and one each from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin.
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A three judge panel of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously struck down same-sex marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana. You can read the history of the case here and the opinion here.
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As was expected, the full panel of judges in the DC District Court of Appeals has decided to re-hear the Halbig v. Burwell case where a panel of three judges voted 2-1 that the tax credits provided by the federal government was not allowed under the Affordable Care Act, saying that the language of the act only allowed exchanges set up the states to do so.
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Even since the US Supreme Court’s United States v. Windor decision in 2013 that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, every single challenge to state bans on same-sex marriage has been overturned in the federal courts. Until today, when the movement received its first setback.
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I have previously written about the US Attorney in our region Steven Dettelbach being an overzealous prosecutor. One example of this is his use of civil asset forfeiture laws to deprive people of their possessions without having to first convict them of any wrongdoing. Another is his use of terrorism charges against hapless individuals who were lured into plotting to blow up a local bridge. The third was his use of federal hate crime laws against 16 members of an Amish group that cut off the beards of other Amish people in an internal dispute because one sect’s leader thought that the other Amish were not sufficiently observant and pious. By stretching federal hate crime and conspiracy laws to an extreme level, Dettelbach obtained convictions and harsh sentences against the defendants in each case.
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We know that the Catholic church takes its consecrated wafers, which they believe have been transformed into the body of Jesus, very, very seriously, as PZ Myers (among many others) can attest when they treated it as just another wafer and triggered a massive outcry.
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We tend to think of the US Supreme Court as being sharply split along ideological lines. But as this article points out, that is because the media focuses on a few high profile cases which have an elevated profile precisely because they are split that way. In actuality, there is a remarkable degree of agreement among the justices in their rulings, with even the lowest level being 66% between Ginsburg and Thomas
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You would think that those religious people who insist on inserting religion into government would have been satisfied with the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Greece v. Galloway case that said that it was not unconstitutional for governmental entities to open their meetings with prayers.
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A federal judge ruled on August 7, 2014 that a privately-funded Ten Commandments monument that on July 4, 2011 was placed on the lawn in front of the city hall of the town of Bloomfield in New Mexico must be removed by September 10, 2014 as a result of suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of two people, one of whom Jane Felix is a Wiccan, a high priestess with the Order of the Cauldron of the Sage.
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Ryan Devereaux reports that five people have now sued the government for infringing on their civil liberties by placing them on no-fly lists and otherwise harassing them using its massive database to put them on watch lists and used it to pressure them.
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