Scrolling around...September 13, 2012

Canada: Education Minister supports school boards in refusing parents’ right to pull kids from sex classes
As a Hamilton father fights his school board in court for the right to protect his children from classes on sexuality that he considers objectionable, Ontario’s Education Minister is backing the board.
In a statement to LifeSiteNews about whether she supports the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board’s decision to forbid religious accommodation to students seeking to withdraw from classes dealing with homosexuality, Education Minister Laurel Broten says school boards may refuse parents’ requests for religious accommodation if they deem fit...

The Biblical Literacy of Teenage Believers
Youth ministry researcher Chap Clark says, “I’m convinced that the single most important area where we’ve lost ground with kids is in our commitment and ability to ground them in God’s Word.”
As a result, Barry Shafer says, “The church today, including both the adult and teenage generations, is in an era of rampant biblical illiteracy.” Duffy Robbins takes this one step further when he says: “Our young people have become incapable of theological thinking because they don’t have any theology to think about. … And, as Paul warns us, this … leaves us as ‘infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching’ (Ephesians 4:14).”...

ISLAMISTS Storm US Embassy in Yemen – Torch US Flag & Vehicles (Video)
Chanting “death to America,” hundreds of protesters angered by an anti-Islam film stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen’s capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

American missions have been attacked in three Arab nations — Yemen, Egypt and Libya — that have faced persistent unrest and are struggling to restore law and order after last year’s revolts deposed their authoritarian regimes...

Las Vegas: Obama compares campaign volunteers to murdered embassy staff
...“And obviously [our] hearts are broken for the families but I wanted to encourage those folks at the State Dept. that they were making a difference,” Obama told volunteer leaders in Las Vegas, according to the pool report. “The sacrifices that our troops and our diplomats make are obviously very different from the challenges that we face here domestically but like them, you guys are Americans who sense that we can do better than we’re doing….I’m just really proud of you.”...

Congress to Block Obama Admin. Welfare Law Changes
Last week, the General Accounting Office (GAO) determined that the Obama administration did change the work requirements in the Welfare Reform Act. On Thursday, two House committees -- Ways and Means and Education and the Workforce -- will introduce resolutions to allow Congress to block the rule change that allows states to effectively waive the law’s work requirements...

Chicago Teachers’ Strike: Last Straw for Voters?
...The $400 million increase in the CPS offer over the next four years would have made the situation even worse. Yet rather than accept that while the city and state try to find other ways to balance the budget and improve performance, the teachers walked out on hundreds of thousands of students, many poor and disadvantaged – not least by their own public school system – and stuck to what the late Mike Royko often insisted was the city’s true motto: Ubi est mea? Where’s mine?...

Unrecorded Muslim Marriages, Bigamy, and Polygamy
...In a review of over 70 sharia Muslim divorce cases for a  policy study, this author earlier demonstrated that it is not unusual for a husband to leverage the sharia customs, which avoid city hall, against the courthouse route, which would enforce civil and constitutional requirements. A wife does not have much of a case against a husband who wishes to escape support or dowry responsibilities when a judge cannot legally recognize the marriage from square one. Even sharia-promoting legal advocacy groups which promote sharia la note the tendency of Muslim husbands to find jurisdictions where there is room to game the system.

The few cases which do make it to the courts are representative of a much larger problem. Adherents of strict sharia law often perform verbal divorces, with the result that many cases are not submitted to a judge. The wife rarely has access to the resources required to contest the terms of the divorce or to appeal an erroneous determination. In this case, there were multiple proceedings as the intermediate court rationalized the terms of the marriage to pass muster, but found that the verbal divorce did not meet legal standards and so concluded that the second marriage was indeed bigamous. The cumulative costs at the end of three trials had to be staggering...