Category: Religious Freedom

In Boston, the municipal government concluded that allowing a private group—Camp Constitution—to temporarily lift its Christian flag on a city-owned flagpole would suggest that the city was establishing a religion—and, thus, violating the First Amendment.
On the same flagpole, however, Boston itself raised the flag of the People’s Republic of China.

When Steven Smith reflects on the magnitude of the modern school prayer conflict, he thinks about how it all started with a prayer that was just a sentence long. That prayer, produced by the New York board of regents in the early 1950s, had been carefully crafted to avoid causing offense. It was meant to boost public schoolchildren’s moral education, not to challenge whatever their parents or pastors had taught them about God.

The bill dramatically limits public entities’ ability to shut down churches during an emergency.

The Fairfax County School Board approved changes to its student code of conduct on cellphone usage and transgender rights after a long, heated school board meeting Thursday night. The board passed restrictive cellphone rules and also expanded punishment for students who “misgender” or “deadname” transgender classmates. In an 8-4 vote, the northern Virginia school board approved changes to its Student Rights and Responsibilities policy that categorized “discriminatory harassment” on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation as “behaviors of safety concern.”

The latest data corroborating the positive impact of the Gospel comes from the American Bible Society’s twelfth annual “State of the Bible” report, which “shows that Americans who consistently read and apply the Bible report greater levels of hope and resilience.”

A proposed regulation expanding oversight of private schools by the New York Department of Education has set up a clash between the state government and the state’s Orthodox Jewish community, who see the proposal as an attack on religious freedom .

Earlier this year, state education officials released a proposal requiring private schools to provide “substantially equivalent instruction” to the public school system. The proposal would substantially increase the amount of state oversight of private schools while tightening curriculum requirements.

This initiative is part of the Chair presented Culture of the Ramon Llull University and the Department of Justice of the regional government, through the Directorate General of Religious Affairs. The aim of the event, according to the organizers, is to “spark debate, share good practices and everything that can be found in the research on this fundamental human right”.

A bomb and gun attack left more than 70 victims during a mass in the southwest of the country.