‘Pro-Life’ John Kasich Vetoes Bill Banning Abortions on Babies With Heartbeats

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Today, outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich vetoed for the second time a bill that would have prevented babies with beating hearts from being aborted. . .

“As governor, I have worked hard to strengthen Ohio’s protections for the sanctity of human life, and I have a deep respect for my fellow members of the pro-life community and their ongoing efforts in defense of unborn life,” said Kasich. “However, the central provision of Sub. H.B. 258, that an abortion cannot be performed if a heartbeat has been detected in the unborn child, is contrary to the Supreme Court of the United States’ current rulings on abortion.” . . .

On the same day he vetoed the bill, which would have made Ohio the safest state in the country for pre-born children, Kasich signed a ban on dismemberment abortions. The move is reminiscent of his veto of the 2016 heartbeat bill, which he did the same time he signed a 20-week abortion ban into law. . .

“History will judge leaders by what they did or did not do in difficult, inconvenient, yet life saving moments,” said Pastor Rodney Lord of Marietta. Lord leads a coalition of pastors and leaders in southeast Ohio and has a daily radio spot with an audience of 150,000.

“Speaker Smith, Senate President Obhof, and our state legislators have an opportunity to do something significant, meaningful, and life-saving,” said Lori Viars of Warren County Right To Life. (Read more from “‘Pro-Life’ John Kasich Vetoes Bill Banning Abortions on Babies With Heartbeats” HERE)

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Christian Baker Who Refused to Bake a Gay Wedding Cake Is Back in Court Over a ‘Transition Day’ Cake

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By The Blaze. Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who gained global attention for refusing to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, was back in court earlier this week, The Associated Press reported.

The Christian baker and his lawyers are fighting back against allegations that he discriminated against transgender lawyer Autumn Scardina when he denied her request for a “transition day” cake.

“At this point, he’s just a guy who is trying to get back to life. The problem is the state of Colorado won’t let him,” Jim Campbell, an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, told the AP after Tuesday’s hearing. Alliance Defending Freedom is the Christian nonprofit law firm representing Phillips. . .

“All people — no matter who they are, what they believe, or what protected characteristics they have — are welcome in Phillips’ shop and may purchase anything available for sale,” according to the lawsuit. “But as a devout man of faith, Phillips cannot create custom cakes that express messages or celebrate events in conflict with his religious beliefs.”

The lawsuit points out that the baker has received calls asking for cakes to celebrate “Satan, featuring satanic symbols, depicting sexually explicit materials, and promoting marijuana use. Phillips believes that some of those requests came from the same Colorado lawyer.” (Read more from “Christian Baker Who Refused to Bake a Gay Wedding Cake Is Back in Court Over a ‘Transition Day’ Cake” HERE)

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Colorado Baker Back in Court Over Second Bias Allegation

By AP. Attorneys for a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds — a stand partially upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — argued in federal court Tuesday that the state is punishing him again over his refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition. . .

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission said Phillips discriminated against Denver attorney Autumn Scardina because she’s transgender. Phillips’ shop refused to make a cake last year that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside after Scardina revealed she wanted it to celebrate her transition from male to female.

She asked for the cake on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider Phillips’ appeal of the previous commission ruling against him. In that 2012 case, he refused to make a wedding cake for same-sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins. (Read more from “Colorado Baker Back in Court Over Second Bias Allegation” HERE)

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Sacha Baron Cohen: We Stumbled Upon Possible Pedophile Ring During ‘Who Is America’ Taping, Notified FBI

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Showtime host Sacha Baron Cohen revealed Wednesday that he stumbled upon what he thought could be a possible pedophile ring while taping his controversial summer series “Who is America?”

During a classic Baron Cohen-style fake interview, the comedian plays a character named Gio who eventually asks a Las Vegas concierge to get him an underaged boy as a “date.” After this concierge offered to put “Gio” in touch with a person who apparently procures such boys, Baron Cohen turned the troubling footage over to the FBI.

“We were shooting some of this at the time of Harvey Weinstein. We wanted to investigate how does someone like Harvey Weinstein gets away with doing what … get away with criminality, essentially. And the network that surrounds him. We decided that Gio would interview a concierge in Las Vegas,” Baron Cohen explained to Deadline.

“During the interview, I revealed that basically Gio has molested an eight-year-old boy,” he continued. “Now, mind you, this is extreme comedy and we thought that the guy would leave the room. Instead, this concierge stays in the room and I go, listen, you’ve got to help me get rid of the problem. And this guy starts advising Gio how to get rid of this issue. We even at one point talk about murdering the boy, and the concierge is just saying, ‘well, listen, I’m really sorry. In this country, we can’t just drown the boy. This is America we don’t do that.’ And then, in the end, he puts me in touch with a lawyer who can silence the boy.” . . .

The footage was immediately handed over to the FBI by Baron Cohen’s team “because we thought, perhaps there’s a pedophile ring in Las Vegas that’s operating for these very wealthy men,” he told Deadline. “And this concierge had said that he’d worked for politicians and various billionaires.” (Read more from “Sacha Baron Cohen: We Stumbled Upon Possible Pedophile Ring During ‘Who Is America’ Taping, Notified FBI” HERE)

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Catholic Church in Illinois May Have Hidden Hundreds of Complaints of Sexual Misconduct

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The Catholic Church in Illinois, which includes the Chicago Archdiocese, may have hidden hundreds of allegations of sexual misconduct made against priests and other members of the clergy, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said in a press conference late Wednesday. . .

“Madigan opened an investigation into the issue in Illinois in August after a grand jury report revealed widespread clergy abuse in Pennsylvania,” the news site continued. “The attorney general has been reviewing thousands of pages of internal documents released from each of Illinois’ six diocese as part of its investigation.”

Each diocese in Illinois has released a list of “credibly” accused members of the clergy, Madigan said, but those lists only include around 185 names, total, and don’t reference other priests who were accused of misconduct but were not “adequately investigated.” Each individual diocese, including Chicago, has its own definition of an “adequate investigation,” and there are no uniform rules for handling claims of sexual misconduct or reporting allegations to law enforcement. . .

The news comes on the heels of a separate report issued by the Midwest Province of Jesuits that claims at least 65 Jesuit brothers and priests across 12 states have been “credibly accused” of sexual misconduct, including 18 priests who operated within the Chicago archdiocese. “Half a dozen” of those priests were teachers at a Chicago-area prep school.

According to the report, one of those priests, Fr. Donald McGuire, was moved around several times over the course of four decades before being finally defrocked in 2007 — only after being convicted of bringing a minor across state lines for the purpose of having sexual contact. (Read more from “Catholic Church in Illinois May Have Hidden Hundreds of Complaints of Sexual Misconduct” HERE)

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Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees

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By The New York Times. . .That includes Planned Parenthood, which has been accused of sidelining, ousting or otherwise handicapping pregnant employees, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.

In interviews and legal documents, women at Planned Parenthood and other organizations with a feminist bent described discrimination that violated federal or state laws — managers considering pregnancy in hiring decisions, for example, or denying rest breaks recommended by a doctor. . .

At Natera, which sells genetic tests for pregnant women, two former employees, Melissa Blain Johnson and Judit Rigo, said they were demoted while on maternity leave. Ms. Johnson, who has sued Natera, also said that she was left feeling like a “guinea pig” when her boss suggested that she and another pregnant employee pose as patients and get genetically tested by a rival company. (Read more from “Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees” HERE)

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Planned Parenthood Employees Accuse Organization of Mistreating Pregnant Workers

By The Hill. Former and current Planned Parenthood employees accuse the women’s health organization of mistreating its pregnant workers in a New York Times investigation published Thursday.

The Times interviewed more than a dozen current and former employees who said Planned Parenthood discriminated against workers when they became pregnant and that some offices fostered a culture that discouraged workers from becoming pregnant. . .

“It was looked down upon for you to get pregnant,” Carolina Delgado, who worked in the Planned Parenthood Miami office until 2012, told the newspaper. “I don’t think that any supervisor had to literally say it for us to feel it.”

One former Planned Parenthood hiring manager who worked in California told the Times that she witnessed supervisors declining to promote certain employees depending on whether they were likely to get pregnant.

The Times said that 49 of the organization’s 55 regional offices do not offer paid maternity leave. (Read more from “Planned Parenthood Employees Accuse Organization of Mistreating Pregnant Workers” HERE)

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Why It’s Not Discrimination for Christian Agencies to Only Recruit Christian Foster and Adoptive Parents

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In October, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that claims to be founded on Jewish values, accused South Carolina’s Miracle Hill foster care agency of discrimination for exclusively serving Christian parents. The ADL blasted Miracle Hill’s action of recruiting only Christian foster care parents as “immoral” and “deeply disturbing.”

But the ADL forgets that, for more than a century, American Jewish organizations have placed Jewish children with Jewish families. During World War II, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the German Jewish Children’s Aid Society (GJCAS) helped Jewish orphans fleeing Nazi persecution find homes with Jewish families in the United States. Five decades later, as Jewish orphans fled the Soviet Union, Jewish organizations in the United States helped them find Jewish homes. This was not a story about discrimination, it was about preservation—of shared traditions, history, and values.

Rather than honor these traditions, the ADL has joined the American left’s ongoing crusade to eradicate faith from our nation’s foster care and adoption agencies. In Philadelphia, Catholic Social Services is desperately fighting the city for the right to continue to serve children without sacrificing its Catholic principles. In Buffalo, New York, Catholic Charities was forced to end its adoption services because of its practice of placing a child only with both a mom and a dad. . .

The ADL thinks that publicly funding faith-based adoption agencies violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, but it is wrong. Although the First Amendment prohibits any “establishment of religion,” its framers never thought that providing funding to religious organizations on the same basis as to secular organizations would count as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Indeed, the Supreme Court held in Trinity Lutheran that the government may fund religious organizations on equal footing with secular ones without running afoul of the establishment clause.

What this case is really about is the free exercise of religion under our laws. That is why faith-based agencies like Miracle Hill need President Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services to implement regulations that support one of our most cherished founding principles: religious freedom. (Read more from “Why It’s Not Discrimination for Christian Agencies to Only Recruit Christian Foster and Adoptive Parents” HERE)

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The Female Gender Symbol Is Now Offensive

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A Massachusetts all-women’s college found out the hard way that any attempt to include anything relating to gender or sex will be met with scorn in today’s society. . .

This angered students and alumni who don’t identify as women, and the school was forced to apologize and withdraw the logo design:

This past Thursday, we had the occasion to solicit feedback on the design firm’s identity work from a group of students. We listened to feedback regarding the use of the Venus symbol as an option for the brand identity and logo, as proposed by the consultants. It is now evident to us that this symbol has a long history of exclusion connected to movements that, while trailblazing for some groups, represents the erasure of others.

We have thus determined that the College cannot move forward with a word mark that references this symbol as we rethink how we will distinguish Mount Holyoke College. While it is always disappointing to realize that our creative work has not achieved its goals, it is deeply upsetting to realize that the work is seen as offensive and damaging.

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A year later, trans activists succeeded in shutting down a performance of the “Vagina Monologues” because it was not trans-inclusive. Eve Ensler, the creator of the Monologues, penned a response saying she was “surprised” by MHC’s response to her work, and insisted it was not exclusive and noted that an all-trans rendition was performed in 2004. (Read more from “The Female Gender Symbol Is Now Offensive” HERE)

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6-Month-Old Baby Girl Found Alive, Floating in Pond After Father Says He Drowned Her

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By The Blaze. A 6-month-old was miraculously discovered alive, floating face up in a Missouri pond on Monday, after her father walked into the Greenwood Police Department and confessed — so he thought — to drowning his baby girl.

Police rushed to rescue the infant, retrieved her from the water and were able to revive her after performing CPR. She had been in the water for an estimated 10 minutes or more and was found with mud in her eyes, and grass in her mouth.

Jonathon Zicarelli, 28, made his way to the department around 10 a.m., telling police that he had just drowned his daughter and that he saw her sink after placing her in the water, according to KSHB-TV.

Cpl. T. Calhoun and Police Chief Greg Hallgrimson leapt into action, sped to the location of the pond, and found the child floating on her back in the water. Hallgrimson said the infant wasn’t moving when they found her and that she looked like a porcelain doll.

Calhoun quickly performed CPR on the baby girl after pulling her from the water, and she began to breath normally. The officers removed her wet clothing and Calhoun wrapped her in his own uniform shirt in an attempt to warm the child, who was taken to a local hospital where she is recovering from severe hypothermia. (Read more from “6-Month-Old Baby Girl Found Alive, Floating in Pond After Father Says He Drowned Her” HERE)

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6-Month-Old Baby Recovering After Father Admitted to Trying to Drown It

By KSHB. . .Zicarelli told detectives he was having “bad thoughts” and said he was stressed out by the holidays and thought killing his daughter would make it easier on his wife.

Investigators said Zicarelli confessed he had been planning to kill his baby for over 24 hours. He said he parked his car and walked down to the pond three separate times, trying to determine if he could kill her. He said he put her in the water and watched her sink, then got in his car and left.

Prosecutors have requested a $500,000 cash bond. (Read more from “6-Month-Old Baby Recovering After Father Admitted to Trying to Drown It” HERE)

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Girl’s Inoperable Brain Tumor Disappears, Doctors Can’t Explain It

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By USA Today. A girl’s inoperable brain tumor is gone and doctors have no explanation.

Today, Roxli Doss is doing what she loves, and that’s horseback riding. . .

It’s hard to imagine that in June doctors diagnosed Roxli with an inoperable cancerous brain tumor called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG.

“It is very rare, but when we see it, it is a devastating disease,” said Dr. Virginia Harrod with Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas. “You have decreased ability to swallow, sometimes vision loss, decreased ability to talk, eventually difficulty with breathing.”

Harrod said the now 11-year-old went through weeks of radiation, even though there is no cure. The family held a benefit for her in August, and the community responded in a big way. At that point, all Gena and Scott Doss could do was pray for a miracle. (Read more from “Girl’s Inoperable Brain Tumor Disappears, Doctors Can’t Explain It” HERE)
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11-Year-Old Girl’s Brain Tumor Disappears in Medical Mystery

By CBS News. When 11-year-old Roxli Doss was diagnosed with what appeared to be a rare, inoperable brain tumor in June, she faced it with courage. Each year, some 300 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with this particular brain tumor, known as a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. . .

Roxli was given months to live. As she went through weeks of radiation, her parents Scott and Gena Doss prayed for a miracle. . .

Typically, radiation is a life-extending treatment and not a cure. But just over two months after being diagnosed, the tumor appeared to have completely gone away. (Read more from “11-Year-Old Girl’s Brain Tumor Disappears in Medical Mystery” HERE)

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‘Disney’ Actor Arrested for Trying to Solicit Sex With a 13-Year-Old Boy

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Disney Channel actor Stoney Westmoreland was arrested after arranging to meet up with whom he believed to be a 13-year-old boy for a sexual encounter. Westmoreland, who plays the grandfather character named Henry Mack on Disney’s “Andi Mack,” was en route to meet the supposed child when he was apprehended by Salt Lake City police and the FBI Child Exploitation Task Force on Friday.

Disney announced Friday that they had terminated Westmoreland’s role on the show due to the nature of the arrest. “Andi Mack” is filmed in Salt Lake City.

“​Stoney Westmoreland, an actor working on the series ‘Andi Mack,’ was arrested in Salt Lake City today,” said a Disney Channel spokesperson, according to Page Six. “Given the nature of the charges and our responsibility for the welfare of employed minors, we have released him from his recurring role and he will not be returning to work on the series which wraps production on its third season next week.” . . .

The actor was corresponding with the supposed child, whom he met through an online dating app, in a sexual capacity before the arrest. “According to reports citing court documents, Westmoreland asked the minor to engage in oral sex and other sexual acts, and requested that the minor send him nude photos,” reports Page Six. According to ABC News 4, Westmoreland sent the minor pornographic photos of himself. . .

As noted by ABC News 4, the characters on the “Andi Mack” show are the same age as Westmoreland’s alleged victim: 13. “The comedy, created by Terri Minsky, follows 13-year-old Andi Mack and her best friends, Cyrus Goodman and Buffy Driscoll, as they attend middle school.” (Read more from “‘Disney’ Actor Arrested for Trying to Solicit Sex With a 13-Year-Old Boy” HERE)

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