Hundreds of Pastors Across US Endorse Candidates in Defiance of IRS

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Baptist Pastor Mark Harris stood before his flock in North Carolina on Sunday and joined hundreds of other religious leaders in deliberately breaking the law in an election-year campaign that tests the role of churches in politics.

By publicly backing candidates for political office from the pulpit, Harris and nearly 1,500 other preachers at services across the United States were flouting a law they see as an incursion on freedom of religion and speech.

Under the U.S. tax code, non-profit organizations such as churches may express views on any issue, but they jeopardize their favorable tax-exempt status if they speak for or against any political candidate.

“Pulpit Freedom Sunday” has been staged annually since 2008 by a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom. Its aim is to provoke a challenge from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in order to file a lawsuit and have its argument out in court.

The event has grown steadily in size, but the IRS has yet to respond – even though the pastors tape their sermons and mail them to the agency.

Read more from this story HERE.

Congressman: Evolution Lie Straight From “Pit of Hell” (+video)

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By Associated Press. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun said in videotaped remarks that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell” meant to convince people that they do not need a savior.

The Republican lawmaker made those comments during a speech Sept. 27 at a sportsman’s banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell. Broun, a medical doctor, is running for re-election in November unopposed by Democrats.

“God’s word is true,” Broun said, according to a video posted on the church’s website. “I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.” Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the video of the Congressman’s remarks:

Sharia Law in Arizona: Daughter Tied to Bed, Scalded For Refusing Arranged Marriage (+video)

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A report from Fox 10 in Phoenix says that three Iraqi-American family members pled guilty to acts relating to the abuse of a teenage family member who refused an arranged marriage:

The alleged incidents happened when she was 19. Court records show she was burned on her face and chest with a hot spoon after refusing to paricipate in an arranged marriage with a 38-year-old man.

Records also state that victim was tied to a bed with a rope secured with a padlock until Feb. 8, when she was released to go to school.

The mother, 50-year-old Yusra Farhan, plead guilty to unlawful imprisonment. The father, 45-year-old Mohammed Altameemi, plead guilty to disorderly conduct and her 18-year-old sister, Tabarak Altameemi, plead guilty to misdemeanor assault.

The family members’ sentencing is scheduled for next month. Despite the guilty pleas, the abused daughter now claims that everything was her fault and wants her mother back:

FOX 10 News – Phoenix, AZ | KSAZ-TV

Woman Who Hospital Said Wanted to Die Decides to Stay on Life Support

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A day after a state appeals court said a terminally ill woman is capable of making her own medical decisions, Grace Sungeun Lee has decided to remain on life support.

The court cleared the way on Friday for North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., to remove the breathing tube from the 28-year-old woman – against the wishes of her parents – after doctors and hospital staff insisted that she clearly expressed her desire to be taken off life support. But on Saturday, Lee’s court appointed attorney said she wants to stay on the ventilator.

According to ABC News, Lee, who has brain cancer, signed a health care proxy that allows her father to make medical decisions for her.

Lee, who is paralyzed from the neck down, told the attorney that she wanted to make peace with her family and God.

Read more from this story HERE.

Egyptian Illiterate Children Detained for Insulting Koran

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Two Coptic Christian children, aged 10 and 9, have been arrested for insulting religion in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Beni Suef, Ahram Online reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, the two children were arrested on Tuesday after the imam of their local mosque filed a complaint against them.

By order of the prosecution the two boys, Nabil Nagy Rizk and Mina Nady Farag, are now being held in the Beni Suef juvenile detention pending further investigation on Sunday, said the report.

Ibrahim Mohamed Ali, the village imam, has accused the children of tearing up pages of the Koran. An Ahram Online reporter in the area said Ali initially took the children to the church and requested that the priest punish them.

Unsatisfied with the church’s decision not to castigate the two boys, Ali, together with three other villagers, turned to the courts.

Nabil’s father Nagy Rizk defended the action of the boys in a public statement, explaining that they are illiterate and therefore did not know the content of the papers which they found in a small white bag, as they were playing near a pile of rubbish in the street.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sex trafficking now an ‘epidemic’ in US

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Six months ago, Barbara Amaya said she was watching a story on television about teenage girls being trafficked for sex in her Northern Virginia neighborhood when she realized that she, too, had been the victim of sex trafficking — four decades earlier.

“I didn’t know I had been trafficked,” she told an audience during a panel discussion on human trafficking sponsored by the Universal Peace Federation and the Women’s Federation for World Peace at The Washington Times. “I viewed myself as a prostitute.”

Ms. Amaya, now 56, said she was a 13-year-old runaway from Fairfax when she was sold into sex trafficking at 14th and Eye Streets in the District and later was taken to New York City where she was trafficked for eight years. Like a lot of girls forced into sex trafficking, she said she had been abused as a child and at 12, began running away from home.

“I was a walking target,” she said. “I didn’t have low self-esteem, I had no self- esteem.

“I was raped so many times, I can’t remember. I became addicted to heroin and numb to what happened to me,” she said, adding that her trafficker dumped her when she was “no longer valuable to him.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obamacare: Infertility Treatments, Massage Care ‘Essential’ Covered Services in Some States

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Health insurance plans being set up in Kansas under President Obama’s health care law will have to cover infertility treatments, but those in Arkansas and Colorado won’t.

Maryland plans must cover weight-loss surgery, while those in Michigan have to pay for chiropractic care. Oregon plans won’t be forced to cover either of those – officials there say that covering such procedures would make premiums too expensive for most residents.

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have laid out what they consider to be the minimum coverage that must be made available to those obtaining insurance through small employers or the new state-based exchanges under the federal health care law.

Those states are grappling with the edges of medical care, debating whether infertility treatments, visits to chiropractors and time with massage therapists are considered “essential” in 21st-century medicine.

The law called for states to set rules for health care plans offered by small employers and plans offered under the state health care exchanges, where those without insurance will be able to shop for plans. The rules don’t apply to companies with 50 or more employees because those plans tend to already include a large range of benefits.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama beats Romney… Michelle, that is, in Battle of the Cookie Recipes

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Barack Obama and Mitt Romney [went] head-to-head tonight in the first live presidential debate of the election season.

But the pair’s wives have already been battling it out in a quadrennial recipe contest run by Family Circle magazine. Since 1992 the publication has asked potential First Ladies to submit their ultimate cookie dough formula.

And after testing both submissions, 51.5 percent of readers opted for Michelle Obama’s white and dark chocolate chip cookie over Ann Romney’s colorful M&M and oatmeal offering.

But Family Circle magazine admitted that it was a tight contest, stating: ‘Just 287 votes separated the two women, our smallest margin ever.’

Mrs Obama credited her wining recipe to her daughters’ godmother and close family friend, Mama Kaye.

Read more from this story HERE.

Inexplicable: Obama Waives Sanctions on Countries that Use Child Soldiers

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U.S. President Barack Obama issued a new executive order last week to fight human trafficking, touting his administration’s handling of the issue.

“When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery,” Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. “It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we’ve long rejected such cruelty.”

But for the third year in a row, Obama has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers, upsetting many in the human rights community.

Late Friday afternoon, Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen, penalties that Congress put in place to prevent U.S. arms sales to countries determined by the State Department to be the worst abusers of child soldiers in their militaries. The president also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country.

Human rights advocates saw the waivers as harmful to the goal of using U.S. influence to urge countries that receive military assistance to move away from using child soldiers and contradictory to the rhetoric Obama used in his speech.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: CNN’s Brooke Baldwin Battles Reparative Therapist Promoting Homosexuality Cure

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As Restoring Liberty reported yesterday, California’s governor signed into law this weekend a bill banning mental health intervention for children who have been molested and then say they’re gay, bi-Sexual, or transgendered.

A leading opponent of this new law, a reparative therapist who had gone through such therapy himself as a child after being molested, was then interviewed on CNN by a hostile Brooke Baldwin.

On Baldwin’s show, he announced a court challenge to the new law.

If you have any interest in this subject, you should watch the below exchange: