UnknownThe US Department of Justice is backing regligious freedom in the case to be heard by the Supreme Court on a Denver baker who, in 2012, refused to make a wedding cake for a Gay couple and this is a case civil rights activists will lose.

The baker, Jack Phillips, says his religious beliefs prevent him prevent him from celebrating or endorsing same-sex marriage.

Forcing Phillips to create expression for and participate in a ceremony that violates his sincerely held beliefs invades his First Amendment rights,” Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall wrote in a brief last week.

The key-word which progressives seem to miss here is “expression.”

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Prime Minister Valls says Salafism feeds Islamic terrorism.

Imams who tell young children they will turn into pigs and go to Hell if they listen to music; public bus drivers who refuse to drive a vehicle after a woman had driven it; airport baggage handlers who want to stop work several times a day to pray; project thugs who aggress girls not wearing a headscarf; men with several undeclared wives collecting generous family allotments for the children: just a few of the manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism those on both the left and the right claim is sweeping France.

Are hardline islamists, known as Salafists, promoting the recruitment of young French Muslims for terrorism through their preaching? The question is important because the debate in France this week could lead to the banning of a form of religious thought. Although “not all Salafists are Jihadists, all Jihadists are culturally Salafists,” said the French researcher on Islam, Gilles Kepel.

Stepping into the Breach: religion and sexual repression: Much is being said of intolerance in western societies, as if this somehow justifies the violent anger of young muslims against the countries they were born in. Self flagellation is not going to resolve a dilemma whose roots are also religious. Misogyny and homophobia have theological support and one is Sharia laws.
 
Moroccan courts have sentenced two homosexuals, who were beat to a pulp in the town of Beni Mallal, to prison for the crime of being homosexual. They actually got stiffer sentences than their aggressors. 

Banjul, May 5, 2012 – When Europeans went to Berlin with their scissors in 1884 to cut up the map of Africa, they played a sick joke which is still felt today. The British wanted the Palm oil from the Gambia River so they took that out of French West Africa and today the place is called a country: 60 kilometers wide at the Atlantic it snakes 338 kilometers up river where it is just a dozen kilometers wide. French diplomats like to refer to it as the finger in the ass of Senegal. The metaphor is à propos this year as the country obsesses over all things anal.