Marriage and the Left’s Duplicity; The Vindication of Christian Sexual Ethics; ISIS’s War on the World’s Ancient Religions...more

Marriage and the Left’s Duplicity on Pre-Enforcement Challenges ...The Knapps filed what is called a “pre-enforcement” challenge. Leftist groups frequently use these types of challenges to advance their agenda, which is why it is so amusing that people in their camp are squawking that the Knapps filed such a suit.

Pre-enforcement challenges are lawsuits filed before actual enforcement of a law.

These types of lawsuits have a venerable legal pedigree, and play a pivotal role in protecting our precious First Amendment freedoms. They are based on a simple and understandable proposition: that people should be able to challenge a law that threatens their First Amendment rights without having to subject themselves to criminal prosecution...

Court rules Obama admin can’t force Catholic college to obey HHS mandate  ...A federal court issued a decision Tuesday in Ave Maria School of Law v. Sebelius that stops enforcement of the  Obama administration’s abortion pill mandate against Ave Maria School of Law, a Catholic law school...

An eerie calm: Iraqi Christians anxiously ponder their future  Basima al-Safar retouches a picture of Jesus on an easel outside her house overlooking the flat Nineveh plains, 30 miles north of Mosul.

The murals she paints tell the story of her people, Christians in Iraq. But with Islamic State militants nearby, she is worried that life in Alqosh and towns like it could soon come to an end.

The Assyrian Christian town of around 6,000 people sits on a hill below the seventh-century Rabban Hormizd Monastery, temporarily closed because of the security situation. Residents of Alqosh fled this summer ahead of Islamic State militants. Around 70 percent of the town’s residents have since returned. Still, a sense of unease hangs in the air...

ISIS’s War on the World’s Ancient Religions 
Yazidis, Samaritans, Copts and other descendants of ancient civilizations are being erased...

The Vindication of Christian Sexual Ethics
Over at The Weekly Standard, Heather Mac Donald has penned an outstanding cover story chronicling the ongoing collapse of sexual-revolution values on college campuses. It turns out that sexual “liberation” has not led to sexual fulfillment, but instead to a landscape littered with broken hearts, long-lasting psychic pain, and a consequent desperate effort to create and enforce a bizarre “neo-Victorian” sexual ethic grounded not in any real morality, but instead in an effort to use institutional power to shift the emotional, psychological, and legal consequences of sexual regret and ambiguity to men and — as much as possible — men alone.

It won’t work. Sure, there will be a chill that settles across some campuses (depending on enforcement), and there will be cases where the burden-shifting “works” (at least in the way that feminists want it to work) by ruining a man’s life in highly ambiguous circumstances. But the end result won’t be a net increase in healthy relationships but instead an increase in fear, confusion, and recriminations as neo-Victorianism butts up against the crazed ”sex week” culture that still infects campuses from the top to the bottom of the academic food chain. It’s decadence versus contractual morality that utterly defies human nature, and neither model is viable....

Religious Colleges Face a New Threat over Their Sexual Policies   Christian colleges value accreditation from secular agencies as a quality assurance mechanism, but also because without it their students will lose federal financial aid and may have trouble gaining acceptance to graduate school. So accreditation is a potential weapon in the hands of agencies influenced by the agenda of gay rights activists. This worries some education leaders in the wake of news from Gordon College in Wenham, Mass., while others say there’s nothing to fear...