A federal appeals court has upheld the firing of a Christian counselor who lost her job at the Centers for Disease Control for refusing to advise a woman in a homosexual relationship.

Marcia Walden launched a lawsuit in 2008 saying she was illegally laid off by a company the CDC hired to provide counseling to CDC workers. She said the CDC requested the dismissal.

Walden said the layoff violated her free exercise rights under the First Amendment and her rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But on Tuesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld a federal judge's dismissal of Walden's claims.

"We accept that Ms. Walden's sincerely held religious beliefs prohibit her from encouraging or supporting same-sex relationships though counseling," the court said. But the record in the case is "devoid of evidence" supporting her claim that she was removed because she needed to refer potential clients engaged in same-sex relationships to other counselors.

In response, the Alliance Defense Fund has released a statement that reads: "A counselor who is a Christian shouldn't lose her job for upholding the highest professional standards. It is unlawful to punish a Christian for abiding by her faith, particularly when she made every effort to accommodate the interests of a potential client. We are disappointed that the court ruled against these fundamental principles, but we are determining next steps to ultimately vindicate Marcia and the freedoms for which she's fighting."

"Tolerance is a two-way street."

These five simple, yet profound, words come from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit's recent opinion in a case involving Eastern Michigan University's expulsion of Julea Ward from its graduate counseling program. It is difficult to conceive of five words that more aptly sum up the lesson of this case -- a lesson all public universities and professional associations should heed.

The opinion reverses an earlier ruling and remands the case to district court for a jury trial.

EMU says it supports, indeed requires, tolerance and nondiscrimination. But when it came to Ward's religiously based need to refer a client, Eastern practiced anything but.

Legislation that would allow private adoption agencies to deny placements that conflict with their religious or moral beliefs, including opposition to homosexuality, sailed through the Virginia House of Delegates by a wide margin and without debate Friday.

The House passed the Republican-backed bill 71-28 a day after rejecting several amendments offered by Democrats aimed at softening the measure. Earlier Friday, the Senate Rehabilitation and Social Services Committee endorsed its version of the bill on an 8-7 party-line vote, sending it to the floor for a vote next week. Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell is expected to sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Woodstock and sponsor of the House bill, says it protects religious freedom.

One pastor says: "Never in human history has marriage been defined as two men. Never in human history has marriage been defined as two women. Who has the right to redefine it? [Crowd shouts: "No One!"] This is reckless social experimentation. Marriage is the fundamental cell of society. If you mess with marriage, you threaten the very future of humanity. We ask our government to do their job. Fix the problems we already have. Don't make new ones! Do your job!"

An Eastern Michigan University student who was expelled from a counseling program because she refused to counsel gays and lesbians about their lifestyles won a key victory today in the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A three-member panel of the court said Julea Ward can argue her religious discrimination suit against the university before a federal court jury in Detroit.

... “Although the university submits it dismissed Ward from the program because her request for a referral violated the ACA (American Counseling Association) code of ethics, a reasonable jury could find otherwise — that the code of ethics contains no such bar and that the university deployed it as a pretext for punishing Ward’s religious views and speech.”

... Although Ward refused to counsel gays and lesbians about their sexual orientation, she said she was willing to counsel them on other issues.

Farr talks to Joan Frawley Desmond at the National Catholic Register on the challenges ahead for religious liberty and respect for conscience:

...When it comes to marriage, abortion or other issues of concern to Catholics, it leaves us in a precarious position. The remedy must be to engage with energy and optimism in public-policy debates, and to win.

Let me give you one example — among many — of the problem we face. The new health-care law may require Catholic associations like colleges and hospitals to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs in their health-care plans. Catholics are, quite reasonably, fighting to broaden the conscience exemptions from that requirement (exemptions which now appear to apply only to churches themselves).

Conscience protections are important because they acknowledge, in principle, that protecting the conscience of the religious dissenter is more important than the law itself. But the conscience approach is, in my view, insufficient. Catholics need to marshal their resources more effectively to defeat these laws in the legislatures. We have not done this well, and we should ask ourselves why.

So far, 2012 has been a good year for religious liberty in federal court. Two weeks ago the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that religious organizations have a First Amendment right to choose their ministers — even in the face of federal nondiscrimination policies. Today, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a trial-court ruling that essentially allowed Eastern Michigan University to erect a “no Christians allowed” sign outside its graduate counseling program.

... The trial court had essentially ruled that the university could do whatever it wanted with its curriculum, and if it wanted to mandate that Christian students affirm homosexuality while granting referrals and exemptions to other students on other issues, it could. The Sixth Circuit disagreed, strongly:

A reasonable jury could find that the university dismissed Ward from its counseling program because of her faith-based speech, not because of any legitimate pedagogical objective. A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems based on a phantom policy as the price for obtaining a degree.

The stakes of this case were very high. If the university had prevailed, students would truly have been at the mercy of ad hoc ideological demands reformulated as “curricular requirements.” Understanding the stakes for individual liberty, theMichigan attorney general, the American Center for Law and Justice (where I’m a senior counsel), the Becket Fund, Eugene Volokh, and others submitted amicus briefs on Ward’s behalf. They were opposed by, among others, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, LAMBDA Legal, and the ACLU.

You can read the Sixth Circuit opinion here (PDF).

A Gay Marriage Equality bill (read SB 6239) has been introduced this month in Washington State. The measure is deceptive and exceedingly dangerous. It represents a radical shift in the definition of marriage, and it would pose a serious threat to religious freedom.
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The bill’s introduction says it would not force clergy or churches to marry gays. However, it adds to state marriage law a section dealing with discrimination. To date, there have never been discrimination provisions in the Washington Marriage Code.

... A bill which describes the conditions under which a church can be sued for discrimination against gays is not about marriage equality, and it certainly does not protect religious freedom. The Gay Marriage Equality bill is a serious threat to religious freedom in Washington State. It takes aim at the heart of religious freedom.

Churches and ministers who participate in the newly defined “discrimination” against gays would be subject to lawsuits and legal penalties. If they have their way we will be bludgeoned into acceptance and submission. They want the church to accept and approve of gay marriage whether we like it or not.

A series of lawsuits and a new court ruling are fresh examples of how laws granting marriage benefits to gay couples can end up squashing religious liberty, says a Christian attorney involved in one of the cases.

All four cases involve states with gay "marriage" or same-sex civil unions laws: Illinois, Vermont, Hawaii and New Jersey. In Vermont and Illinois, bed and breakfast owners were sued for declining to host a same-sex ceremony or reception, and in Hawaii, a bed and breakfast owner was sued after turning away a lesbian couple who wanted to make a reservation.

In New Jersey, a state judge ruled Jan. 12 that a Christian beachfront property operated by United Methodists violated state non-discrimination laws when it refused to host a lesbian couple's civil union ceremony.

Jim Campbell, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund -- which is representing the Methodist group -- said the cases prove that there is harm to religious liberty when states legalize gay "marriage" or civil unions or pass broad legislation incorporating sexual orientation into non-discrimination laws.

"When people hear that their legislature is considering a law like this and they think, 'What's the harm?' they need to realize that there is this direct threat to religious liberty -- to business owners, employees, religious entities and people who attend all those religious entities," Campbell told Baptist Press. "These four cases are a good demonstration of that. People who are concerned about religious liberty should be concerned about these legal developments."

The citizens of several countries are pushing back against President Obama’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender foreign policy imperative. Leaders in El Salvador launched a website on “Obama’s Corrupting Foreign Policy” and are asking the U.S. Senate to reject Obama's nominee for ambassador to their country.

President Obama announced in December that the promotion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) behavior is a top foreign policy priority, even for the U.S. military overseas. At the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a high-profile speech at the UN equating LGBT status with religion. The State Department told oambassadors worldwide to recognize “gay pride month," and it released alist of “accomplishments” including the fact that a U.S. ambassador had published an OpEd promoting the LGBT agenda on behalf of the United States .

... In Pakistan, the US embassy hosted an LGBT “pride celebration” in June which provoked protests in several cities. A leader of one of the rallies said, “America has unleashed a storm of immoral values" and "we’ll resist at all costs.” The U.S. ambassador to Serbia promoted a homosexual rights march in that country last October which led to riots with an explicitly anti-Western tone.

Yesterday, a group of U.S. religious leaders — including Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Jews and Sikhs — released an “open letter,” “Marriage and Religious Freedom: Fundamental Goods That Stand or Fall Together.” Among other issues, the letter expressed alarm about the threat legal same-sex “marriage” poses to the free exercise of religion in this country.

This is a powerful statement. It is an encouraging and, frankly, very American phenomenon when religious groups with deep theological differences come together in defense of marriage and of religious freedom. The power of the statement comes from the truths it expresses. It sounds the alarm about the sweeping consequences for our society if the definition of marriage is overturned and about the threat to religious liberty implicit in such an act.

The letter itself is an example of religious liberty in action — public advocacy by religious actors on behalf of truths they hold sacred and which they believe central to protecting the common good.

There are those who would contend that this kind of public religious advocacy violates the separation of church and state. That reading of our Constitution is nonsense, but it exists, and it poses a danger both to marriage and religious freedom.

Consider Judge Vaughn Walker’s 2010 ruling on Proposition 8, the California referendum affirming marriage as between one man and one woman. He simply declared that the vote was in part motivated by religious and moral values, that those values did not and cannot meet constitutional standards of rationality, and that, therefore, the outcome of the referendum was unconstitutional.

Should this reasoning be more widely adopted by the courts, it would pose a severe threat to religious liberty by reducing the capacity of religious actors to prevail in democratic deliberation with religion-specific or even religiously derived moral arguments. It would implicate issues from marriage to abortion to the cloning of human beings for medical research.

Leaders of some of the largest religious communities in the United States have joined together in an open letter to all Americans to voice their shared concern for marriage and religious freedom.

The letter, titled "Marriage and Religious Freedom: Fundamental Goods That Stand or Fall Together," was released today. Signatories include leaders from Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities in the United States.

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was one of the four signing Catholic bishops.

"Marriage and religious liberty are at a crisis point in the United States," he said. "This letter is a sign of hope. Not only are tens of millions of believing citizens represented in the letter's signatories, but the letter itself testifies to the growing and shared awareness of just how important marriage and religious freedom are to the well-being of our country. The letter makes a compelling argument that needs to be heard by all of us, especially those in positions of authority: Anyone truly concerned with religious freedom must also be a defender of marriage's perennial definition."

A New Jersey judge ruled Thursday that a church group violated the state's discrimination laws when it prevented a lesbian couple from holding a civil union ceremony on its property in 2007.

The dispute began when the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association stopped the couple from using its boardwalk pavilion, an area it rented out for weddings.

Administrative Law Judge Solomon Metzger wrote in Thursday's ruling that the pavilion was a public space that advertised itself as a wedding venue without any mention of religious preconditions.

He rejected the church's contention that the pavilion was an extension of its wedding ministry, noting that weddings had been performed at the pavilion for at least 10 years before the dispute arose and that there was no proof that couples, "particularly those that chose secular vows, or that were of other faiths, were ever told that they were participating in a ministry."

The church had argued that its freedom of religious expression would be violated if it was forced to allow same-sex ceremonies to be performed on its property.

A New Jersey Church that refused to allow two women to hold a civil-union ceremony on its property four years ago broke the law, a state administrative law judge said Thursday.

Since the judge works for the state’s Division on Civil Rights, his opinion doesn’t have the force of one coming from a state or federal court — but the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, is considering its next steps in protecting the church’s religious rights.

“The government should not be able to force a private Christian organization to use its property in a way that would violate its own religious beliefs,” Litigation Staff Counsel Jim Campbell said. “Religious groups have the right to use their private property in a way that is consistent with their beliefs. That right, protected by both the New Jersey and U.S. Constitutions, obviously trumps any law enacted by the state’s legislature.”

The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights has 45 days to adopt, modify or reject the ruling. If the director takes no action, it automatically becomes final.

A ministry that follows the dictates of its faith is engaging in wrongdoing, according to a New Jersey judge who recommended today that the state Division on Civil Rights find the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association violated the state’s nondiscrimination law.

“The respondent violated the [Law Against Discrimination] when it refused to conduct a civil-union ceremony for Ms. Bernstein and Ms. Paster,” wrote Solomon Metzger, an administrative law judge whose determination will become final if not overturned by the Division of Civil Rights.

... The seaside location has been popular for years for weddings, but the association, which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, determined it could not biblically allow same-sex ceremonies to take place on its property.

So when Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster signed up for such a ceremony, they were turned down. They filed the discrimination complaint, and the state’s Division on Civil Rights joined their cause.

You can download a PDF of the ruling here.