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Avowed atheist Michael Newdow, infamous for his attacks against references to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto, now wants to remove all religious references from Barack Obama's inauguration.
Newdow, who in past legal battles has tried to strip the United States currency of a reference to God and has sued to alter the pledge of allegiance in schools, now wants to alter history. Newdow wants the president-elect barred from a traditional reference to God in the oath of office -- "so help me God" -- because those words are not in the oath set out in the Constitution. He also wants two prayers by well-known Christian figures cancelled. Revs. Rick Warren and Joseph Lowery are scheduled to deliver inaugural prayers on January 20.
"I hope people understand this is not an anti-God issue -- this is a pro-equality issue," Newdow tells Associated Press. "And it's not treating people equal when the government takes one side in a religious debate. To have chaplains come and say that God exists when there are people who think quite strongly that's not true is just as wrong as to have chaplains come in and say that Jesus is Lord."
Randy Thomasson of SaveCalifornia.com suggests that Newdow find other venues to spread his hatred of God. "Newdow obviously believes in God so much that he hates God," says the Christian activist. "He really needs to find a different racket and stop wrecking America's heritage."
Indeed, the phrase "so help me God" does not appear in the presidential oath as outlined in the Constitution. But the nation's first president, George Washington, used those words when he first took the oath -- and it has been a tradition since. According to Thomasson, Newdow is demonstrating more than just intolerance in this latest legal attack.
"Talk about revisionist history," he exclaims. "Talk about an attack on our very Constitution [which] talks about the free exercise of religion being guaranteed."
Thomasson says the atheist Newdow has no business trying to dictate what a president-elect does or does not say in the oath of office. Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute agrees, saying it is a matter of the president-elect's constitutional rights, not Newdow's.
"The same way a student does not have to leave their faith at home when they go to school, similarly those elected to office and those elected president of the United States do not have to leave their Christian faith at home either," says the Christian attorney. "Just because the Constitution doesn't reference God as a part of the oath does not prevent the president from referencing God in that oath."
AP notes that Newdow sued to remove religion from the 2001 and 2005 inaugurations but lost both cases. This time, however, he is joining 17 other plaintiffs, including atheist and humanist organizations.
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The Methodist Church has lost a round over homosexual unions.
In March 2007 the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association refused to permit two lesbians -- Harriet Bernstein, 67, and Luisa Paster, 61 -- to stage a civil union ceremony at the church-owned Boardwalk Pavilion, and returned their check for $250. Subsequently, says Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, the lesbians filed a legal complaint against group. However, Association officials countered that the decision was based on their religious beliefs.
"That didn't make any difference to the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights," says Staver of the group that issued its determination on Monday. "They said there's no First Amendment defense here and in fact the church violated the public accommodation law in New Jersey," the attorney notes. "After New Jersey adopted the same-sex civil union law, no longer could the church allow its facility to be used in ministry to the public because to do so would open them up to these same-sex civil unions."
Staver says that puts the church in a quandary. "The church has really been put in the situation where the clash between the same-sex civil unions and the religious liberty is forcing the church to either violate its own religious freedom or open up its facility to the community," he points out.
The church lost a federal court decision dealing with the same matter, and that case is on appeal. The Camp Meeting Association is represented in the case by the Alliance Defense Fund, which has argued that a Christian organization has a constitutional right to use its facilities in a manner consistent with its beliefs.
Founded in 1869, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association is affiliated with the United Methodist Church.
Why did 18-to-29-year-old evangelicals vote for Barack Obama despite his apostasy on the fundamental moral issues of abortion and same-sex unions? They voted 32 percent for Obama, twice the percentage of that demographic group who voted for John Kerry in 2004.
Many of these young people identify "social justice" as the reason that led them to relegate the prime moral issues of life and marriage to the back burner. But the term "social justice" does not define a moral cause -- it is left-wing jargon to overturn those who have economic and political power.
What caused young evangelicals, the children of the so-called "religious right," to change their moral imperatives so dramatically? Most likely it's the attitudes and decision-making they learned in the public schools, which 89 percent of U.S. students attend.
The public schools took a major left turn in the 1960s, when humanist John Dewey and the instructors he trained at Columbia Teachers College began their put-down of objective truth and authoritative notions of good and evil. In the 1970s, Sidney Simon's best-seller "Values Clarification" taught students to cast off their parents' values and make their own choices, often aided by Kinsey-trained sexperts determined to change our sexual mores.
By the 1980s, many radical antiwar activists of the 1960s had become tenured college professors, so teachers colleges and public schools opened their doors to "social justice" instruction. Among these '60s radicals was Weather Undergrounder William Ayers, who escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against him and then emerged as a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Ayers developed quite a following as he taught resentment against America. In 2008, he was elected by his peers as vice president for curriculum studies of the American Education Research Association, the nation's largest organization of education professors and researchers.
In 1983, Humanist Magazine featured an article that boasted, "The battle for mankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom." Ayers put it this way: "Education is the motor-force of revolution."
Ayers became a leading advocate of "social justice" teaching -- i.e., getting students to believe that they are victims of an unjust, oppressive and racist America. Community organizers can then use these young people to vote and otherwise carry out Ayers' "revolution."
Ayers has been on a decades-long mission to transform education into anti-American indoctrination and to get young people to demand government control of the economy, politics and culture. We see the result in the 2008 post-election surveys: Seven out of every 10 voters between the ages of 18 and 29 now favor expanding the role of government and agree that the government should do more to solve the nation's problems. It's obvious which party and which candidates will get their vote.
Ayers worked closely with Barack Obama in the 1990s when Obama headed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which gave $160 million in grants to so-called school-reform projects. Ayers and Obama guided some of this Annenberg money to community organizers such as ACORN.
The National Association of Scholars reports that use of the term "social justice" is today understood to mean "the advocacy of more egalitarian access to income through state-sponsored redistribution." That is academic verbiage for Barack Obama's assertion that he wants to "spread the wealth around."
"Rethinking Schools" is a Milwaukee-based organization that publishes instructional materials to assist teachers how to "weave social justice issues throughout the curriculum." Lessons include "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers" and "Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word."
Howard Zinn, author of the anti-American "People's History of the United States," urges educators to prioritize "social justice" education over political neutrality. In a 1998 interview, he said "quiet revolution" to move us toward "democratic socialism" was his goal in writing "People's History."
The thinking of teachers is further molded at expensive conferences, financed by billing the taxpayers. The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) sponsors seminars with titles such as "Our Work as Social Justice Educators," "Teaching for Social Justice in Elementary Schools," "Dismantling White Privilege and Supporting Anti-Racist Education in Our Classrooms and Schools" and "Creating Change Agents Who Teach for Social Justice."
This "social justice" curriculum results in a heavy cost in time not spent on the basics. Young Americans who are exposed to Ayers' radical left-wing ideas generally have little background information to help them evaluate bias and errors.
Barack Obama's selection for secretary of education is his crony Arne Duncan, who most recently made news by recommending the creation of a Chicago Social Justice High School-Pride Campus, where half the students would be homosexuals and the other half straight. Somehow that school was canceled just about the time that Obama announced Duncan's appointment.
Planned Parenthood has been shut down in the Texas panhandle.
Then the state reduced funding for the organization, and pro-life workers also continued in their efforts to shut Planned Parenthood's doors. "And as of December 31, there will no 
longer be any Planned Parenthood offices in the Texas panhandle," Sedlak explains. "They will all be gone."
The two remaining clinics in Amarillo have disaffiliated with the national organization. Sedlak says other cities can accomplish the same goal if they are determined, and information on that is available on the Stopp website.
The pharmacists sued because the order violated their religious beliefs against selling certain abortifacients like the "morning-after pill." Brian Rooney of the Thomas More Law Center explains why the pharmacists filed suit.
"There is a law in Illinois that allows pharmacists and pharmacies to allow their rights to conscience to take precedence over these kinds of things," he notes.
Rooney believes the governor's executive order requiring them to dispense and sell the drugs was illegal. "When you have a duly enacted statute of law by the legislature, it always takes precedence over an executive order," he points out.
Blagojevich's executive order, according to Rooney, has already hurt the pharmacy industry in Illinois. "There were businesses going out of business," he adds. "There were pharmacists that were being let go -- all because they had deeply held religious beliefs and deeply held moral beliefs."
The state Supreme Court has ruled that pharmacists should be heard, so a trial will soon be held in a lower court.
The university announced the decision to parents in a letter that was sent in mid-December. The change in boarding rules will allow students of the opposite sex to reside in the same room, and the school says the decision was born from a student-led initiative. Students who wish to have a coed roommate will not need parental consent.
Laurie Higgins, the director of the division of school advocacy with the Illinois Family Institute, calls the decision troubling, but not surprising. "I think it reflects a number of troubling assumptions: One is that sex differences are irrelevant, that modesty is irrelevant -- and modesty is not equivalent to prudery -- that parental values and beliefs are irrelevant," she notes.
The living arrangements will not be available to freshman, and the University of Chicago states that it is not aiming for "romantic couples," but couples will not be banned from rooming together. Higgins believes the living arrangements could lead to an increase in sexual assault and that the university is sending a message that it does not care about promiscuity.
"In addition, it's not going to stop here," she contends. "[At] some colleges they actually have coed bathrooms, which of course further emphasizes the idea that sex differences are irrelevant and modesty is irrelevant to administrations."
Higgins notes that one college student argued in favor of the rule change, citing that 18-year-olds are allowed to smoke cigarettes and own guns so they should be allowed to live together. In response to that argument, Higgins points out that most students are not allowed to smoke or have guns in dorm rooms.
About one third of 18-to-29-year-old evangelicals voted for Barack Obama. Something does not compute here. Obama’s record on abortion and same-sex unions stands in direct opposition to what the vast majority of evangelicals believe.
And it’s not as though this is typical. In 2004, less than half that percentage voted for John Kerry.
So what made Obama so appealing to these Christian young people? By their own accounts, it was their belief in “social justice.” And where did they learn about “social justice?” According to Phyllis Schlafly, the answer is simple: public schools.
Her column today outlines the changes public schools have gone through, starting in the 1960’s. Since then, educators have come to consider it their duty to discourage students to “blindly” follow their parents beliefs and teachings, and “make their own choices.”
During the election, Bill Ayers became the poster boy for 60’s radical-turned-educator. But he is far from alone. In fact, his radical thinking is not radical in education circles.
As Schlafly writes, “Ayers became a leading advocate of ‘social justice ‘ teaching – i.e. getting students to believe that they are victims of an unjust, oppressive and racist America.”
The teaching has obviously paid off, as evidenced by the votes cast for Barack Obama by young people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians.
A lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana asks a federal judge to shut down the program and bar the school district from providing it with utilities or any other support. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a boy whose elementary school offers third- and fourth-graders a voluntary "release time" program for religious instruction.
School officials argue that the program neither advances nor inhibits religion.
Similar programs at elementary schools have been protected by a 1952 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed students to receive religious education during school hours but not on school property.
Lambda Sigma Phi is a Christian fraternity, founded at the University of Alabama in 2000. OneNewsNow had the opportunity to talk with fraternity president Daniel Weaver. He says some of the fraternities did not have very good reputations, so there was a desire among the guys to start something different.
"So we started it here at the university, and we wanted to build around a fraternity that had Christian values and recruit guys who were really on fire for the Lord and wanted to minister and be an example for the campus," he explains.
Weaver says Lambda Sigma Phi holds weekly Bible studies, and all of their members are active church members. He adds that there is mixed reaction to their presence on campus and that they had a bit of a bumpy road when several members wanted to take the fraternity in a different direction.
"The main reason was because they wanted to be able to drink alcohol. We are, of course, a dry fraternity, and they wanted to be able to drink alcohol and do all that other stuff and be a fraternity of good guys," he notes. "About 12-to-14 of us stood up against that and said, 'No, we want to remain a Christian fraternity and be what we were founded upon being.'"
The split, according to Weaver, was a tough decision, but he adds that the Lord has blessed the fraternity since then. He says membership has grown and they have filled up their house and are now able to be on campus debt-free. Lambda Sigma Phi is just one of many Christian fraternities on secular campuses across the U.S.
The United States has refused to sign on to a United Nations declaration on sexual orientation.
Tozzi says the statement's purpose is to decriminalize homosexual conduct. For now, he contends there is no cause for alarm, but the situation could change in the future.
"There is no binding impact. It is purely a moral statement, but once it's in the UN system as it were, it will likely be referenced by advocates," he points out. "And the statements from the French government official Rama Yade said that this is not the end; it is only the beginning."
In spite of homosexual marriage being illegal in 70 nations, Tozzi believes it will achieve international acceptance eventually. He adds that while the United States did not sign on to the declaration, the incoming Obama administration might think differently.