The other day, a good friend and ex-roommate from my yesteryear, now living in Virginia, e-mailed to tell me that a city’s council meeting she recently attended began with a prayer. Ellen, married with three children, is an educated woman who’s father and father-in law are both retired Lutheran ministers. Her kids go to “bible [...]
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[Disclaimer: Because this article is intended to be both instructive to the general public but also legally relevant, in the course of my splitting the difference and trying to serve two audiences, the general public may find some of it legalistic and dense, while lawyers may find some of it pedantic. Apologies in advance to [...] I’ll bet there are a few posts I’ve made where I promise to post more but this time, no, THIS time, I’m really going to commit myself. This commitment will be a daily fight where I dissuade myself of the notion that my thoughts on a story aren’t original enough to merit inflicting on the [...] In the earliest hours of November 15, 2011, I finally drifted off to sleep after the NHL Network had looped for perhaps a third time. The mumbling TV probably caused me to miss my phone’s space-agey text message notification, even though it lay inches from my head. It wasn’t until a half hour later that [...] I’m going to post something more generally about Occupy Wall Street [hereinafter #ows] soon but in the meantime, I want to comment on a tangentially related issue that arose after one protester at Zuccotti Park took it upon himself to file a trademark application for the term “Occupy Wall St.” [Original Smoking Gun story here; [...] The following is content I wrote as two comments on the Village Voice’s Runnin’ Scared blog in response to an update by Tony Ortega on the Janet Reitman book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. My comments somewhat strayed from the point of Ortega’s post, which was merely a short interview with [...] The “ministerial exception” is finally about to get its long overdue day in court, as the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on October 5, 2011 in the case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, out of the 6th Circuit [pdf of decision here]. The case’s outcome promises to have significant impact, [...] In a potentially devastating blow to the Church of Scientology, a lawsuit filed by Laura Decrescenzo (nee Dieckman)–alleging Forced abortion; Deprivation of liberty; False imprisonment; Intentional infliction of emotional distress; and various violations of California labor law statutes–which was dismissed as time-barred by the (federal) District Court for the Central District of California in November [...] Marty Rathbun of ex-second-in-line-for-the-Scientology throne fame recently posted a very interesting PDF of a spreadsheet purporting to be a list of OSA volunteers for the Western United States. OSA–the Office of Special Affairs–is Scientology’s intelligence agency, and the official arm by which Scientology exerts control over its myriad entities. This list of 222 Scientology-members is [...] Scientology owes the City of Clearwater a half million dollars in fines and doesn’t want to pay it. The St. Pete Times thinks they should. There will be no shortage of comparisons made between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, but where Palin’s beliefs are 7 parts opportunism to 1 part Christianity, Bachmann is the real [...] |
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