A religious couple in Massachusetts took the Commonwealth to court today for banning them from welcoming vulnerable children into their home through the Commonwealth’s foster care program. In Burke v. Walsh, Mike and Kitty Burke wanted to foster and someday adopt children in need of a family. Even though Massachusetts has a foster care crisis, state officials refused to let the Burkes foster any children in the state.

The reason was their religious beliefs about marriage, sexuality, and gender. With the help of Becket, the Burkes are asking the court to ensure that qualified families no longer suffer for their religious beliefs and that vulnerable children are given a loving home.

Mike and Kitty Burke are a Catholic couple from Massachusetts who have long wanted to become parents. Mike is an Iraq war veteran, Kitty is a former paraprofessional for special needs kids, and together they run a business and perform music for Mass.  Mike and Kitty began exploring becoming foster parents through the state’s foster care program, hoping to care for and eventually adopt children in need of a stable, loving home like theirs.

“After months of interviews and training, and after years of heartbreak, we were on the verge of finally becoming parents,” said Mike and Kitty Burke. “We were absolutely devastated to learn that Massachusetts would rather children sleep in the hallways of hospitals than let us welcome children in need into our home.”

Children in foster care throughout Massachusetts are waiting for families like the Burkes. The Department of Children and Families (DCF) currently does not have enough foster homes or facilities to meet the needs of the children in its care, leaving over 1,500 children without a family. The crisis has become so extreme that the state has resorted to housing children in hospitals for weeks on end. Now more than ever, Massachusetts needs the help of parents like Mike and Kitty to foster children in need.

During their application process, the Burkes underwent hours of training, extensive interviews, and an examination of their home. Mike and Kitty completed the training successfully and received high marks from the instructors. However, during their home interviews, the Burkes were troubled that many questions centered on their Catholic views about sexual orientation and gender dysphoria. In response, the Burkes emphasized that they would love and accept any child, no matter the child’s future sexual orientation or struggles with gender identity.

Read more at: www.lifenews.com

Investigative journalist James O’Keefe has obtained audio recordings of a Best Buy manager in Jacksonville saying that LGBT flags are permissible in the Geek Squad office, but Christian crosses would not be allowed. The manager explained that people can choose their religion, but they can’t choose their gender. The worker said he was also not allowed to have a Bible in the office area — because it was not work appropriate. Perhaps it’s time that Best Buy gets the Bud Light treatment?

Watch at: www.toddstarnes.com

Alliance Defending Freedom submitted a friend-of-the-court brief Friday in National Center for Public Policy Research v. Securities and Exchange Commission asking the court to hold the SEC accountable for engaging in viewpoint discrimination against religious shareholders of publicly traded companies.

Filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, the ADF brief explains that the court should provide constitutionally required guardrails on SEC rulemaking and application, which in recent years has been abused to censor religious shareholder proposals based on viewpoint.

“Americans count on the SEC to be a viewpoint-neutral referee, but officials are showing up wearing one of the team’s jerseys,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President for Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco. “As a government agency, the SEC is bound by the First Amendment. It can’t pick and choose which viewpoints get a hearing in the public square. Every shareholder deserves a voice—not just those who happen to agree with the government’s current views on a hot-button issue.”

Courts require “narrow, objective, and definite” limitations to protect viewpoint neutrality when government officials have the power to grant or deny “prior permission,” as with shareholder proposals. But the SEC has created its own “significant social policy” test to determine which proposals reach ballots at annual shareholder meetings. As the ADF brief points out, since 2018, the SEC has allowed corporations to keep conservative proposals off the ballot 72% of the time—26% more frequently than those originating from progressive viewpoints.

Although the SEC denied requests from JPMorgan Chase and PayPal to keep shareholder resolutions on viewpoint diversity off the 2023 ballots, the agency’s decision to grant similar requests to multiple companies—including Kroger, American Express, Apple, Alphabet, and Walgreens—prompted a lawsuit from the National Center for Public Policy Research and other individual shareholders.

Read more at: harbingersdaily.com

Ireland’s government has very little to boast about over the past decade, but it can successfully brag about one achievement, it has successfully reduced birth rates by 25%.

These apocalyptic policies have brought us to a stage where paying a doctor €450 for the intentional killing of an unborn is more of a priority for the government than virtually anything else related to children, apart from perhaps their plans for gruesome new sexual education that includes lessons on pornography.

In a complete panic after the overturn of Roe vs. Wade in the United States, Ireland’s incompetent government is now moving to establish anti prayer zones across the country, where a person can be jailed for praying against abortion or for encouraging people to give birth to their baby instead of killing it.

The establishment has waged a long and lackluster war on prolife prayer in an effort to justify such zones, yet now they are proceeding regardless of any real evidence and are doing so in defiance of the public advice of Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, who has repeatedly rejected the need for such legislation, stating that it was not necessary.

Some of the efforts by the establishment, and we include Sinn Fein, the Social Democrats and Labour in that list, have been ones of pure desperation.

In 2020, Simon Harris claimed that women attending hospital for miscarriages were being asked ‘Are you going to murder your child?’, however the claim was quietly dropped when it emerged that it was linked to an anonymous Antifa Twitter account from someone claiming to have been working in the Department of Justice. In the resulting controversy, proaborts threatened to murder the prolife advocates across social media.

Footage also emerged of Antifa, who appear to support the government, pelting elderly Catholics with eggs because they were praying the Rosary.

In another effort, the Social Democrats, who were founded by current Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, waged a campaign against Catholics who wished to pray outside their closed church under state restrictions. An English born politician was deeply unhappy with this, though thankfully it was captured on film.

Read more at: www.catholicarena.com

In recent years, Christian persecution has been sharply on the rise, and its terrible impacts have only begun to be felt. In fact, according to Pope Francis, conditions for Christians are worse now than they were in the days of the early Church.

The merciless targeting of Christians—driven by hatred of Christians and the faith itself—emerges as a common denominator in hundreds of testimonies of persecution received by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) from countries around the world. As a Catholic charity providing emergency aid and pastoral support to the persecuted and suffering Church in 140 countries, ACN is committed to chronicling and assessing the evolving phenomenon of the persecution of Christians around the world today.

Today, according to ACN research, almost 340 million Christians around the world—or 1 out of every 7—live in a country where they suffer some form of persecution, such as arbitrary arrest, violence, a full range of human rights violations and even murder.

“It is difficult to be chained. It is difficult to be hit. But I lived in the moment as God presented it to me, and I wished no harm to my captors,” said Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez after being released from captivity in Mali, where she was tortured by Islamic extremists for four years. “Let’s see if your God gets you out of here,” one of her captors had said. She couldn’t believe their hatred.

Sadly, Sister Gloria is not alone. She is one of the many thousands of Christians around the world who suffer because of their faith. Aid to the Church in Need is committed to comforting and supporting these innocent victims. Our mission is twofold. First, we provide persecuted Christians with pastoral and humanitarian aid. Second, we document and report on the hardship they face. Through our fundraising, advocacy, and journalism, we highlight and provide for the needs of these endangered faithful.

Read more at: www.churchinneed.org

A software engineer fired for putting “Assigned By God” as the preferred pronoun on his employee profile has filed a civil rights lawsuit against his company.

Chard Scharf was fired by the software company Bitwarden, an online storage service for sensitive information. Scharf served as Vice President of Software Engineering at the Jacksonville, Florida, location.

The lawsuit alleges that Bitwarden violated Scharf’s Title VII rights against religious discrimination by allowing other employees to post preferred pronouns on their employee profiles, but prohibiting Scharf from using his preferred pronoun based on his religious beliefs.

“Had Chad set aside his religious beliefs and acquiesced to Bitwarden’s promotion of gender ideology, he would not have been fired,” Scharf’s attorney Jennifer Vasquez told The Epoch Times, “which means his religious beliefs were the cause of his termination.” Vasquez is with the Florida law firm Campbell, Trohn, Tamayo & Aranda.

Neither Bitwarden nor its attorney B. Tyler White of Jackson & Lewis, responded to multiple inquiries from The Epoch Times about Scharf’s lawsuit. The company has not yet filed a response to the federal complaint.

“Bitwarden violated Title VII when it placed Mr. Scharf into a disfavored class by promoting its gender ideology, when it failed to approve his reasonable request for accommodation, and when it terminated his employment,” the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, Scharf was repeatedly pressured to add his preferred pronouns to his Slack employee profile under his company’s “inclusivity initiative.” Slack is a platform utilized for intra company communication.

When Scharf added “Assigned By God” to his employee profile page, he was told to remove it, his complaint alleges.

Scharf, a Catholic, told his company he would not participate in its request to choose preferred pronouns because it was part of a gender ideology that went against his religious beliefs.

He told Bitwarden executives that it was his belief that there are only two sexes and “that gender cannot be changed, chosen, or manipulated,” and that it was the company discriminating against him for failing to accommodate his beliefs.

Read more at: www.theepochtimes.com

A federal judge ordered a Korean-American women’s spa with compulsory nudity to admit men who identify as women, even if they have intact penises, in a decision on Monday.

Olympus Spa attempted to sue the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC) after being ordered to remove any mention of “biological women” from their website and to admit transgender men without question. Senior District Judge Barbara Rothstein dismissed the lawsuit, upholding the WSHRC’s orders as legal and requiring the spa to comply.

Haven Wilvich, a man who identifies as a woman, complained to the WSHRC in 2020 and claimed the spa declined his membership request. Wilvich alleged that the spa said, “transgender women without surgery are not welcome.” The spa disputed this claim, stating they had no record of an application.

The family-owned spa is modeled on jjimjilbang — traditional sex-segregated bathhouses in Korea. The spa only admitted trans-identified men if they had “gone through post-operative sex confirmation surgery.”

In March 2021, the WSHRC served spa owner Myoon Woon Lee with a Notice of Complaint of Discrimination. The spa’s president, Sun Lee, explained to the commission that Olympus was a family-owned “women’s Korean traditional health spa” that required nudity for certain treatments.

“We firmly believe it is essential for the safety, legal protection, and well-being of our customers and employees that we maintain adherence to this adaptation of a females-only rule,” Lee wrote.

The president also educated the board on the traditions of Jjimjilbang, arguing that the spa had “worked so hard over many years to build and preserve, simply for the sake of promoting gender neutrality.”

Both the owner and the president said they were Christian and cited their faith — the Christian belief in modesty between the sexes — as a reason why they did not wish to accept biological males into the women’s nude spa. Employees also involved in the suit — all of whom were women — refused to perform body scrubs on naked men, citing Christian principles as well. The District Court rejected their religious liberty claim.

The court upheld the WSHRC’s requirement that the spa removes all references to biological women from their site and subject their staff to “inclusivity” training. The spa challenged this as “compelled speech” in violation of the First Amendment, which Rothstein also rejected. The court rejected the spa’s third argument, which claimed that the WSHRC’s requirement of admitting men violated the right of association.

After the WSHRC ruling in 2021, Wilvich celebrated on social media, saying the order allowed “all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals.”

Read more at: www.dailywire.com

Biden admin funding controversial efforts to treat conservative groups as radical, watchdog warns

The Biden administration is doling out taxpayer money through an anti-terrorism grant initiative to a university program that has explicitly lumped the Republican Party, as well as Christian and conservative groups, into the same category as Nazis, according to documents shared exclusively with Fox News Digital.

The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, obtained documents through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests showing a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program meant to fight terrorism is funding a group whose work has explicitly targeted the American political right. The MRC outlined its findings in a report, arguing what the group found warrants criminal prosecution.

“This terrorism task force is engaged in an active effort to demonize and eliminate Christian, conservative, and Republican organizations using federal taxpayer dollars,” said Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center. “What we have uncovered calls for criminal prosecution. The American people need to know those who are abusing their positions in the federal government will be held accountable for their criminal behavior.”

DHS’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) provides funds to various public, private, and non-profit institutions — such as universities and county governments — “to establish or enhance capabilities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism.” Grant applicants must be based in the U.S. and implement a U.S.-based program.

The Biden administration has awarded 80 grants through the TVTP totaling just under $40 million. The lowest grant was for $85,000, the highest was over $1.1 million, and the median was about $442,000. TVTP grant recipients are prohibited from engaging in viewpoint discrimination, according to DHS.

Started by the Obama administration under a different name, the TVTP was broadened and revamped by the Biden administration with a new focus on violent extremism and white supremacy. DHS named one of its TVTP goals as “media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives,” which many grantees listed as the mission of their projects.

Read more at: www.foxnews.com

Regulators in Britain have banned a Christian teacher from the profession for life for “misgendering” a student, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.

The Teaching Regulation Authority (TRA) has ruled that Joshua Sutcliffe, 33, formerly of the Cherwell School at Oxford, should be banned from the teaching profession for failing to use the so-called preferred pronouns of a girl student who identified as a boy, which they claimed amounted to not providing the pupil with “dignity and respect”.

Sutcliffe admitted that there was an instance in which he praised a group of students by saying “well done girls” during a maths lesson, which apparently was enough for a student to feel misgendered. Regulators claimed that it was likely that there were other instances of the teacher not using preferred pronouns, however, Sutcliffe had denied these charges, The Telegraph reported.

In addition, the TRA also found the former mathematics teacher guilty of misconduct for expressing his faith-based opposition to gay marriage and for showing students at a different school video with “inappropriate comments” about the problems of declining masculinity in the modern world.

“The panel was satisfied that the conduct of Mr Sutcliffe fell significantly short of the standard of behaviour expected of a teacher,” the ruling from the regulators stated.

The TRA’s Alan Meyrick, who made the decision to impose the ban on the teacher, said: “In my view, it is necessary to impose a prohibition order in order to maintain public confidence in the profession.”

The chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, which has supported Mr Sutcliffe’s case, Andrea Williams said: “This is a tipping point. The government needs to step in and restore some sanity into the teaching profession. Similar action needs to be taken regarding the Teaching Regulation Agency.

“I am very concerned by the way regulatory bodies are now punishing Christian teachers simply for stating the truth.

Read more at: www.breitbart.com

Christian parents Izzy and Shane Montague are to appeal their case after the Central London County Court dismissed their claim against their child’s former school, Heavers Farm, for attempting to force him to participate in an LGBT themed Pride Parade.

Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, the parents brought the claim after a series of events which left them feeling intimidated and discriminated against for challenging the school over the LGBT education of their 4-year-old son, which included mandatory participation in a school run Pride Parade to celebrate Pride Month.

Parents were informed about the LGBT themed Pride celebration only days in advance when they received a rainbow-coloured invitation to attend the event. In preparation for the parade, children were taught the popular ‘gay anthems’, ‘We are Family’ and ‘True Colours’, which they had to sing while marching around the school.

The children were also required to create rainbow themed art, which the school’s lesson plan held out as an assignment to show support for the diverse LGBT community. The march also featured several large and conspicuous Pride flags. A number of members of staff were photographed at the event wearing LGBT campaigning themed t-shirts, with one teacher wrapping himself in a Pride flag.

The school told all parents that holding the parade was a legal requirement and even said to one parent it was against the law for their son not to attend.

182 children were withdrawn by their parents on the day of the parade.

Despite all of this, the Country Court ruled that the event was, in fact, not a promotion of LGBT but part of a general programme to promote equality and inclusivity.

Circuit Court Judge Christopher Lethem went so far as to find that there was little in the parade that was inconsistent with the Montague’s Christian beliefs (paragraph 160 of judgment).

Elsewhere in the judgment, the Court found that a Stonewall campaigning poster that was hung in the school and read “Some people are gay. Get over it!” was not only consistent with Christianity, but is what Church teaching advocates (paragraph 145 of judgment).

Read more at: christianconcern.com