Officials deny they voted down plan because of Baptist opposition
A Baptist church in Ohio is being accused of religious intolerance for allegedly thwarting a plan to build a mosque on nearby property.
The board of zoning appeals in Sugarcreek Township, Ohio, insists its 5-0 vote against a variance request that would have permitted the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton to build the mosque was not influenced by the local First Baptist Church. The rejection, officials say, was based only on the expected sewage and traffic impact, the Dayton Daily News reported.
But the senior pastor of the 1,900-member church, Barry Jude, has made his opposition to the mosque clear.
"We just feel that Christianity is right and that Islam is wrong," Jude told the Daily News. "Therefore, we take a stand to see (a mosque) not in our community. The wonderful thing about our American culture is that you have the right to speak out against something you don't support."
The paper says the issue "has touched on larger questions: Does the presence of a mosque locally evoke feelings of fear or even hatred? Are church officials saying out loud what a lot of people are thinking privately?"
The ...   more »

'You are going to see this decision quoted by cities across the country'
The right of a small town in Missouri to deal with the cost and crime caused by the influx of illegal aliens has been upheld by a federal judge who ruled the community's ordinance penalizing local companies that hire undocumented workers is not pre-empted by federal law, does not discriminate against Hispanics and does not violate due-process rights or state law.
The ruling late Thursday by U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber was in favor of Valley Park, Mo., located about 20 miles west of St. Louis.
Valley Park is one of several cities across the U.S. that have attempted to address the problems resulting from illegal immigration and the failure of the federal government to address the issue.
City officials have been in court since 2006 after passing the town's first immigration law fining landlords who rent to illegals and suspending business permits of companies that hire them. The city eventually repealed the rental ordinance but continued to target businesses.
WND has reported on dozens of towns – including Hazleton, Pa., Manassas, Va., Bridgeport, Pa., Prince William County, Va. and Cape Cod, Mass. – that have ...   more »

Parents challenge curriculum targeting children as young as 4th grade
By Bob Unruh 
A campaign has been launched by concerned parents and others in Florida where a school board has adopted an explicit sex ed curriculum that includes various how-to lessons for students as young as fourth grade, and in one incarnation proposed field trips for children to purchase condoms and then talk about their experience.
The parents have created the Sex Ed Facts.com website to coordinate their work to oppose the program adopted by the board members of the St. Lucie County school district.
The dispute is similar to a controversy that has been going on in Montgomery County, Md., over a similarly graphic sex-education curriculum adopted by the school board there that teaches homosexuality is innate and provides depictions of "erotic" sex techniques.  
Brandon M. Bolling, of the Thomas More Law Center, told Judge William J. Rowan III during a recent court hearing on the legality of the program Maryland law requires that information presented in public schools be supported with evidence, and the teaching that homosexuality is "innate" lacks that support.
He also argued that the lessons required by Montgomery County Board of Education teach students ...   more »

he U.S. Constitution empowers the federal government to "regulate commerce … among the several states. …" Historically, this has been interpreted to empower the feds to regulate "navigable" waters of the United States. Historically, "navigable" waters were defined to be water deep enough to float a canoe. Historically, the regulation of all other waters has been left to state and local governments, and before that, to whoever had the fastest gun.
No more. Nearly 40 percent (173) of the House of Representatives and 20 percent (20) of the Senate have co-sponsored legislation that will change existing law:
by striking "navigable waters of the United States" each place it appears and inserting "waters of the United States"; (H.R.2421, Sec. 5(1)).
The proposed law will define "waters of the United States" to be:
"[W]aters of the United States" means all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams), mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, natural ponds, and all impoundments of the foregoing, to the fullest extent that these waters, or activities affecting these waters, are subject to ...   more »

Editor joins Breitbart, Horowitz at Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C. 
WASHINGTON – WND founder and Editor Joseph Farah joins radical-turned-conservative author David Horowitz and Internet pioneer Andrew Breitbart in a nationally televised panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, Feb. 8, at noon Eastern at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in the nation's capital.
Farah will be addressing the imminent threat to the First Amendment of "Fairness Doctrine" legislation that will be introduced if Democrats recapture both houses of Congress and the presidency this fall.
The panel topic is "Hugo Chavez Democrats: Silencing the Right." It will be moderated by L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.
CPAC is the largest gathering of political conservatives held annually in the U.S. The 2008 meeting is the 35th annual conference. It is typically televised by C-Span.
Farah is the founder, editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com, the world's leading independent Internet news source. In addition, he writes a daily column for WND and a weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate. He is also the founder and co-publisher of WND Books, a publishing venture that has produced several New York Times best sellers in the last five years. WND ...   more »

Godless detractor after reading book: 'Trust me, it wasn't pretty' 
The first atheist critic to read and review WND columnist Vox Day's book, "The Irrational Atheist," has been left flummoxed and frustrated by its content, cursing the fact the new work is both "amazing" and, to him, "depressing."
Wrote Brent Rasmussen on the blog Unscrewing the Inscrutable:
"I am not going to go into a point by point review of the various arguments that Day addressed in 'The Irrational Atheist.' Suffice it to say that by the end of the chapters dealing with the individual [atheist] authors, I was happy that it was over. It was a thorough, detailed, dispassionate (with a little snarky levity thrown into the footnotes for flavor), and completely disheartening take-down of some of the best arguments that the godless have put into print – on their own terms, without using the Bible (in the first part of the book, that is), or any other sacred text to do it with. Amazing. And depressing. It is not my place to defend their books. I truly hope that they do find time to defend and clarify their books, specifically to the counter-arguments and claims made by Vox ...   more »