By Christy Barritt

High School Football Coach Scrutinized for Team Meals

A high school football coach in Walker County, Georgia came under attack by an atheist organization after several local churches provided pregame meals for the team.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter to the county’s school superintendent and requested that the school board look into the activities of the Ridgeland High School football coach.

The letter stated, “Taking public school football teams to church, even for a meal, is unconstitutional. This program is an egregious violation of the Establishment Clause and must cease immediately.”

The school system released a statement to acknowledge they’d received the letter and were reviewing the claims.

Immediately after the scrutiny became public, social media sites began a campaign to support the football coach. In the first three days, more than 1,000 people “liked” the Facebook page supporting the coach.

California Bans Conversion Therapy for Gay Teens

The California State Assembly passed a ban against allowing gay teens under 18 to undergo reparative or conversion therapy.

The ban forbids psychologists from attempting to change a teen’s sexual orientation from same-sex to heterosexual. The measure will still be intact “regardless of the willingness of a patient” or a “patient’s parent.”

The Bill quotes a 2009 APA report that defines conversion therapy as “unlikely to be successful and involving some risk of harm.”

Opponents of the measure say it encroaches on parental rights.

The bill will head to the senate for a final vote before reaching the desk of the state’s governor. If it’s signed into law, California will be the first state to ban conversion therapy.

Focus on the Family Reveals Anti-Bullying Resource

Focus on the Family is now offering a tool to help parents evaluate anti-bullying policies in their children’s schools through a new “policy yardstick.”

The resource is available at www.truetolerance.org, which was launched in 2009. The site also suggests ways parents can make their voices heard in a loving, fact-based way when schools challenge the values they are teaching their kids at home.

Candi Cushman, director of the truetolernace.org website, said that many gay-activist groups push policies in their favor—which are often used as leverage to get controversial lessons in the classroom. Cushman said that bullying should be prevented in all forms.

“It can and should be done without politicizing taxpayer-funded classrooms and introducing controversial sexual topics to kids against their parents’ will,” Cushman said.

Less than One Percent of Abortions to Save a Mother’s Life

Just six in every 100,000 abortions performed in England and Wales were done to save the mother from a life-threatening situation, a new
report states.

The report was issued by the British government and highlighted the alarming number of legal abortions conducted over the past decade.

The author noted that only 0.006 percent of abortions were performed because the termination was immediately necessary to save the life of the mother. Another 24,778 were done on the grounds that a continued pregnancy would involve more risk to the mother than if the unborn child were destroyed.

“When the case for allowing legal abortion was first placed before the [British] Parliament it was argued that the law needed to be changed to deal with extremely serious situations,” according to a report by the Christian Institute in Britain. “More than six million abortions later the figures reveal that in 99.5 percent of the cases where an unborn child’s life is ended, there is no risk to the health of the mother.”

Christy Barritt is an award-winning author, freelance writer, and speaker living in Chesapeake, Virginia. She and her husband Scott have two sons.
www.christybarritt.com