In Franciscan Alliance, Inc. v. Becerra, (5th Cir., April 15, 2021), the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals remanded to a Texas federal district court a challenge by religious medical providers to a 2016 Health and Human Services rule that prohibited discrimination on the basis of “termination of pregnancy” and “gender identity.” The appeals court noted that since the district court decision, “the legal landscape has shifted significantly.” It pointed out:  HHS repealed the 2016…

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York yesterday announced the issuance of a superseding indictment (full text) bringing additional charges against leaders and members of the extremist Jewish sect Lev Tahor.  The new indictment in United States v. Helbrans, (SDNY, April 20, 2021) charges defendants with conspiring to transport a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual…

Suit was filed last week in a Missouri federal district court challenging a Directive issued last month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development interpreting the Fair Housing Act as barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The 70-page complaint (full text) in The School of the Ozarks, Inc. v. Biden, (WD MO, filed 4/15/2021), in addition to claiming a number of procedural problems with the adoption of…

 As reported by Politico: The Biden administration on Friday moved to unwind strict Trump-era restrictions on federal-funded medical research using fetal tissue obtained by abortions, reversing policies that scientists warned would devastate the development of treatments for a broad range of diseases. The Trump administration, under pressure from allied anti-abortion groups, ended fetal tissue research at the National Institutes of Health and established an ethics board to review government support for the research at…

France 24 reports that France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, ruled on Wednesday that a Muslim man who murdered Sarah Halimi, a Jewish woman, was not criminally responsible for the act.  The report says in part: Halimi, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her sixties, died in 2017 after being pushed out of the window of her Paris flat by neighbour Kobili Traoré, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic). The verdict by the…

Michigan’s Child Protection Law (MCL 722.634) provides: A parent or guardian legitimately practicing his religious beliefs who thereby does not provide specified medical treatment for a child, for that reason alone shall not be considered a negligent parent or guardian. In In re Piland, (MI App., April 15, 2021), a Michigan state appellate court held that the trial court erred in refusing to give a jury instruction based on this statute in a…

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule that would reverse the Trump Administration rules on federally funded family planning services and return, with a few modifications, to the rules in effect before 2019.  As summarized by NPR News: The [Trump Administration] rules … forbid any provider who provides or refers patients for abortions from receiving federal funding through Title X to cover services such as contraception and STD…