I just spent the better part of the day reading and listening to sermons by the leaders and jihadis of the new "caliphate" in Mesopotamia, the Islamic State (formerly "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria").

I did so in the vain hopes of learning something "new."

But it was absolute déjà vu-taking me back to a decade ago, when I was reading and translating the Arabic writings and speeches of al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, as collated in The Al Qaeda Reader. more >>

A group of organizations committed to LGBT rights have announced their pulling of support from the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act over its religious exemption.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Transgender Law Center released a joint statement Tuesday expressing their opposition to ENDA.

Meant as a federal measure to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the current version of ENDA included a provision allowing religious organizations to be exempted from the proposed legislation. more >>

A photo of Holly Fisher celebrating Hobby Lobby's Supreme Court victory posted on Twitter was supposed to be lighthearted. But when the Christian mother of three from Charleston, West Virginia, realized she was under attack from liberals, she followed it up with a photo of herself standing with a gun and a Bible on Independence Day — that's when all hell broke loose.

"Attention liberals: do not look at this picture. Your head will most likely explode," Fisher tweeted on July 1 posing in a pro-life T-shirt with a Chick-fil-A cup in front of a Hobby Lobby store.

The tweet came just a day after the Supreme Court had struck down the HHS' mandate when it ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods Specialties, stating that corporations are not required to cover, under their healthcare plans, birth control methods that can lead to the early termination of a pregnancy. more >>

It's been almost a week since the Supreme Court issued their ruling on the Hobby Lobby case, and there appears to be no end in sight to the Left's outrage over the outcome. As expected, given the controversial nature of the issue at hand, most of the ire is reflexive and purely visceral. It's unlikely that many are taking the time to actually educate themselves on the Court's reasoning behind the decision. In their eyes, misogyny and religious fanaticism won out over women's rights, period. On the Right, there is a temptation to fall into essentially the same error: ascribing moral significance to what is in reality a legal decision. While its understandable that conscientious Christians are heartened by the outcome of this case, we must understand that the Court's ruling in the Hobby Lobby case had virtually nothing to do with the Justices' personal beliefs about the morality of abortifacient drugs, and everything to do – as should be the case – with the law.

In the face of the hysterical fallout over this decision, legal scholar Eugene Volokh penned a piece for The Washington Post aiming to explain the reasoning behind the Court's ruling in layman's terms. He distilled the decision into five simple points, which I've paraphrased here:

1. Congress has decided that religious objectors may go to court to demand religious exemptions from federal laws, when the law makes them do things that they view as religiously forbidden. more >>

A Christian-run bakery in the U.K. could be facing a court case after it refused a request from a customer to make a cake featuring the "Sesame Street" characters Bert and Ernie with a slogan to "support gay marriage."

Ashers Baking Company in Belfast declined the order from the customer, a gay rights activist, but now mat face legal action from watchdog group Equality Commission, BBC News reported on Tuesday.

In a statement, the 24-year-old general manager of the Christian bakery said that the order, featuring portraits of the two puppets side by side alongside the logo of gay rights group QueerSpace, went against their religious convictions. more >>

Amid some of the myths perpetuated about last week's Supreme Court's decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, there were a few reactions that were particularly notable for their nonsensical reasoning. Here were three of them:

1. "We are a corporate theocracy now."

The Court's Hobby Lobby decision was part of a Christian Right plot to end democracy in America and replace it with a "corporate theocracy," C.J. Werleman wrote for Salon. more >>