Liberals, stop being so defensive. That’s the message of Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet in a new post at Balkinization, titled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” The problem, according to Tushnet, is that liberals have been too defensivewhen it comes to advancing their agenda in the courts.

Now that President Barack Obama has reshaped the federal judiciary, liberal causes can win easily in court. And now that Justice Antonin Scalia has died, “judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.” MORE

The U.S. Justice Department is putting the feelings of transgenders — men who think they are women and women who think they are men — above the privacy rights of the vast majority of people who don’t contest the biological facts of who they actually are.

“And what we must not do, what we must never do, is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans for something that they cannot control and deny what makes them human,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Monday.

“[N]one of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not.” MORE

A sculpture of a crucified frog threatened with eviction from Bolzano’s new modern art museum after being condemned by the pope, the minister of culture and local right-wing politicians is staying where it is.

Today the museum’s governing committee decided “by a clear majority” to keep it on display. PICTURE INAPPROPRIATE

MINNEAPOLIS –  It’s been nearly three years since Minnesota opened a path for lawsuits by victims of long-ago childhood sexual abuse.

In that time, more than 800 people have brought abuse claims against churches, the Boy Scouts, schools and a children’s theater company. Previously unknown offenders have been exposed. Two Roman Catholic dioceses have filed bankruptcy. Lists of credibly accused priests and thousands of documents have been released. And the heightened scrutiny played a part in the downfall of two bishops MORE

Veiled women, incense, Gregorian chants, kneeling, standing, kneeling again, long periods of silence — think all of this is a scene from a Catholic Mass in 1950?

It was then, to be sure — but it is now also happening every Sunday, and in some places every day, in churches all over the United States. The Latin Mass of years gone by is becoming more popular again.

As a convert to the Catholic faith, I was drawn to the Catholic Church by the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the fullness of the faith, and the path of truth with a capital “T” through the ages. I thirsted for the Eucharist during every Mass I attended even before my First Communion and Confirmation at the Easter Vigil in 2012. MORE

More than a dozen members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards were killed this week during an attack by militants in northern Syria in what shows Tehran’s deep involvement in the Syrian civil war.

Iran has been one of President Bashar Assad’s strongest backers and has, along with Lebanon’s Iran-backed militant Hezbollah group, sent fighters to battle on the government’s side. MORE

Vol 9 Issue 19 ~
Editor: Rev. Fr. Courtney Edward Krier
May 7, 2016 ~ Saint Stanislaus, opn!

1. Baptism: Means of Salvation (67)
2. Sunday after Ascension
3. St. Michael
4. Christ in the Home (41)
5. Articles and notices

Dear Reader:

Please accept a brief newsletter. The Novena to the Holy Ghost as begun as the Church prepares for the feast of Pentecost, but May also means First Communions, Confirmations, and May crownings. The Church is alive in presenting her children with opportunities of grace and the faithful should take advantage.  Continue reading →

Ash Carter’s announcement December of 2015 demonstrated the Obama’s Administration attachment to a political ideology fueled by arrogance and premeditated ignorance. MORE

Human life begins in bright flash of light as a sperm meets an egg, scientists have shown for the first time, after capturing the astonishing ‘fireworks’ on film. MORE

Southern California’s section of the San Andreas fault is “locked, loaded and ready to roll,” a leading earthquake scientist said Wednesday at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach. MORE

The Queen James Bible, also known as the Gay Bible, is a new assault on Biblical orthodoxy and sexual purity. In it, the 1769 King JamesBible has been reproduced with only a very few select verses altered–the ones that relate to homosexuality. Those verses are listed below and analyzed. I hope you will see that the Queen James Bible is a perversion of the original text and is the result of obvious prejudices against the original Hebrew and Greek texts in order to make homosexual practices appear acceptable. MORE

Canada wildfire forces mass evacuation in Fort McMurray. The blaze has destroyed a number of homes, dropping ash on the streets of the city in the province of Alberta. A huge wildfire has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Fort McMurray – nearly all the residents of the Canadian city. Fort McMurray – which lies in Alberta’s oil sands region – has a population of more than 60,000 people. Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada.

The dead started washing up in April: miles and miles of fish, countless clams, the occasional whale. Government researchers eventually concluded that “toxic elements” were responsible for the die-off, which Vietnamese officials described as “unprecedented.”MORE