Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:
- Baptists and Mormons have joined other faith groups in asking the Supreme Court to review a 10th Circuit decision striking down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage.
- State officials in Indiana and Wisconsin have challenged a federal appeals court ruling striking down their gay marriage bans. This brings the total number of Supreme Court appeals regarding same-sex marriage to seven.
- The 9th Circuit heard oral arguments in cases from Idaho, Nevada and Hawaii challenging same-sex marriage bans.
- Watch a recording of the oral arguments here.
- For Chaldean Catholics in the US, the only thing new about the atrocities committed by ISIS in Iraq is an awareness of them outside the Chaldean-American enclaves of San Diego and metropolitan Detroit.
- Canada’s Ambassador for religious freedom stated that ISIS’s attacks against religious minorities in Iraq and Syria have risen to the level of a genocide.
- A watchdog group, International Christian Concern, has raised concerns that a Hindu nationalist group, is looking to cleanse the minority Christian population in India, much like ISIS is doing in Iraq and Syria.
- 28 Christians were arrested at a prayer meeting in Saudi Arabia by hard-line Islamists from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Congressman Frank Wolf is urging the State Department to assist the arrested Christians.
- Inspired by ISIS, Boko Haram is attempting to carve out a caliphate in northeastern Nigeria.
- Notwithstanding Boko Haram’s extremism, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama seeks to engage in a ‘Dialogue of Life’ to bring together Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims.
- The European Court of Human Rights has upheld its judgement that Hungary’s church law violated articles 11 and 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The Hungarian church law stripped nine religious communities of their legal status as churches.
- Spanish interior minister Jorge Fernández Díaz has stated that the final draft of Spain’s Citizen Security Law could include a ban on burqas.