Who should decide whether a child should be allowed to identify as transgender? In numerous locations across the country, school administrators are saying that they should be the ones to decide—and that they can keep such information from parents. That’s why over the past year, the ERLC has signed onto three different amicus briefs relating …
Continue...The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) is the SBC entity tasked with speaking for Southern Baptists in the public square and speaking to Southern Baptists on matters of moral importance. As an organization committed to bridging the gap between the moral demands of the gospel and the practical realities of life and society, the …
Continue...Recently, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) proposed a rule change concerning education programs and school activities that receive federal financial assistance. On April 6, the ED released a proposed rule under Title IX anti-discrimination laws to “clarify” the participation of transgender students in school sports. The proposed rule focuses on sex-related eligibility criteria for …
Continue...On May 3, the North Carolina legislature passed the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act” (Senate Bill 20), legislation that reduces the state’s elective abortion limit from 20 weeks down to 12 and includes an exception for rape and incest through 20 weeks. It also establishes an exception for fetal life-limiting anomalies through 24 weeks …
Continue...Over the past year, there’s been increasing debate about the nature and classification of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. Are these systems truly representative of artificial intelligence (AI)? Do they propose a threat to humans? The answers, as with many things in …
Continue...On May 1, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released its 2023 annual report. As the report mentions, USCIRF was created as a result of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA). USCIRF “is an independent, bipartisan U.S. government advisory body, separate from the U.S. Department of State, that monitors religious …
Continue...Sexual abuse in the nation’s federal prisons must be rooted out, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the Justice Department’s second-highest-ranking leader, recently told prison wardens gathered for a nationwide training event. “This is urgent, urgent work,” Monaco told the Associated Press (AP) in an interview. “It’s incumbent upon us as leaders to call that out …
Continue...The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 18 in Groff v. Dejoy, a case dealing with religious accommodations in the workplace. This case, which centers around a Christian postal worker who wishes to observe the Sabbath, puts before the court a question of what burden employers must meet before denying religious accommodations to their …
Continue...In the wake of the recent shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee has called on Tennessee lawmakers to introduce an Order of Protection law aimed at preventing firearms from being bought or possessed by people who may be a danger to society or themselves. Gov. Lee’s proposal is fundamentally about providing …
Continue...A 150-year old law that many Americans have never heard of before is at the heart of the recent ruling on the abortion pill. The Comstock Act of 1873 was passed to safeguard public morality by suppressing the distribution and sale of obscene materials—including information on abortion—through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). As part of …
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