UW-Madison must fund prayer activities, court says

Madison - A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court's ruling that the University of Wisconsin-Madison must pay for student activities involving prayer, worship and proselytizing.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision Wednesday that the university's policy of turning down funding requests from student groups for such activities violates their First Amendment right to free speech.

The case was brought by the Roman Catholic Foundation, now known as Badger Catholic.

The university had argued that awarding student fees to the group that runs Evangelical training camps and hosts spiritual retreats is a violation of the separation of church and state.

But the judge and the appeals court say subsidizing the activities does not amount to an illegal endorsement of religion.
JSOnline 

By the way, I had never heard of the UW Student group Badger Catholic prior to naming my blog.  I actually Googled for a while making sure I had a unique name.  But great minds do think alike.  A solid group, and they can be found on Facebook.

5 comments:

Matt said...

NAME STEALER

Unknown said...

I just got a Google email Alert from "Leagle" on the case. I wondered if it was you.

http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=infco20100901127

I still don't have my backup from Qwest. I am starting to get very worried.

Badger Catholic said...

Hmm, Ray I know a thing or two about recovering data so email me if I can be of assistance.

Yes, the Badger Catholic Inc sounds like a very solid group. I hope they can hang tough in there.

Unknown said...

This is what I know now about Qwest's Digital Vault.

They give you free 2 gigs and that's all I thought I needed for my documents. But I knew that I should probably pay them a few bucks a month to go up to 4 or 5 gigs and backup some of my programs where I don't have disks.

So I was somewhat surprised when I went to restore and saw that they had me down for 900mb or so with something like 2,000 files.

And I noticed that in the "music" category, they had me down for only 12 files. Well, I'm in a schola in the Twin Cities and have lots of my music saved. So something must be wrong.

So rather than restore I called them up and talked to a woman who seemed to know what was going on. Then after a bit she noticed that in early May of this year they had saved something like 12,000 files and then a week or two later, it had dropped down to 2,000 files. (And now it is at 1,000 files).

So she told me to change the Digital Vault default to manual updates and she would contact their database geeks and have them give me a restore from early May. This was Tuesday and it was supposed to take two days to do.

I asked if I could do a restore on the 2,000 files first so I might not lose messages and a few permanent files saved during the period May-August. But she said they advised "no."

But I haven't heard anything since Tuesday and will contact them in the morning.

As I probably told you, my problem was a Windows crash. General Nano Systems in Minneapolis, near the UofMN, told me that there was no problem with my hard drive or memory. But they recommended that I put in a new hard drive and install a new Windows program on that.

They said that all my data should be on the old C drive.

Well there is lots of data on the old C drive, now called E on my computer. But some of it is garbled.

Lots of my "my documents" files are there, but wouldn't you know, my most important file, the backup of my genealogical program is not there, to my knowledge. Since Windows is shot, I assume I can't use C's Windows Desktop to search on E.

I could probably use some other program to search my E drive. Any recommendations on that?

I do have a copy of a Belarc analysis of my old system's hardware and software if that is of any interest.

Unknown said...

One thing that I wondered too was messing with the Registry on the old C, now E.

I had a restore point set. Could someone knowledgeable go in and attempt to back up a few days from the crash which happened about August 22?