Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:
- Oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the challenge to the third version of the Trump Administration’s travel ban appeared to show a majority of the Court is in favor of upholding it.
- African Americans are more likely to identify as Christian than the U.S. population generally and are also more likely to identify as Protestant according to data from the Pew Research Center.
- A panel of judges from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in a suit challenging deportation orders for hundreds of Iraqis living in the United States, many of whom are from the country’s Christian minority.
- Attorneys for the owners of a business in Arizona that creates and sells custom wedding invitations argued before a state appellate court that the city of Phoenix’s anti-discrimination law violates their clients’ religious free exercise rights.
- In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that a group of foreign plaintiffs cannot use the Alien Tort Statute to sue a Jordanian bank in U.S. courts for allegedly facilitating terrorist attacks that occurred outside the U.S.
- The lower house of the California state legislature has passed a bill that would outlaw advertising or selling conversion therapy; a Republican legislator said it would likely be overturned in court on religious freedom grounds if it becomes a law.
- The Council on American-Islamic Relations has claimed that there was a 15% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes and other incidents of discrimination in 2017, and it blames rhetoric from President Trump and policies from his administration for the increase.
- The President of Turkey has said he will not turn over a Christian pastor jailed in the country unless the U.S. extradites an exiled Turkish Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania.
