The role of religion in military institutions is being questioned as the American Civil Liberties Union moves to defend students at the U.S. Naval Academy who feel that religion is being forced on them in the daily routine, according to The New York Times.

Prayers precede the noon meal at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where over 4,000 midshipmen dine together family-style in King Hall at 12:05 p.m. as outlined in the school’s schedule. In preparation, they stand “at attention” while one of the six resident chaplain offers a recitation, giving students “an opportunity for prayer or devotional thought,” says Cmdr. Ed Austin, a school spokesman in The New York Times.

Nine students who did not want to assume the “at attention” posture to participate in prayer, but might prefer to stand at “parade rest” instead, complained to the ACLU, saying that the practice makes them conspicuous and implies insubordination.

The ACLU, while differentiating between the organizations’ support for personal religious belief versus its opposition to involuntary religious activity, warns it is prepared to pursue legal action if “compulsory” noon day prayers do not come to an end. In a letter sent to Vice Admin. Jeffrey L. Fowler, superintendent of the Naval Academy, on May 2, ACLU legal director Deborah Jeon deems the prayer a violation of “religious freedom and rights of conscious.” Jeon draws on a 2004 appellate court case that ruled Virginia Military Institutes’ similar “supper prayers” unconstitutional. She states that the Naval Academy has long been usurping the precedent set by that decision.

Leaders at the academy are defending the structure that offers a spiritual element to the military regimen, and the superintendent says that “the academy does not intend to change its practice.” The school, founded in 1865, concludes that honor and integrity can be enhanced by cultivating spiritual growth, according to the academy’s Web site, which indicates that none of the religious activities is mandatory.

As noted on WMB, Carolyn Kirk, mayor of Gloucester is attempting to debunk the idea of a “pregnancy pact” at Gloucester High School – a pact the principal blamed for a fourfold increase in the high school’s teen pregnancy rate.  Whether there was a pact or not (Kirk hasn’t convinced everyone), the situation is unsettling conventional wisdom about teen pregnancy. 

Seventeen girls are pregnant and none is over 16 years old, reported Kathleen Kingsbury of Time. The town of 30,000 has experienced economic decline, causing city budget restrictions that affected education. Kirk told The New York Times, “There are cuts in economic programs…and they’re impacting the social climate.” One such cut was from sex-education.

But how much of a difference did the lack of sex ed make?  At the press conference, Kirk said Gloucester High School’s spike in pregnancies was similar to spikes in other communities and in the nation as a whole.  Between 2005 and 2006, the nation saw a three percent increase in teen pregnancies following a historic low, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Time writer Kathleen Kingsbury told National Public Radio that the girls she interviewed seemed to lack direction. “”So these are girls who didn’t have a strong life plan,” she said. “They decided … being a mother would be their identity.” It’s an identity that Kay S. Hymowitz of the City Journal notes has become more appealing in the wake of glamorized Hollywood mothers such as Jamie Lynn Spears. That may have made pregnancy seem reasonable, even appealing.

The City of Gloucester is considering ways of preventing further teen pregnancies, but is meeting opposition. The school’s former nurse practitioner and medical director suggested revising the health policy to allow the distribution of contraceptives without parental consent. The idea—a hard-sell to a predominately Catholic community— reportedly led to the pair’s resignation, said Kingsbury.

But as Hymowitz notes, if the girls planned to get pregnant, “Unless someone has figured out how to force young people to take birth-control pills, sex education is completely beside the point.”  Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy told the AP, “This is not a story about sex education. This is a story about a failure to take childbirth seriously.”

The California Supreme Court overturned the state ban on same-sex marriages last month and declared it an unconstitutional breach of citizens’ right of equal protection, according to majority opinion leader Chief Justice Ronald George in US News.

The repeal caused a tumultuous combination of conservative protest and influx of requests for marriage. By the evening of Friday, June 13, hundreds of same-sex couples scheduled appointments to obtain licenses at San Francisco City Hall, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. California conservatives acted just as quickly, reports US News, as 1.1 million signatures on a petition secured the issue on the November ballot for a vote. Californians will then decide on the constitutional definition of marriage.

California Supreme Court Justice Marvin Baxter expressed his disapproval of the ban in his dissenting opinion, saying the court overstepped its bounds as a check to the legislative branch. “If there is to be a…change in the social and legal understanding of marriage itself,” he said, “that evolution should occur by similar democratic means.” He chided the Californian judicial branch for seeking to change the “age-old” and “confirmed” meaning of marriage, and supports the move to put the decision in the hands of the people.

Conservatives who support the ban cite religious convictions and tradition.* Everett Rice of California Family Council, a not-for-profit organization that aims at protecting traditional family values, told the San Francisco Chronicle that by allowing same-sex marriages, the state was asking Californians to cast off ideals held since the founding of America. “Why do we have to change our historical understanding of marriage?” he asked. He conveys the worldview of the organization, whose Web site vouches for defining marriage in the state constitution as a union between a man and a woman.

With the possibility of Californians lifting the ban within four months, same-sex couples are vying for licenses to wed during the narrow time window this summer. Starting Tuesday, the first day the licenses are available, California will see another historic rush for its borders.

*This sentence has been changed from the original.  It originally read, “Conservatives who oppose the ban cite religious convictions and tradition.”  

Polar bears found shelter under the Environmental Protection Act Wednesday when the U.S. Department of Interior added them to the list of “threatened” species. America’s largest bears were already protected from sport and profit hunters, but scientists identified a more dangerous threat with the potential to decrease their population by two-thirds in the next 40 years: global warming.

The Department of Interior drew on satellite images that showed how a fifth of the Arctic sea ice, which the polar bears rely on as a feeding ground, has melted. An article in The Washington Post explains how the bears travel north with the receding ice to hunt during the summer, but get landlocked in the winter and struggle to survive on bodily reserves.

The LA Times reports that the Endangered Species Act is potentially “the nation’s most powerful environmental law.” This is the first time the government has applied it to protect animals from the impact of climate change, though, and both conservatives and liberals wonder how the measure will affect climate change regulations.

Reassuring the nation that the government can achieve a balance, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said in a press release that the “listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact … in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.”

Yet some see the act as a front to implement energy regulations. “The Endangered Species Act…would actually do quite a bit of economic damage, and may or may not actually impact the bears,” said Ben Lieberman of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in a CBS News article.

His comment reflects the foundation’s worldview that “myths” regarding the environment keep America from tapping all its energy reserves and summarizes the suspicion that some Christians (although not all Christians) harbor about climate change. Lieberman voices the concern that restrictions in the name of preserving polar bears could block U.S. energy efforts to drill for oil off the coast of Alaska and curb the building of coal-burning energy plants across the nation.

Kempthorne said it would be “wholly inappropriate” to use the protection of polar bears as a platform for climate change, according to The New York Times. He recognizes that merely listing the bears “will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting. Any real solution requires action by all major economies for it to be effective.”

Dubbing the species on the verge of becoming endangered isn’t tough enough for some environmentalists, who say it’s a superficial effort that uses polar bears as a meaningless symbol.

Thomas L. Friedman says he wants a president who can focus on getting America “back to work.” He writes in his New York Times column, “Who Will Tell the People,” that the Iraq war is distracting America from reaching its potential. “People want to do nation-building,” he says, “They really do. But they want to do nation-building in America.”

Friedman blames the declining economy on the neglect of traditional values because of preoccupation with Iraq. Noting that working and studying hard, saving, investing and living on a budget “have given way to subprime values,” he refers to the current housing crisis. The National Association of Realtors reports that foreclosures have caused median single-family existing home prices to drop 7.7 percent during the first quarter of this year compared to 2007. The economic situation can also be seen in the rising number of unemployed citizens, which the U.S Department of Labor records as up to 5 percent of the population. But Friedman doesn’t cite statistics. He concludes America is falling behind in the technological and economic spheres based on his observations of New York’s transportation centers compared to ports in Singapore and Germany. He says his arrival abroad made him feel as though he had flown “from the Flinstones to the Jetsons.”

In a Letter to the Editor the following day, Joy Jurnack agreed, saying [I] “believe in this great nation, but want to see it concentrate its dollars and sense on those of us who live between our borders. We want to help others,” she says, “but our infrastructure is near the fracturing point, and it is high time we concentrate on us.”

Friedman was not impressed with Senator Hillary Clinton’s recent TV ad that portrays her as the experienced official ready to answer the “Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom.” Anyone can do that. Instead, he wants “a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people.”

In a comment in response to John Cole’s Balloon Juice blog post on the column, a reader disagreed with the idea that involvement in Iraq is the cause of America’s economic downslide, but reiterated Friedman’s desire for a president who will help the situation. The blogger writes that he wants a president who will tell the American public, “‘OK, here is what we are doing to ourselves. We can’t fix it overnight, but we can make it better, one step at a time.’”

Jurnack says she hopes that the next president will have the ability to foster the values Friedman lists. That would fill her prescription for what she says America needs, which is a dose of “tough love.”