The upper house of the Minnesota Legislature will debate a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage, a bill many believe will pass.

The Minnesota Senate has scheduled debate on Monday afternoon for the bill, which passed the Minnesota House of Representatives Thursday with a vote of 75 to 59.  According to the Huffington Post, the Democratic Party holds a firm majority in the Minnesota Senate and Democratic Governor Mark Dayton has stated that he would sign the bill.

If passed, the bill would make Minnesota the eleventh state to legalize same-sex marriage and the second one located in the Midwest, with Iowa having legalized it via judicial fiat. more >>

Obama has gotten a relatively free pass as president, no doubt due to the intrigue of being the first black president. Congressional investigations into his administration go nowhere. The liberal media minimizes any wrongdoing by the administration and finds a way to spin it against Republicans instead. But something unusual has started happening. Influential figures on the left are speaking up loudly and attacking Obama over his policies regarding the U.S. military and defense. Obama is accused of being worse than former President George W. Bush due to the way he is continuing to detain Guantanamo inmates.

Obama originally said when he ran for office that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison, and after being elected in 2009, publicly instructed the military to shut it down within one year. It is now over four years later, into his second term, and the prison is still open. Most of the prisoners have been there for over 11 years without a trial. Nine have died since it opened in 2002. The scrutiny has intensified in recent months as a majority of the 166 inmates, down from a high of 684 in 2003, have gone on hunger strikes, and at least 21 of the men are being force-fed twice daily. The administration has approved 86 detainees for release, but curiously none have been released so far this year.

Obama recently closed the office of the Special Envoy to the Closure of Guantánamo, evidence that it is becoming even less likely that it will be shut down. Polls reveal that a whopping 70 percent of Americans approve of Obama keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison open, giving Obama less incentive to shut it down. Many of the detainees are from Yemen, and cannot be released there, because the administration imposed a ban on transfers to Yemen in 2009 after the Underwear Bomber attack. more >>

The only way I know we still live in a relatively free nation is that, at times, the truth does come out. The IRS announced that, yes; it did give extra scrutiny to tax returns that included the name "tea party" or "patriot" as part of their exempt applications. Too bad for Boston that the names Tamerlan and Dzhokhar weren't on that IRS watch list.

The IRS admits its blatantly illegal actions:

IRS agents singled out dozens of organizations for additional reviews because they included the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their exemption applications, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for lists of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said. more >>

The home schoolteacher who taught my children is retiring after a stellar twenty-three year career.

In the next few days we will withdraw our youngest child from her home school, high-school program. She then will prepare for taking the GED test in the next few weeks. For Sonya, my wife, it ends a twenty-three year home school teaching career.

When we made the decision to start homeschooling our oldest daughter it was not because we heard a word from God. It was not because we thought Deuteronomy 6 applied to readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic. Nor was it because we were on an anti-public school tirade. more >>

With all of the unrest being reported in countries like Egypt, Syria and Libya, perhaps the real untold story is the record number of Christians leaving the Muslim world.

According to Open Doors USA, at least 100 million Christians in 65 countries suffer persecution. For example, as the situation in Syria continues to intensify, it is very easy to forget the plight of Syrian Christians who are fleeing the country.

In his new book, Crucified Again, Raymond Ibrahim writes that Christians in that country are being targeted for kidnapping, plundering and beheadings. He reports that regions and towns that were once populated with Christians are now emptied. more >>

Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in all 50 states, benefited the pro-life cause and harmed the movement in favor of legal abortion, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who favors legal abortion, said Saturday. Her argument in favor of "judicial restraint," as she called it, could have implications for pending gay marriage cases.

"That was my concern, that the court had given opponents of access to abortion a target to aim at relentlessly. ... My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum that was on the side of change," she said before a University of Chicago Law School audience, according to Associated Press.

Ginsburg told the audience that she preferred a "judicial restraint" approach to the expansive approach of Roe, which took the decision away from legislative bodies. She would have preferred for the judges to have only struck down the Texas abortion law, rather than decide the issue for all 50 states. more >>