Via Religion Clause, a lawsuit against controversial Ohio high school teacher John Freshwater has been settled, according to the Columbus Dispatch:

The family of a boy who said his eighth-grade science teacher burned a cross on his arm with an electric lab instrument and taught Christian doctrine in the Mount Vernon classroom has agreed to settle a federal lawsuit against the teacher.

Attorneys for the insurance carrier for Mount Vernon City Schools and teacher John Freshwater and the family of Zachary Dennis have chosen not to release details of the proposed settlement, court deputy Scott Miller said.

A Georgia college student is suing Augusta State University for requiring her to undergo additional diversity training as a part of her counseling degree.

According to the lawsuit, filed earlier this month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, school officials told Keeton that she was failing to conform to professional standards because of her views on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues.

This election season seems to be bringing out even more religion-based fearmongering than usual. In Colorado, former Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo has decided to launch a high-profile third-party bid for Governor under the Constitution Party, which as Beliefnet's Mark Silk points out insists on a religious basis for US law. 

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.

Meanwhile, running for Governor of Tennessee as a Republican, Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey argues that the First Amendment's religious freedom protections should only extend as far as his own bias will allow.

"Now, you know, I'm all about freedom of religion. I value the First Amendment as much as I value the Second Amendment as much as I value the Tenth Amendment and on and on and on," he said. "But you cross the line when they try to start bringing Sharia Law here to the state of Tennessee -- to the United States. We live under our Constitution and they live under our Constitution."
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"My concern is that far too much of Islam has come to resemble a violent political philosophy more than peace-loving religion," he said...

Suzii Paynter writes for Associated Baptist Press about the evolving dance between religion and foreign policy.

Religion has gone from being virtually ignored in foreign policy to being acknowledged. This is clearly stage one of a relationship -- and is accompanied by much of the same awkwardness of any new encounter. If religion is being acknowledged in policy circles, the relationship is soon to advance to a process of more integration. In the past three years, I have participated in several forums that bring religious and foreign-policy leaders together. Both sides are learning. The public-policy folks are often strong on persuasion and information. The religious leaders are almost always trying to convey the diversity of religious interests and voices -- there is no religious monolith in the 21st century either within religious traditions or among religious traditions.

A rule in Washington State that would have required pharmacists to dispense medications regardless of religious objection has been halted while a change in policy is being considered.

The motion to stay the trial was agreed upon to allow the state’s pharmacy board to begin the process of amending the rules, especially the one in question, Sally Boyer, executive director of the Washington State Board of Pharmacy and Clinical Facilities, told CNSNews.com. 
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[Becket Fund Director Eric] Rassbach said that since the state is now looking into changing the regulations, the Board of Pharmacy will probably finally have a formal facilitated referral system similar to the one proposed four years ago.

A referral system might require pharmacists not carrying some medications to direct patients to nearby pharmacies that do, a system Rassbach says is informally working currently.

In an online followup to his analysis of the Supreme Court's recent decision in CLS v. Martinez for the NYTimes, Stanley Fish responds to his critics with an explanation of why religious freedom cases these days have so little to do with the First Amendment's religion clauses. Recent church-state jurisprudence, he argues, has watered down religion's impact:

Lurking in the background of these cases is the question of exactly what a religion is. The courts do not confront that question directly — how could they? what would be their expertise? — but when even-handed treatment becomes the rule in aid and burdens on free exercise must be tolerated if imposing them was not the law’s affirmative intention, an answer has implicitly been given: religion is just another discourse, no different than any other. That is to say, religion is not special; it is not special in the negative sense implied by the establishment clause, which by its very existence announces, “watch out, this stuff is trouble”; and it is not special in the positive sense declared by the free exercise clause, which seems to announce, “this is something the state must protect.” The evisceration of the establishment clause gets religion in the door but at the expense of its unique status; the neutering or “neutraling” of the free exercise clause completes the denial to religion of the label “special.”

In March, a federal judge ruled in favor of California high school math teacher Bradley Johnson in a dispute over banners in his classroom with patriotic-religious messages like "God Shed His Grace on Thee" and "God Bless America". Now heading to the 9th Circuit on appeal, Americans United argues such use of a classroom is unconstitutional.

“The district court got it wrong,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United’s executive director. “A public school teacher has no constitutional right to push personal religious beliefs on students.

“I am confident that the appeals court will reverse this decision,” Lynn continued. “It conflicts with current constitutional law and opens the door for teachers to proselytize students.”

You can read their amicus brief here.

A Rhode Island high school has agreed to alter a decades-old auditorium banner, after complaints about its religious content led to an inquiry by the ACLU. The text is a prayer to "Our Heavenly Father", which school officials are now attempting to modify. Interestingly, this prayer itself was an attempt at compromise in the 1950s once it became clear that the practice of the day - beginning the school day with a recitation of The Lord's Prayer - was inappropriate.

“Growing up, we literally said the Lord’s Prayer in school, which obviously is a Christian prayer,” said the Rev. Donald Anderson, a Baptist pastor who graduated from Cranston West in 1966 and now heads the Rhode Island State Council of Churches. The prayer at the center of the storm, Anderson said, “was a move to accommodate a broader community than the prayer that was being said.”

“Looking back from 2010, it doesn’t feel that way at all,” Anderson said, but “this prayer [was] a move to be more inclusive.”

Anderson now supports the idea of removing the current banner to an off-campus location as a historical artifact.

As in the previous administration, many federal agencies under the Obama White House include a "faith-based" office. During President Bush's "Faith-Based Initiative" era, these offices primarily served to ensure that religious organizations had access to federal funding distributed by the agency. Since President Obama's faith-based director Joshua Dubois has said that the new adminstration does not view the role of partnerships to be concerned primarily with funding, the Washington Post's Michelle Boorstein asks a sensible question: "What do the White House's faith offices DO, exactly?"

Sure, we know generally that the offices help faith-based and other nonprofits that run programs on things like job training, but let's get more specific. Which groups do they help and fund, and for what projects? Have their priorities changed since the offices were run by the Bush White House? Does the office at USAID, for example, get involved in the many millions of dollars of contracts related to sex and family planning overseas? And what does the Justice Department faith office do?

So far, she says, she hasn't received answers from the White House, or the agency faith-based offices.