WASHINGTON—On Monday the Supreme Court unanimously decided that children conceived through in vitro fertilization after their father’s death could not count as his children for the purpose of receiving his Social Security benefits. The court said the Social Security benefits are designed only for those who were dependents during the parent’s lifetime. (Download a PDF of the opinion.)

The case involved complex questions of who counts as a child for legal purposes in an age of donor eggs and sperm and artificial insemination (see “Postmortem conception,” March 20). Justice Sonia Sotomayor wondered in the oral arguments in March whether any children of a sperm donor would qualify for his benefits.

“The technology that made the twins’ conception and birth possible, it is safe to say, was not contemplated by Congress when the relevant provisions of the Social Security Act originated (1939) or were amended to read as they now do (1965),” wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the court’s opinion. She added that the decision by the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deny benefits to the children conceived postmortem was “reasonable,” but that it might not be the only reasonable interpretation of the law. The court didn’t have enough ground to reverse the SSA’s decision, Ginsburg wrote, so the justices had to defer to the SSA’s reasonable interpretation of the law. … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

WASHINGTON—Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius delivered a commencement address Friday morning at Georgetown University, after days of debate about a Cabinet secretary who has clashed so publicly with the Catholic Church speaking at the nation’s oldest Jesuit school. In her speech, Sebelius avoided points of controversy, but she brought up protecting religious freedom—of which her religious critics have accused her of doing the opposite.

The controversy mirrored the outcry when President Obama delivered a commencement address at Notre Dame, another Catholic university, in 2009. Sebelius is herself Catholic, but is pro-abortion and has been the face of the debate this year with U.S. Catholic bishops as well as Protestant leaders after she instituted the contraceptive and abortifacient mandate as a part of the implementation of Obama’s healthcare law.

Religious leaders object to the mandate as an imposition on religious freedom, because only churches are exempt from the requirement to provide free contraceptives and abortifacients to employees. The administration has sought to nuance the mandate in the months since it was announced, but religious groups remain unconvinced that the new regulations will protect them from paying for drugs—like the morning after pill—that violate their consciences. …

More words were spilled about Sebelius speaking at Georgetown than were in her speech itself. The brief, low-key address to a few hundred graduates of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute avoided controversial topics, but Sebelius did reference the ongoing debate over religious freedom.

She recalled witnessing attacks on John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism when he was running for president in 1960, and brought up his speech on religion in the public square: “He believed in an America, and I quote, ‘Where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against us all.’”

Sebelius added, “And more than 50 years later, that conversation, about the intersection of our nation’s long tradition of religious freedom with policy decisions that affect the general public, continues.” … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

WASHINGTON—Not many funerals draw the nation’s political elite, evangelicals, and ex-convicts. Charles Colson’s memorial service on Wednesday at Washington National Cathedral did, by the thousands. And those thousands heard not so much about Colson—the Nixon confidante, redeemed prisoner, and founder of Prison Fellowship—as they did about his Savior.

“Chuck never forgot that he was saved by a Savior who was crucified as a prisoner,” said Timothy George, the dean of Beeson Divinity School and a close friend of Colson’s who gave a gospel-filled homily. “We do not grieve as those who have no hope.”

The service was filled with Scripture readings and congregational hymns like “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

Emily Colson, Chuck Colson’s daughter, urged the audience to consider the service a “celebration.” She read something her father wrote before he died: “I want my funeral services to be joyful … death is but a homecoming. It’s the culmination of life.”

Indeed, the service concluded with a quarter-peal of the cathedral’s bells—a 45-minute performance—so it sounded like a wedding as those in attendance left.

“My dad became, as Scripture says, a new creation, and he loved his family differently,” his daughter continued. “He put God first, family second, above all else. That’s the mark of a great father and a great Christian leader.”

“Who will take the place of Chuck Colson?” George asked the audience. He noted that people asked the same question when evangelist Dwight L. Moody died, and not many years after Moody’s death, John Stott, Billy Graham, and Chuck Colson were born. … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

WASHINGTON—On the heels of a landslide victory for a traditional marriage amendment in North Carolina, President Obama announced in a Wednesday interview with ABC News that he now personally supports same-sex marriage.

The announcement was practically forced upon the president a few days after Vice President Joe Biden said that he supported gay marriage. Biden’s comments made the question of the president’s position on the issue perennial in White House press briefings.

“I’d hesitated on gay marriage in part because I thought civil unions would be sufficient,” Obama said Wednesday. “And I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people the word ‘marriage’ was something that invokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs, and so forth.” Obama cited his and his wife Michelle’s Christian faith as his reason for personally supporting same-sex marriage.

“In the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people,” he said. “We are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing Himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule—treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.”

Back in 2004 as a Senate candidate, Obama cited his faith as his reason for opposing same-sex marriage: “I’m a Christian, and so although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.” … MORE >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

WASHINGTON—Majed El Shafie grew up a Muslim in Cairo, Egypt. After his conversion to Christianity as a young man, he was arrested and tortured. He will describe his torture in graphic detail, but he can’t eat anything after talking about it. He was sentenced to death by hanging and put under house arrest, but he escaped to Israel and then immigrated to Canada as a refugee in 2002.

A few years later, El Shafie became one of the key people pushing the Canadian government to launch an international religious freedom office. Now Canada’s Conservative government is working on creating such an office in its Foreign Affairs Department for the first time—the hope is to officially open the office in the next few months, though a date hasn’t been set. In late April a delegation of a half dozen Canadian members of Parliament traveled to the Washington meet with members of Congress as well as members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to discuss the new office. It was apparently the first such delegation from Canada to Washington on the issue of religious freedom.

El Shafie now heads up a religious freedom group in Toronto, One Free World International, and he said his group has been in talks with the government about the creation of such an office for six years. He sees the Arab Spring as a strong reason to get the office off the ground.

“My fear is that we’re losing an important human rights battle,” he said. “Why do they call it an Arab Spring? It’s turning to be a deadly cold winter for the minorities.” … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

UPDATE: A public memorial service honoring Charles Colson will be held Wednesday, May 16, at 10 a.m. at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Except for those formally invited, seating will be limited to first-come, first-served. The service will be streamed live on the National Cathedral website.

OUR EARLIER REPORT: The staff from Prison Fellowship, the ministry founded and led by Charles Colson, will hold a private memorial service for the evangelical leader in Washington, D.C., this afternoon. Colson died Saturday following complications from a intracerebral hemorrhage suffered on March 30.

Details about a public memorial service for Colson are still forthcoming. According to a family spokesperson, the family is working out arrangements to hold a public service at Washington’s National Cathedral. WORLD will post further details here.

Colson, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, will be buried at Quantico National Cemetery, part of the Marine base in northern Virginia.

WASHINGTON—A posse of state attorneys general were milling around on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building—again. Another day at the high court, another blockbuster case.

Wednesday’s case on Arizona’s immigration law, the last of the Supreme Court’s term, was in many ways a parallel of last month’s historic healthcare case. Arizona v. United States pitted the same two lawyers against each other: Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. and Paul Clement, who was solicitor general during the Bush administration. Dozens of state attorneys general filed briefs in favor and against Arizona’s laws; religious groups took sides, holding vigils; and chanting crowds packed in front of the steps of the court—all just like in the healthcare case.

The justices seemed to view this as a similarly historic case: It was billed for an hour of argument, but they granted the lawyers a rare extra half hour, what Clement called “bonus time.” (Download a PDF of the transcript.) Missing from this case was Justice Elena Kagan, who, because of her position as the former solicitor general in the Obama administration, recused herself. If the court’s vote ends up tied 4-4, then the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to overturn most of the law would be in force.

The court will decide the case sometime in the next two months, and the decision will have a wide impact because over the last two years a number of states—Utah, Alabama, Indiana, Georgia, and South Carolina—have passed similar immigration laws and have faced similar legal challenges. Some federal courts are waiting on the Supreme Court’s ruling to decide these other states’ cases. Plus, other state legislatures are currently working on passing Arizona-type laws.

The justices will not be deciding whether the Arizona law, known as S.B. 1070, is a good law. The federal government’s lawsuit did not ask the court to consider, for example, whether the law’s provision allowing law enforcement officers to check the immigration papers of those they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally amounts to racial profiling. …

The court is dealing with the more abstract issue of whether federal law preempts certain provisions in the Arizona law. The law’s challengers have a high bar to clear because the court has generally placed the burden on the federal government to show that its laws take precedence over state laws. Specifically at issue were four elements of the Arizona law that the federal government said conflicted with its immigration policy: state law enforcement checking someone’s immigration status, law enforcement making warrantless arrests, the criminalization of illegal immigrants working or attempting to work, and the criminalization of immigrants being in the country illegally. None of these elements have been in force in Arizona because courts have blocked them.

From the tone of the arguments Wednesday, it seemed most of the justices were willing to give Arizona at least limited authority to address immigration. Just last year, the court in U.S. Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting approved Arizona’s law that requires employers to check the immigration status of their employees. … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

Chuck Colson, who died earlier today, fell ill on March 30 during his speech at the Wilberforce Weekend Conference hosted by the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview in northern Virginia. Eric Metaxas, who has written bestselling biographies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and William Wilberforce, worked with Colson earlier in his career and introduced him for what would be his final speech.

Below are a few excerpts from Colson’s speech. (Note: The audio recording of his speech has been removed from our website at the request of the Colson family.)

“I personally am very glad to be here because this is the first time I’ve been out in three months. I had a little mishap and have been on the sidelines recuperating. So I’m really glad—I would not have wanted to miss this weekend, and was afraid I might have to. …

“I happen to be one of those who believes that societies are changed by movements at the grassroots. So how do we get that material out to people that they can use it for their neighbors. I think cultures are changed over the backyard fence and the barbecue grill; I don’t believe they’re changed from the top down. And I’ll talk to you tonight a little bit about why I think that is so critical right now. …

“My topic is the cultural environment today. Culture at a crossroads, which indeed it is.

“What you’ve just witnessed with the Department of Health and Human Services attempting to impose a mandate on the church that the church and Christian groups and religious organizations would have to provide insurance for things which violate our conscience, and that we wouldn’t be allowed a conscience exemption. What’s extraordinary about that is there have been battles over religious liberty ever since the nation was founded. Most of them have ended up in court decisions, sometimes legislative. This is the first time in history—which is why Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl here in Washington said this is the most serious invasion of the church by government ever—it’s the first time it’s been done by a bureaucrat in a government agency simply writing it and putting it out as law. Normally in a court case you get a chance to argue both sides. But there wasn’t a chance for two sides to be argued this time; it was done by executive fiat. But it’s opportune for us as we meet here tonight—Eric [Metaxas] said this is a moment. This is a moment, where the church has to learn how to defend itself against this sort of thing, and do it in a sort of way that is constructive. …

“What we’re witnessing in our culture today—the HHS mandate is but the tip of the iceberg. It’s the latest visible manifestation of a growing hostility to Christianity. Mainly because, and this has always been the case, government officials feel threatened by the power of the church, because we all worship a king higher than the kings of this earth. And that’s seen as a threat. We’re also seen as wanting to impose our views on people. Don’t let them tell you that. We don’t impose anything. We propose. We propose an invitation to the wedding feast, to come to a better way of living. A better way of life. It’s the great proposal. We couldn’t impose if we wanted to impose. And we don’t want to impose. In our democracy you can’t.

“So we need to be very clear about who we are and what we do and why we do it. And I hope some of the teaching this weekend will help you with that.

“But what we’re seeing now is the fruits that have come from 30 years of relativism, death of truth, in the academy particularly, and in public discourse. And the coarsening of public discourse, coarsening of politics.

“Everybody looks to the elections and thinks, well the elections are going to settle this problem or settle that problem. Elections are important. Whoever serves in office, it makes a difference what kind of person that is and what that person believes. But elections can’t solve the problem we’ve got. The problem we’ve got is that our culture has been decaying from inside for 30 or 40 years. And politics is nothing but an expression of culture.

“So how do you fix the culture? Culture is actually formed by the belief system of the people, by the ‘cult,’ which is us, the church, has been historically. So if things are bad, don’t think it’s going to be solved by an election. It’s going to be solved by us. You have a healthy cult, you have a healthy culture. You have a healthy culture, you have a healthy politics.

“So it comes right back to us. Look in the mirror, that’s where the problem is. And if we can, through the church, renew the church to really bring a healthy cultural influence, then there’s some hope that we can be changed.

“I think Eric is right that this is a moment. This is a moment when the time is right for a movement of God’s people under the power of the Holy Spirit to begin to impact the culture we live in. Desperately needed. …”

WASHINGTON—Former Watergate felon turned evangelical leader and Prison Fellowship founder Charles W. “Chuck” Colson, 80, died Saturday afternoon in Fairfax, Va. Colson had suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage in his brain March 30 and was hospitalized ever since.

“Though we mourn the loss of a great leader, we rejoice knowing God has welcomed his humble and faithful servant home,” said Prison Fellowship CEO Jim Liske in a statement. “Please continue to pray for the entire Colson family. While we all deeply feel this loss, we take heart knowing God has welcomed Chuck into paradise with a ‘well done, good and faithful servant!’”

Colson started his career as a hard-nosed political operative in the Nixon White House, where Richard Nixon once told him to “break all the [expletive] china” to get the job as counsel to the president done. That led to a conviction in the Watergate proceedings for obstruction of justice—and a seven-month sentence served out at a federal prison in Alabama.

In the midst of the historic scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Colson’s self assurance and religious apathy broke after a Christian businessman friend, Tom Phillips, prayed for him. Phillips read to him from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, a passage Colson later said led to his conversion. At the time, many doubted the sincerity of Nixon’s “hatchet man.” Wrote one columnist, “If he isn’t embarrassed by this sudden excess of piety, then surely the Lord must be.”

Upon his release from jail, Colson decided to start a prison ministry. Prison Fellowship’s logo since shortly after the group’s founding in 1976 has featured a bent reed, referencing Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” That reflected Colson’s belief that no one—not the most hardened criminal nor the most egotistical Washingtonian—was beyond hope.

“A lot of people falsely accuse Chuck of being overly political—but Chuck’s whole emphasis has been to say that the root problem is a spiritual problem,” said Timothy George, a close friend of Colson’s and the dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University. George, who for many years co-wrote a column with Colson for Christianity Today and serves on the Prison Fellowship board, added, “He was an evangelist at his deepest heart … but he realized that preaching the gospel is not just dropping tracts from a blimp.”

Today Prison Fellowship is at work in most U.S. prisons and in more than 115 countries around the world. The ministry helped to launch Justice Fellowship, an advocacy arm for criminal reform, as well as Colson’s career as an evangelical leader, an author of more than 20 books, and the lead commentator for Breakpoint, a radio program with an estimated 8 million weekly listeners. … COMPLETE STORY >>

Read Emily Belz’s complete Web Extra report.

For more, see “Setting captives free,” by Emily Belz, from the May 5 issue of WORLD.

Video tribute from Prison Fellowship:

Former Watergate felon turned evangelical leader and Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson, 80, is near death after undergoing surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain more than two weeks ago, according to Prison Fellowship. Doctors have called Colson’s family to his bedside after he took a bad turn Tuesday. Colson was speaking at a Wilberforce Weekend Conference sponsored by the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview in northern Virginia March 30 when his speech became garbled and he was taken to a hospital. (See WORLD’s previous report, “Colson hospitalized.”)

Here’s the full note Prison Fellowship CEO Jim Liske sent supporters and friends late Wednesday morning:

“It is with a heavy, but hopeful heart that I share with you that it appears our friend, brother, and founder will soon be home with the Lord. Chuck’s condition took a decided turn yesterday, and the doctors advised Patty and the family to gather by his bedside.

“As you know, Chuck underwent surgery more than two weeks ago to remove a pool of clotted blood on the surface of his brain. And while we had seen some hopeful signs for Chuck’s recovery—including his ability to talk happily with Patty and the kids—it seems that God may be calling him home.

“I cannot tell you how much your prayers, cards, and well-wishes have meant to Patty and the family—and to Chuck. He loves you all deeply, and I know that his greatest desire beyond seeing Jesus is that the work he and all of us have been called to will continue. As Chuck would say, ‘Remain at your posts and do your duty—for the glory of God and His kingdom’

“As soon as we have more information, I will be sure to let you know. And as always, keep praying for Chuck and Patty.”