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(Sorry for the delay in the posting. We'll try to post Wednesday stories by early this afternoon.)

1. Report: More than a third of religious worker visas fraudulent
Remember when the U.S. government banned Finnish theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen from returning to his post at Fuller Seminary and revoked his "special immigrant religious worker" visa? Those visas might be a lot harder to come by very soon. The Boston Globe reports that the Department of Homeland Security

found numerous instances in which groups in the United States falsely claimed to be churches, and visa applicants lied about their religious vocations in order to get into the country. More than a third of the visas examined by investigators were based on fraudulent information. … The probe found a particularly high fraud rate among applicants from countries the government deemed to pose a security risk, such as Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the report found. There were 11 applications for people from special-risk countries among the 220 petitions that were audited—and 8 of those 11 were fraudulent, it said.

Catholics quoted in the story are worried that curtailing or reforming the visa system could add even more hurdles for the church's bringing in foreign priests to fill many vacant pulpits. But Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Globe that at the very least, the department needs to step up investigations.

"There is way too much fraud in this program," he told the Globe. "One of the things we need to do is go there more often and actually check that it is a real institution, because unfortunately one form of fraud is to say 'I have a storefront church,' and when you go to that address there is a store, not a church."

2. Christian Legal Society wins injunction against Southern Illinois U.
Can you name all the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment? Only 1 in 1,000 Americans can—it's that tricky freedom to petition for redress of grievances that gets 'em every time. But you'd think that the Southern Illinois University School of Law would be able to name most of them. Not so, according to a suit by the Christian Legal Society (CLS), which accuses the school of violating at least half of the First Amendment freedoms (three of five or six, depending on whether you count the religion stuff as one freedom or two), along with the Fourteenth Amendment rights of equal protection and due process, by revoking a CLS chapter's official student organization status.

Monday, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave CLS a significant victory, telling the university that it couldn't revoke the status just yet. That yet is important—while some media reports might make it seem like the court ruled on CLS's lawsuit, what it really did was rule on CLS's request for an injunction while the lawsuit moves forward. The 2-1 decision was granted because, the court said, CLS is likely to succeed in its lawsuit:

There are three reasons CLS is reasonably likely to succeed on the merits, and any one of them is enough to carry CLS's burden. First, it is not clear CLS actually violated any SIU policy, which was the justification offered for revoking its recognized student organization status. Second, CLS has shown a likelihood that SIU impermissibly infringed on CLS's  right of expressive association. Finally, CLS has shown a likelihood that SIU violated CLS's free speech rights by ejecting it from a speech forum in which it had a right to remain.

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July (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50