Every school building in Louisiana must display the nation’s motto, “In God We Trust,” under a new law that goes into effect this school year. 

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the law last year. It passed the state Senate, 33-6, and the state House, 93-12. 

Social studies classes also must teach students about the national motto by fifth grade under the new law. 

The law is popular, even among some administrators. 

“I still feel strongly that America is a Christian nation,” Shelby Ainsworth, principal of West Monroe High School, told WAFB 9. “I want our high school youngsters exposed to as much as that as possible.”

The law says, “each public school governing authority shall display the national motto in each building it uses and in each school under its jurisdiction.” The minimum requirement is that it be a paper sign.

A Democrat, Sen. Regina Ashford Barrow, was the bill’s lead sponsor. She told WWL last year that America has suffered morally by taking God out of public schools. 

“We have seen a moral decay in our schools and in our community because we have taken this out of our school system,” Barrow said. 

She was inspired to promote the bill, she told WWL, by the governor’s prayer breakfast and by the senate’s practice of praying.

“Every day before we begin to do our business here at the…

The Trump administration on Friday gave Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers and family planning programs until Aug. 19 to announce if they will comply with a new rule that prohibits them from referring or promoting abortion under the federal Title X program.

Nearly $300 million in Title X money is at stake, including $60 million for Planned Parenthood. Title X is a family planning program which funds services such as cancer screenings, contraception and pregnancy tests for lower-income individuals. 

The new rule prohibits Title X money from going to clinics that “perform, promote, refer for, or support abortion as a method of family planning.” 

Supporters call it the Protect Life Rule. Critics have dubbed it the “gag rule.” 

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday that Title X recipients have until Aug. 19 to document their steps for complying with the rule. It will go into effect Sept. 18, as Christian Headlines previously reported. 

Another part of the rule requires family planning clinics to physically and financially separate their abortion services from their non-abortion services. That section, though, won’t go into effect until March 4. 

“If the grantee believes that it cannot meet the deadlines listed above, it must submit a request for an extension along with an explanation or documentation of…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says 300 workers who were detained last week in a raid in Mississippi have been released after the children of many of the workers reportedly came home from their first day of school to find their parents had been detained.

ICE says they released the workers on “humanitarian grounds.”

According to Relevant Magazine, hundreds of undocumented immigrants were taken into custody in what’s being called the “largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.”

 “Children finished their first day of school with no parents to go home to tonight,” a report from the Jackson Free Press said. “Babies and toddlers remained at daycare with no guardian to pick them up. A child vainly searched a workplace parking lot for missing parents.”

In one interview, an 11-year-old girl asked the U.S. to release the parents.

“Government please show some heart,” she said. “Let my parents be free and everyone else please don’t leave the child with cryness and everything.

“I need my dad and mommy,” she said. “My dad didn’t do anything, he’s not a criminal.”

Many of the children were taken to a local gym where neighbors had donated food and drinks for the children.

“I understand the law and how everything works and everything needs to have a system,” the gym’s owner Jordan Barnes…

Over the weekend, comedian Sarah Silverman posted a video to Twitter of a Florida pastor calling for her death, hoping God “breaks all of her teeth out.”

“This is Adam Fannin of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Florida and he is going to get me killed,” Silverman tweeted, according to Relevant Magazine.

Fannin, who is no stranger to controversy, called Silverman a “Jewish false prophet…willing to put Jesus to death again.”

“She is a witch; she is a Jezebel; she is a God-hating whore of Zionism,” he continued.

According to the church’s Facebook page, Adam Fannin was fired after the video. “He started his own ‘church’ called Law of Liberty Baptist Church. Our pastor is Jonathan Shelley,” the August 8 post read.

But Fannin wasn’t fired because of the video. Shelley posted a message to the Facebook page explaining the former pastor’s firing.

“I wanted to give an update to Sarah Silverman and this Adam Fannin saying all these different things about you…Well, I do have some good news for you. Adam Fannin is fired from Stedfast Baptist Church,” he said. “But, not for the reason you think, not for what he said about you. It’s actually because we found out six months ago, this guy is a liar. He’s a railer, he’s super-selfish.”

But Jonathan Shelley has also made headlines for violent and controversial remarks.