Sangamon County Circuit Judge John Schmidt ruled last week that the state of Illinois has no legal obligation to renew its annual foster care contract with Catholic Charities, due to Catholic Charities’ refusal to place children in families with gay and lesbian parents. After being investigated earlier this month simply for providing meeting space for PFLAG meetings, Journey Fellowship, a Baptist congregation in Owensboro, Kentucky, has adopted a position of “radical acceptance” of LGBT people and, as a result, has been removed from the Daviess-McLean Baptist Association. Progressive Christian magazine Sojourners, which had previously received criticism after rejecting an advertisement by the Believe Out Loud campaign, printed an ad in this month’s issue highlighting statistics on LGBT youth homelessness and the Ali Forney Center, an LGBT youth homeless shelter in New York City. Meeting in Orlando for their 2011 Churchwide Assembly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination, passed a resolution last week to seek out and eliminate bullying in churches and schools. The Rev. Dr. Janet Edwards wrote in The Huffington Post this week about Mt. Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, which recently celebrated its 20^th year as an inclusive and affirming congregation, noting that “while many faithful Christians today are beginning to move in the direction of full inclusion, Mt. Auburn has been showing us the way to the future of the church, since the early 1990s” and has served as a guide for the progression of many denominations and congregations towards affirmation and acceptance of all people of faith. Finally, clergy in Australia are speaking out in favor of marriage equality, while a poll found that the majority of Australian Christians support marriage for all couples.