By a 4-3 vote, the Arkansas Supreme Court Thursday ruled that high school teachers have a constitutional right to have sex with their students as long as the students are 18 and give their consent.

“The fundamental right to privacy implicit in our law protects all private, consensual, noncommercial acts of sexual intimacy between adults,” the court said, quoting from an earlier Arkansas case.

Preventing a teacher from having sex with a willing 18 year old student “infringes on [the teacher's] fundamental right to privacy,” the court ruled.

The opinion is posted on the Supreme Court’s website.

(Once you’re there, click on Paschal v. State).

This decision was written by Chief Justice Jim Hannah. Justices Paul E. Danielson, Donald L. Corbin and Courtney Hudson Goodson also voted to throw out Arkansas’ ban on high school teacher-student sex.

Upholding the statute were Justices Robert L. Brown, Jim Gunter and Karen Baker.

In his dissent, Brown described the majority’s analysis as “wrong…preposterous…”

The idea that high school teachers have a “constitutionally protected fundamental privacy right to have sexual contact with an 18-year-old student at the school where he teaches is absurd,” Justice Baker wrote.

The failure of Florida officials to arrest and charge George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin reveals “profound failures of our justice system,” the United Methodist General Board of Church & Society declares.

The church’s announcement is below: (more…)

Mitt Romney’s campaign claims it’s within 1 point of winning the Alabama Republican presidential primary on Tuesday.

So they’re looking for volunteers with non-Bostonian accents to make phone calls this weekend.

“Folks in TN, NC, GA, and VA” — in particular — are being recruited to dial up Alabama, Politico reports.

With superior financial resources and organization, Romney is working hard to make a break-through in Dixie, USA Today reports.

“I am learning to say y’all, and I like grits and things,” he told a Mississippi audience Thursday. “Strange things are happening to me.”

By Frank Lockwood
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
March 5, 2012

NORTH LITTLE ROCK — A North Little Rock church celebrated its 100th birthday by giving away $100,000 Sunday to central Arkansas schools and charities. Then it collected $160,000 in offerings to build Assemblies of God churches across communist Vietnam.

“We chose to celebrate God’s faithfulness to us by sharing God’s love with others,” pastor Rod Loy said, explaining what motivated people at First Assembly of God North Little Rock to give away so much money.

When a church is 100 years old, Loy said, “What you expect is a church living in the past, stuck in its traditions, increasingly irrelevant. That’s what you expect. That’s not what we’re experiencing.”

Instead, the congregation is “enjoying the greatest days in our 100 year history … We’re the opposite of worn-out and tired. We have a fresh vision, we have a new energy. We have a sense that God has greater things in store.”

First Assembly was originally an independent Pentecostal church and is two years older than the Assemblies of God, which was founded in 1914, in Hot Springs.

One of the largest, fastest-growing Assemblies of God congregations in the country, with average weekly attendance of about 3,000, the North Little Rock church has given millions of dollars to world missions in recent years…

The rest of the story is available for Arkansas Democrat-Gazette subscribers at arkansasonline.com