The near-unified front led by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to oppose a mandate for employers to cover birth control has now crumbled amid the compromise plan that the Obama administration offered last week to accommodate religious institutions.

Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church drew fire Tuesday for releasing a set of voting “guidelines” for the faithful ahead of the July 1 presidential elections.

Vanderbilt University administrators are writing down a nondiscrimination policy they claim has been in place for decades, the newest chapter in a monthslong debate that has pitted them against some student religious organizations.

Conservatives said Sunday the flap surrounding President Barack Obama's birth control mandate was far from over, with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell saying he will push to overturn the requirement because it was another example of government meddling.

Governor Christine Gregoire signed legislation on Monday to make Washington state the seventh in the United States to legalize gay marriage, but opponents vowed to try to prevent the law from taking effect.

President Obama's effort to accommodate the Catholic Church by altering his administration's rule on birth control coverage has not appeased the church, congressional Republicans or GOP candidates trying to take his job next year.

A Superior Court judge called the power struggle that resulted in machete violence at a Sikh temple “disgraceful” and he doesn’t have praise for the resulting legal aftermath.

The simple, heart-felt letters of an old-fashioned Amish man are being credited for the Senate's quick passage of a bill that would allow Kentucky's Amish residents to use reflective tape on their horse-drawn buggies instead of the bright orange triangular signs that they object to on religious grounds.

The nation's Roman Catholic bishops have rejected a compromise on birth control coverage that President Obama offered on Friday and said they would continue to fight the president's plan to find a way for employees of Catholic hospitals, universities and service agencies to receive free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance plans, without direct involvement or financing from the institutions.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's brand of conservative Catholicism is not only helping rally a key part of the Republican base, but has proved an asset in drawing deep-pocketed Christian donors to an independent campaign supporting his presidential bid.

Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins doesn’t like being called the archdiocese’s CEO.

Scores of religious congregations are scrounging for cheap space in New York City as they prepare to be evicted, on constitutional grounds, from rooms they've been renting at public schools.

Under fierce election-year fire, President Barack Obama on Friday abruptly abandoned his stand that religious organizations must pay for birth control for workers, scrambling to end a furor raging from the Catholic Church to Congress to his re-election foes.

The Obama administration's new mandate that religious organizations pay for their workers' birth control has become a bludgeon for Republican culture warriors, as social issues have surged to the forefront in the presidential campaign.

Supporters of a war memorial cross deemed unconstitutional last year by a federal court plan to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision, amid a growing fight nationwide over the use of religious symbols to honor fallen troops.

The last time same-sex marriage was debated in the state Capitol, the Legislature's sole gay lawmaker watched as his colleagues passed the state's version of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1998 banning gay marriage.

Sealed documents filed in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy identify at least 8,000 instances of child sexual abuse and 100 alleged offenders - 75 of them priests - who have not previously been named by the archdiocese, a victims' attorney said Thursday.

When after much internal debate the Obama administration finally announced its decision to require religiously affiliated hospitals and universities to cover birth control in their insurance plans, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops were fully prepared for battle.

Conservative critics like to point out that the federal appeals court that just declared California's same-sex marriage ban to be unconstitutional has its decisions overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court more often than other judicial circuits, a record that could prove predictive if the high court agrees to review the gay marriage case on appeal.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney shifted his focus from the economy to abortion, religious freedom and gay marriage in recent days, part of an intensified effort to win over social conservatives in states voting Tuesday.