c. 2000 Religion News Service
Graham Honored With Ronald Reagan Freedom Award
(RNS) Evangelist Billy Graham has been honored by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation for his contributions to freedom.
Former first lady Nancy Reagan presented Graham with the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award at a dinner Wednesday (April 5) in Beverly Hills, Calif.
“As one of the century’s most thoughtful spiritual leaders, Billy Graham has led a life singular in its purpose and powerful in its message,” said Mark Burson, the foundation’s executive director, in a statement. “He is a leader for all ages whose achievements evidence a lifelong commitment to the cause of religious freedom _ a cause shared and held sacred by Ronald Reagan.”
Past recipients of the award include former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, former Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and the late King Hussein I of Jordan.
The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation is a nonprofit organization that funds the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif.
Pope Warns Annan on Supporters of Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage
(RNS) Pope John Paul II on Friday (April 7) warned United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan that supporters of abortion and same-sex marriage threaten “the dignity of the human person and the cohesion of society.”
The Roman Catholic pontiff issued the warning at an audience attended by Annan and members of the Administrative Committee on Coordination of the United Nations system meeting this week in Rome.
John Paul devoted most of his brief prepared remarks to the issue of globalization, but he concluded with an attack on proponents of contraception, abortion and same-sex marriages.
A group of dissident Catholics, led by the independent U.S. group Catholics for a Free Choice, has called on the United Nations to strip the Vatican of its permanent observer status on the grounds its stand on family issues conflicts with U.N. policy.
“I must express my deep concern when I see that certain groups try to impose on the international community ideological views or patterns of life advocated by small and particular segments of society,” the pope said. “This is perhaps most obvious in such fields as the defense of life and the safeguarding of the family.
“The leaders of nations must be careful not to overturn what the international community and law have laboriously developed to preserve the dignity of the human person and the cohesion of society. This is a common patrimony which no one has the right to dissipate,” he said.
John Paul greeted the U.N. officials cordially and concluded by blessing them and offering his prayer that their “work will be thoroughly pervaded by a generous and ambitious spirit of global solidarity.”
Annan told a news conference Thursday (April 6) that he and the pope “are in the same business.” He said they both work for peace although “with different instruments”and praised the pope for carrying “a message of reconciliation and peace”to the Middle East on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land last month.
Warrants Issued in Uganda Mass Killings
(RNS) Officials in Uganda on Thursday (April 6) issued arrest warrants for six leaders of the doomsday cult that has claimed at least 924 victims.
The six, including a defrocked Roman Catholic priest, were leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. The bodies of more than 900 of the group’s followers have been found in and around the group’s compound in southwestern Uganda.
Investigators believe the leaders of the group are in hiding, despite some reports that they died in the fire that swept the compound on March 17, the Associated Press reported. More than 300 people died inside the locked doors of the group’s church in the fire, and subsequent investigations have found more than 600 additional burned and mangled bodies buried nearby.
The center of the probe focuses on three people _ the leader of the group, Joseph Kibwetere; Credonia Mwerinde, the man believed to be the mastermind behind the deaths; and Dominic Kataribabo, a former Catholic priest who some believe died in the fire.
Each has been charged with 10 counts of murder. The charges stem from 10 bodies authorities have been able to identify. Most of the bodies were burned or decayed beyond recognition. If the six leaders are found and convicted, they could face death by hanging.
An investigation by the Associated Press found that Kataribabo was a student priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in the 1980s. He was sent to Los Angeles by officials in his small diocese to study under a program for foreign priests.
Church officials in Los Angeles said Kataribabo was an average student, earning mostly “B” grades, and was awarded a master’s degree in religious studies at Loyola Marymount University. “He seemed to be pretty ordinary,” said university spokesman Norm Schneider. “He seems undistinguished.”
In Uganda, Kataribabo preached that the world would end on Dec. 31, 1999. Catholic leaders there distanced themselves from Kataribabo and condemned the Ten Commandments movement. The death toll in Uganda now exceeds that of the 1978 Jonestown mass suicides in Guyana.
Court Upholds Visitation Rights for Lesbian Ex-Partner
(RNS) The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Thursday (April 6) that a lesbian woman deserves visitation rights for the children she helped raise, even though the woman and her partner are no longer together.
In a decision praised by gay rights organizations, the court found that the woman is a “psychological parent” because she helped raise the couple’s twins before the two women separated. The case involved a woman, identified only at M.J.B, who was artificially inseminated and gave birth to twins in 1994. She and her partner, V.C., raised the children together before separating in 1996.
After the couple broke up, V.C. was denied visitation rights and custody. A lower court gave her visitation rights but was divided in its opinion. When the state Supreme Court heard the case, Associate Justice Virginia Long said each woman could be a “fully capable, loving parent committed to the safety and welfare of the twins,” the Associated Press reported.
The decision stopped short, however, of granting V.C. shared custody of the twins. The court said those rights belong to the children’s birth mother, and V.C. had not been involved in decision-making for the children for four years.
Conservatives were upset with the ruling, saying the court was making law instead of enforcing it.
“They have acknowledged that there is no statute that would grant psychological parenthood, yet they went on to create it,” said Jan LaRue, a lawyer with the Washington-based Family Research Council.
The decision was issued by the same court that ruled the Boy Scouts could not dismiss an assistant scout leader because he was gay. That case is scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court later this month.
The legal precedent set by this case is unclear. Last year, a Massachusetts court issued a similar decision, while courts in California, New York and Florida have ruled that ex-partners are not entitled to visitation rights.
Amnesty International Report Spotlights Human Rights Abuses in Europe
(RNS) Fifty years after the signing of the European Convention on Human Rights, human rights abuses continue throughout the continent, according to a report released Thursday (April 6) by the human rights group Amnesty International.
“While many people in Europe enjoy basic human rights, some people, including asylum-seekers and ethnic and religious minorities, continue to experience a side of Europe that runs contrary to its image as a bastion of human rights and freedom,” concluded the report. “Nothing demonstrates this more than the spread and frequency of allegations of police brutality. From the United Kingdom to Azerbaijan, individuals have suffered beatings, sexual abuse, mock hangings, electric shock treatment, racist abuse and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment at the hands of police. Many of those responsible have not been brought to justice.”
In its survey of the human rights situation in 34 European and Central Asian countries during the last six months of 1999, the human rights group identified political prisoners in 14 countries, and found evidence of torture and ill-treatment in 27 countries.
The “Concerns in Europe” report noted that 65 people died in 1998 while in police custody in England, and “a disproportionate number of them were from ethnic minorities.”
Britain’s Immigration and Asylum Act, implemented in November, has been “severely detrimental to refugee rights,” the report said, and noted the “cruel and dangerous methods of restraint” used on asylum-seekers in Europe, such as the case of a Nigerian asylum-seeker who died of asphyxiation while being forcibly deported from Belgium in September 1998.
The report also noted that the European Court of Human Rights found France guilty last summer in the case of a Dutch-Moroccan man who said police beat him and sexually abused him (using a truncheon in one instance) in 1991 while he was held in detention.
AI urged a continentwide push to stop the “the blight of impunity which exists for police and security forces.”
“I encounter a kind of complacency in Western Europe,” said Brian Phillips, the organization’s European campaign director. “You can have letter-perfect pieces of legislation, but that doesn’t negate the need for vigilance or ensure that justice is done.”
Hillsdale College Welcomes New President
(RNS) Trustees at scandal-scarred Hillsdale College in Michigan unanimously named Larry Arnn, the president of a conservative California think tank, as president of the private, nondenominational liberal arts school.
“He brings loads to Hillsdale College,” said William Brodbeck, leader of the presidential search committee. “He has terrific skills, all of the skills that will help Hillsdale move forward smartly.”
Arnn will fill the position left vacant by George Roche III, who resigned in November after 24 years as president after allegations surfaced he conducted a 19-year affair with his son’s wife, Lissa Roche.
Lissa Roche, who worked at Hillsdale college, committed suicide on the college’s campus a month before Roche’s resignation.
Hillsdale College gained national prominence under George Roche III’s leadership, particularly for its rejection of federal aid in order to avoid compliance with federal laws, including those mandating affirmative action.
A vocal opponent of affirmative action, Arnn will take office in June, the Associated Press reported. Since 1985 he has led the Claremont Institute, and was the founding chairman of Proposition 209, an organization that successfully campaigned to end affirmative action in California. Arnn also serves on the Congressional Policy Advisory Board, which assists in making policy decisions for Republican members of the House of Representatives.
British Jews in Passover Matzah Dispute
(RNS) A dispute has arisen over whether one of Britain’s best-known brands of matzo _ the unleavened bread eaten at Passover _ is in fact kosher for Passover, which begins sundown April 19.
The Beth Din of the Federation of Synagogues, representing the more ultra-Orthodox segment of Orthodox Jewry in Britain, has insisted that the Leeds firm of Rakusen has not met all the requirements for making its matzo truly kosher. But eight dayanim, or judges, from the London Beth Din, the Sephardi Beth Din, the Manchester Beth Din, and the Leeds Beth Din have publicly affirmed that Rakusen’s matzoth are kosher for Passover and “to the highest standard.”
In Britain there are half-dozen different authorities regulating kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, and occasionally one will certify as kosher what another will reject.
Quote of the Day: The National Catholic Reporter
(RNS) “All the resistance in the world will not make the earth the center of the galaxy, the earth flat, creationism the preferred scientific view, women incompetent, slaves submissive. Nor will it turn gays and lesbians into contented celibates.”
_ An April 7 editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, praising the recent decision by Reform rabbis to bless same-sex unions. The editorial said the Roman Catholic Church should do the same.
DEA END RNS
