c. 2003 Religion News Service

Christian Anti-Hunger Group Says Subsidies Hurt Poor Farmers

WASHINGTON (RNS) A Christian anti-hunger group says that government subsidies for farmers are actually hurting rural America and keeping foreign farmers locked in poverty.

Bread for the World said in its 13th report on world hunger that the $310 billion spent by developed nations on agricultural subsidies could be better spent on economic development, job training and direct assistance to the poor, both at home and abroad.

“This is an irrational structure in the world,” said the group’s president, the Rev. David Beckmann. “The way we organize it now is very expensive for rich countries, not the best way to help poor countries, and really harsh on poor farmers in developing countries.”

According to the report, almost half of the $95 billion spent by the United States to support U.S. farmers in 2001 went to only 8 percent of farmers. Approximately 60 percent of farmers got no federal aid; most went to large agribusiness operations.

Subsidies artificially inflate prices of U.S. goods and clog the world market with excess products like corn, cotton and wheat, Beckmann said. Meanwhile, poor overseas farmers cannot sell their own products, keeping them locked in poverty.

“This is not the best way to help poor farmers and struggling rural communities in our own country or other countries,” Beckmann said.

The report found that eliminating government subsidies would triple the net agricultural trade of foreign markets, including $10.7 billion a year in sub-Saharan Africa and $22.8 billion in Asia.

Don Lipton, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau, said U.S. farmers depend on government support to balance against low exports, weather catastrophes and overseas competition.

“It’s a money problem, it’s a political problem, it’s a distribution problem,” he said. “Taking away subsidies in the United States would not automatically lead to better things happening in other parts of the world.”

_ Kevin Eckstrom

Appeals Court: Faith-Based Halfway House Constitutional

(RNS) An appellate court has ruled that the funding of a Milwaukee faith-based program by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections is constitutional.

A decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Faith Works Milwaukee is one of several choices given parole violators who are required to enroll in a halfway house contracting with the state.

The court compared allowing Faith Works among the choices of halfway houses to the use of vouchers for private school education.

“The state in effect gives eligible offenders `vouchers’ that they can use to purchase a place in a halfway house, whether the halfway house is `parochial’ or secular,” the decision states.

Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Madison, Wis.-based organization, said that the recommendation of the faith-based program by some parole officers could amount to “governmental support to religion,” but the appellate panel rejected that argument.

“To exclude Faith Works from this competition on the basis of a speculative fear that parole or probation officers might recommend its program because of their own Christian faith would involve the sacrifice of a real good to avoid a conjectured bad,” the court ruled.

The decision noted that parole officers explain that Faith Works has a “significant Christian element” and are required to offer a secular alternative to it. The court also said the program was “uniquely attractive” because its residential program is nine months long while the secular choices last three months.

Its decision upheld a July 2002 ruling by a district court.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based legal organization that supported Faith Works’ case, welcomed the decision.

“The opinion clearly indicates that in the Faith Works Milwaukee program the state of Wisconsin has struck the right constitutional balance,” said Jordan Lorence, senior counsel of the group.

Annie Laurie Gaylor with the Freedom From Religion Foundation told the Associated Press that her group considers it “bad treatment to tell addicted men their addiction results from sin and belief in Christ is the solution.”

_ Adelle M. Banks

Quebec Court Orders Man to Pay Damages in Jewish Divorce Case

MONTREAL (RNS) A Quebec court has ordered a man to pay damages to his wife for refusing to grant her a Jewish divorce, despite having signed an agreement to do so.

The man must pay his estranged wife $47,500 (Canadian) plus interest and indemnities for denying her a Jewish divorce, known as a get, for 15 years, Quebec Superior Court ruled March 28.

It is believed to be the first time in North America a civil court has awarded damages in a case involving religious Jewish divorce.

Judge Israel Maas wrote that the case “is fundamentally different from interfering in the role of the rabbinical court, since the latter could not award damages in a case such as this.”

Maas found that the husband signed an agreement to grant a get, and that under civil law, he “failed to fulfill (his) contractual obligation, leading to consequences for (the) plaintiff in her community.”

In Jewish law, only the man can grant the get. If he refuses, the woman may not remarry according to Jewish law. She may be subject to blackmail or have to live in limbo _ neither married nor divorced _ and unable to have children in another marriage. These women are often called “agunot,” or women in chains.

The couple, whose identities cannot be revealed under a publication ban, married in 1969 and obtained a civil divorce 11 years later. In 1989, the woman sued for $500,000, claiming her husband’s refusal to grant a get prevented her from remarrying.

The man finally granted the get in 1995, but the woman continued to seek damages. The ruling was hailed by the Coalition for Jewish Women for the Get as “a powerful tool.”

Previously, the only recourse Jewish women have had in the civil arena involved the 1990 amendments to Canada’s Divorce Act, under which courts were able to levy sanctions, including increased alimony, against recalcitrant husbands.

_ Ron Csillag

Gospel Music Hall of Fame & Museum Announces New Inductees

(RNS) Gospel artist Dottie Peoples is among the honorees who will be inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame & Museum this year.

Peoples, who is based in Atlanta and is the former general manager of Church Door Records, will join the other inductees at an Oct. 25 ceremony in Detroit.

Other honorees include Shirley Ables & the Joy Gospel Singers, a Baltimore-based group that has performed nationally and internationally; the Consolers of Miami, featuring husband-and-wife team Sullivan and Lola Pugh; Jimmy Dowell, who has had a 50-year gospel music career, including service as choir director at St. James Baptist Church in Detroit for more than 35 years; and Dorothy Grant of Detroit, founder of the Fine Arts Fellowship Chapter of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses Inc.

Additional inductees are the Highway QCs, a Chicago-based group founded in 1945; Leonard S. Scott, owner of Tyscot Records, a black-owned gospel record company; the Swan Silverstones, originally known as the Four Harmony Kings, of Montgomery, Ala.; William E. White, chairman and general manager of KIRL Radio in St. Louis; and Vickie Winans, gospel artist based in Detroit.

“With this year’s stellar list of inductees, we are continuing to demonstrate our commitment to celebrating the work of artists, entertainers and industry leaders who have demonstrated 25 years or more of service to the world of gospel music and entertainment,” said David Gough, founder of the hall of fame, in a Tuesday (April 1) statement announcing the inductees.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Russian Islamic Leader Calls for `Jihad’ in Iraq

MOSCOW (RNS) One of Russia’s top Muslim leaders called for a jihad Thursday (April 3) against the United States for its attack on Iraq but was quickly threatened Friday by government officials to keep quiet or risk prosecution.

“We will collect donations and then use that money to buy weapons for the struggle against America and to buy supplies for the Iraqi people,” Russia’s Supreme Mufti Talgat Tadjuddin was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Tadjuddin did not specify precisely Thursday how the country’s 20 million Muslims could take part in the jihad _ holy war _ but said in a March 29 interview with the Izvestia newspaper that those believers not satisfied with prayer could go “quickly and quietly to Baghdad and take weapons in your hands, and if you have no weapons, strangle the aggressors with your hands.”

Tadjuddin, who heads the Central Islamic Administration of the Muslims of Holy Russia, has been the most outspoken of Russia’s Muslim leaders in criticizing the war on Iraq. He led a last-ditch peace delegation to Baghdad, departing the city just two days before U.S. bombing started. Tadjuddin’s call to jihad came at a Thursday anti-war demonstration in the heavily Muslim southern province of Bashkortostan, Interfax reported.

The next day, the local prosecutor’s office issued an official warning to Tadjuddin not to break the Russian law that forbids inciting ethnic or religious hatred, the ITAR-TASS agency reported. Officials in Russia, with its Orthodox Christian majority and sizable Muslim and Buddhist minorities, are extremely wary of religious conflict, especially given the ongoing violence in mostly Muslim Chechnya.

Other Muslim leaders scoffed Thursday at Tadjuddin’s call to jihad. Tadjuddin’s longtime foe, Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, labeled the call to arms a “populist political act,” Interfax reported.

Although Russian media have reported unconfirmed cases of local Muslim volunteers heading off to Baghdad to fight, there has been little organized religious opposition to the war.

_ Frank Brown

A Church Wedding Tradition Under Threat of Disappearing

LONDON (RNS) A 159-year-old tradition is now under threat from the increasing reluctance of couples actually to get married _ and to do so in church.

In 1844 one John Orr, who ended his service with the East India Company as accountant general of Madras, left 1,000 pounds ($4,000) in his will to provide aid for the poor of the parish of St. Cyrus, a village on the east coast of Scotland some 30 miles south of Aberdeen, and to provide a small dowry for each of four brides married in the parish church: the tallest, the shortest, the oldest and the youngest.

At that time the interest on 1,000 pounds, invested at 2.5 percent, produced a useful sum, even when divided in five _ one share for the poor and four for the four brides. At the start of the 1950s the 8 pounds, 4 shillings each bride received would have been the equivalent of two weeks’ wages. In 1959, the amount still represented more than a normal week’s pay.

However, inflation soon eroded the value of the dowries, which in any case had shrunk to a mere 7 pounds by 1988, and in 1991 the kirk (church) session found it easier, rather than handling increasingly small sums of money, to give each bride a small presentation vase.

Until the 1970s there were usually enough young women in the parish marrying in the church for four of them to qualify, but in 1978 there was only one recipient and in 1979, apparently, none at all.

Since then four recipients have become the exception rather than the rule: four in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1995 and 2002. But it was three in 1996 and 1997, two in 1998, one in 1999, two in 2000, and three in 2001.

The session clerk, John Gow, seems to take a rather gloomy view of the prospect of the tradition continuing. “Last year we had only four brides, but that’s the first time in quite a few years we have even had enough to share the prize,” he said. “It seems people are just not getting married these days.”

_ Robert Nowell

Quote of the Day: Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation Executive Director Mahdi Bray

(RNS) “America doesn’t allow `no colored people’ signs on drinking fountains anymore, nor should there be any de facto `no Muslims allowed’ signs at public banks.”

_ Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, in a statement about his organization’s concerns about accusations that Boston-based Fleet Bank has closed accounts of a mosque, school and several Muslim individuals without explanation.

DEA END RNS