c. 2005 Religion News Service

U.S. Envoy Raises Alarm on Inflammatory Literature in Mosques

(RNS) Karen Hughes, the U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, has raised concern about inflammatory literature reportedly found in American mosques.

According to media reports on Hughes’ trip to Saudi Arabia this week, Hughes told a group of Saudi journalists that the administration is concerned about a study that identified anti-Christian and anti-Semitic literature, connected to Saudi religious organizations, in American mosques.

“We are concerned that literature has been found in American mosques that has a message that is not tolerant, and we hope the people of Saudi Arabia will work with us as we try to deal with this issue,” she told reporters Tuesday (Sept. 27), according to Reuters.

During the same visit, Hughes critiqued the Saudi government’s ban on female drivers.

“I believe women should be free and equal participants in society,” she said to a group of several hundred women. “I feel that as an American woman that my ability to drive is an important part of my freedom.”

Hughes’ role as envoy is to improve the United States’ image in the Muslim world, and to explain the Bush administration’s policies to Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations objected to Hughes’ comments about intolerant literature, saying the remarks were based on what it considers to be a faulty study with an “inherent bias.”

“We don’t agree that there is widespread literature of that kind in mosques in America,” said Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s spokesman, referring to the January 2005 report by the human rights organization Freedom House that Hughes cited.

Hooper said the study has led to “anti-Muslim prejudice” directed against some mosques that say they never saw or displayed any of the literature in question.

_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi

Alabama State Senator: Hurricanes Were `Judgment of God’ on Sin

(RNS) Hurricane Katrina and other storms that battered the Gulf Coast were God’s judgment on sin, according to Alabama state Sen. Hank Erwin, a Republican from Montevallo.

“New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast have always been known for gambling, sin and wickedness,” Erwin wrote this week in a column he distributes to news outlets. “It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgment of God.”

After touring Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., and Bayou La Batre, Ala., Erwin said he was awed and humbled by the power of the storm. But he wasn’t surprised.

“Warnings year after year by godly evangelists and preachers went unheeded. So why were we surprised when finally the hand of judgment fell?” Erwin wrote. “Sadly, innocents suffered along with the guilty. Sin always brings suffering to good people as well as the bad.”

William Willimon, bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, took exception with the state senator’s analysis.

“I have no idea what sort of senator or politician Mr. Erwin is, but he’s sure no theologian,” Willimon said. “I’m certainly against gambling and its hold on state government in Mississippi, but I expect there is as much sin, of possibly a different order, in Montevallo as on the Gulf Coast. If God punished all of us for our sin, who could stand?”

Erwin, a former conservative talk-radio host and now a media consultant and senator, is not alone in seeing God’s wrath at work in the storms.

The al-Qaida in Iraq group hailed the hurricane deaths in America as the “wrath of God,” and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan suggested the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment for the violence America had inflicted on Iraq.

Televangelist Pat Robertson said Katrina might be linked to God’s judgment concerning legalized abortion, and some rabbis suggested Katrina was retribution for supporting the Israeli pullout from Gaza.

Erwin said some hurricane victims were not singled out for harsh punishment but merely in the way of God’s judgment.

“If you are a believer and read the Bible, you know sin has judgment,” Erwin said. “New Orleans has always been know for sin. … The wages of sin is death.”

_ Thomas Spencer

Trial Witnesses Say School Board Members Pushed Their Religion

HARRISBURG, Pa. (RNS) A Pennsylvania school district’s policy of informing students about intelligent design was an attempt by some school board members to impose their religious beliefs on science classes, according to three Dover residents testifying in a high-profile trial.

“I feel they brought a religious idea into the classroom,” Tammy Kitzmiller said Tuesday (Sept. 27) of the Dover Area School District policy.

The policy mandates that teachers or administrators inform students that Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” with “gaps” and that “intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

Kitzmiller is one of 11 parents who, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the school board in an attempt to have the statement eliminated. They argue that it violates the principle of the separation of church and state.

The ACLU wants to link religion to the Dover statement and argues that the connection violates the First Amendment ban on establishment of religion.

The board’s lawyers, from the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, have said the statement is not rooted in religion.

“It is absolutely religiously based,” said Aralene “Barrie” Callahan, who served on the school board from 1993 to 2003, when she lost her bid for re-election.

Callahan, testifying in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, called intelligent design “clearly religious” and said that a book mentioned in the district’s statement, “Of Pandas and People,” is “outdated” and “unworthy as a science book.”

Callahan said school board member Alan Bonsell, while at a district-sponsored retreat in March 2003, said he “did not believe in evolution” and that if evolution needs to be part of the science curriculum, it should be balanced out “50-50” with lessons on creationism.

Callahan said her daughter went through 10th-grade science class at Dover without a biology textbook because the district did not buy copies of the textbook that year. She said when she asked William Buckingham, then a school board member, why the district did not buy the textbook, he replied that it was “laced with Darwinism.”

_ Bill Sulon

Canadian Catholic Bishops Call for Tougher Policy on Predator Priests

CORNWALL, Ontario (RNS) The Catholic Church in Canada must get tougher with sexual predator priests and become more open, compassionate and accountable to abuse victims, says a special report by Canadian bishops.

The report, presented to about 70 bishops attending the annual Plenary Assembly of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), recommended that dioceses adopt rigorous measures for protecting children, including banning from public ministry any member of the clergy or pastoral staff convicted of sexual assault; adopting “diocesan mechanisms” to counter sexual abuse; and implementing procedures to evaluate the diocesan management of sexual abuse cases.

The sexual abuse of minors “is beyond any doubt one of the greatest tragedies brought to light over the past 25 years,” said the report from a committee of bishops, which was two years in the making.

Certain dioceses, it added, “persist in prolonging the legal process, thereby giving an impression of contempt for the victims.”

In response to an outpouring of anger from abuse victims the committee interviewed, the bishops’ report includes these recommendations:

_ Priests charged with abuse put on leave with pay.

_ Priests convicted of abuse removed from working with the community in any capacity.

_ An in-depth study of clergy’s living conditions, responsibilities, quality of spiritual and social life, housing, remuneration, perception of social status, and recreation, among other things.

_ A program to protect children through ensuring they are not alone with adults, as well as volunteer background checks, and pamphlets for children on sexual abuse.

_ An annual report by each bishop on abuse allegations that would periodically be included in a summary at the national level. This final report would be made public.

The task force reviewed a 1992 report on sexual abuse of minors by clergy. That report, titled “From Pain to Hope,” was never adopted as formal policy, though some dioceses have used it as a working guideline.

The latest proposals will be reviewed by the 16-member CCCB Permanent Council in November.

_ Ron Csillag

Quote of the Day: Former hostage Ashley Smith of Duluth, Ga.

(RNS) “If I did die, I wasn’t going to heaven and say, `Oh, excuse me, God. Let me wipe my nose, because I just did some drugs before I got here.”’

_ Ashley Smith of Duluth, Ga., a former hostage who reveals in her new book, “Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage Hero,” that she battled a methamphetamine addiction. She was quoted by The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.

MO/PH END RNS