c. 2005 Religion News Service
New Kansas Science Standards Critical of Evolution, Darwin
(RNS) A sharply divided Kansas State Board of Education voted 6-4 Tuesday (Nov. 8) to adopt new science standards that call for taking a critical view of evolution.
The vote ended an acerbic 10-month debate that pitted advocates of a theory called intelligent design against major science organizations, with the board’s conservative majority leading the push to question the theory of evolution first advanced by Charles Darwin.
“No longer will Darwin be taught dogmatically in Kansas public schools,” John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network of Shawnee Mission, Kan., told the Lawrence Journal-World.
But Jack Krebs, a science teacher and vice president of Kansas Citizens for Science, told The Kansas City Star: “The standards are bad science … an abuse of the educational system and they advance a particular religious viewpoint.”
Under the standards, Kansas students will study not only “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory,” but also “areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of that theory.”
While advocates of intelligent design pushed for the changes, “these standards neither mandate nor prohibit teaching about this scientific disagreement,” according to the document.
Board Chairman Steve Abrams _ a member of the First Baptist Church of Arkansas City, Kan. _ said he considers evolutionary theory incompatible with the biblical account of creation. He praised the new standards at Tuesday’s packed meeting.
But Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius called the action “just the latest in a series of troubling decisions by the Board of Education.”
The debate could continue to dominate Kansas politics as four of the six board members who supported the new standards are up for re-election in 2006.
The National Academy of Science and the National Science Teachers Association both opposed the new standards and withdrew permission for Kansas to use copyrighted material that had been incorporated throughout the standards.
However, the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization active in the intelligent design movement, said the standards will expand the information presented to students by offering scientific criticisms.
Kansas is the fifth state to adopt policies on teaching evolution that have been praised by the Discovery Institute. The others are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and New Mexico.
_ Bobby Ross Jr.
Radical Islam’s Role in Paris Riots Debated
PARIS (RNS) Two weeks after the first clashes between police and ethnic immigrant youths around Paris, a debate continues over what role, if any, radical Islam has had in the unrest.
So far, the violence has mostly stirred soul-searching in France over what critics say is the failure of successive governments to integrate waves of immigrants over the past decades.
The French government has played down the possibility that radical Islam is feeding or fomenting the violence, but has not dismissed it.
When asked by a television broadcaster if radical Islam may have had a hand in the violence, Dominique de Villepin, the French prime minister, said Monday (Nov. 7): “I don’t think that’s the essential. There is of course a concern of Islamism, of a radical movement, but I don’t think it’s the essential today, even if you can’t neglect it.”
Today, many of the children and grandchildren of Muslim immigrants have French nationality. But many also remain locked in gritty suburban housing projects _ akin to America’s inner cities _ where poverty rates are far higher than the national average.
The rioting youths hail from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds, yet some analysts say it is impossible to ignore the fact that many are of ethnic North African-Muslim origin. With an estimated 5 million members, France’s Muslim community is Europe’s largest.
“We have young (ethnic immigrants) who are more likely to be unemployed and victims of discrimination, and who at the same time have a strong relation to international events,” said Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, head of the French government’s Observatory of Immigration and Integration Statistics. “They want to wage war against Europe and the West as if they were in Iraq or Algeria.”
In recent months, reports have proliferated in France that extremist Islamic cells are preying on disaffected youths as potential recruits to join insurgency movements in Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq.
_ Elizabeth Bryant
AIDS Activists Chain Themselves to Christian Group’s Marriage Statue
(RNS) AIDS activists recently chained themselves around a statue at a conservative Christian group’s headquarters, protesting federal funding of abstinence-only HIV prevention programs.
Waving signs that read “Cure AIDS: Tell Youth the Truth” and “Condoms Work,” 12 protesters picketed Friday (Nov. 7) in the Washington lobby of the Family Research Council, which advocates abstinence and discourages condom distribution in combatting HIV transmission.
“We wanted to protest at their offices to expose their strong links to the Bush administration,” said John Riley of ACT UP, an AIDS advocacy group known for civil disobedience. “They’re no longer just some outsider group.”
Police arrested protesters, one wearing a full-body condom, who were chained around a sculpture of a bald eagle supporting a bride and groom. The demonstrators spent a day and a half in jail, according to Michael Kink of Housing Works, a support group for homeless New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.
The statue represents the Family Research Council’s commitment to traditional marriage.
“Activists cannot silence those who proclaim the undeniable reality that abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage are the only formula for `safe sex,”’ said Tony Perkins, president of the council.
Demonstrators said that by denying access to information, condoms and sterile syringes (to reduce AIDS transmission by drug users), abstinence-only supporters put people at risk.
“The Bush administration puts blinders on and talks about marriage as if it’s some sort of vaccine,” said Asia Russell of ACT UP. The federal government spends more than $100 million on abstinence-only programs each year.
Perkins said the protesters were intolerant of people of faith.
Kink said Housing Works, led by a Baptist minister jailed in the protests, has many religious supporters, particularly in black churches disproportionately affected by AIDS.
“There is a difference of opinion among people of faith,” said Kink.
Twenty-nine other demonstrators were jailed for creating a graveyard with their bodies, symbolizing AIDS deaths, at the White House fence. Protesters also tried to deliver a “golden funeral urn award” to the Washington offices of the pro-abstinence-only Concerned Women of America, but were not let in.
The events followed similar protests in Baltimore at a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abstinence education workshop last week.
_ Nicole LaRosa
Groups Urge Chavez to Reverse New Tribes Expulsion
(RNS) Protestant and Pentecostal organizations in Venezuela have asked to meet with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez before the final implementation of his order to expel missionaries from the New Tribes Mission.
Leaders of the Evangelical Council and Pentecostal Evangelical Federation of Venezuela said they wanted to meet with Chavez “so we are heard by you,” the religiously based Latin American and Caribbean News Agency reported.
There was no immediate response from the government to the request.
The groups asked that the missionaries _ there are some 153 New Tribes personnel in Venezuela _ not be expelled until an investigation is carried out by the government on the charges Chavez has leveled against the Florida-based group.
If any irregularities were found, they said, “we would be in agreement with the government’s measure.”
Chavez is an ardent opponent of the United States and Washington’s free trade measures which he says are economic imperialism.
In mid-October, in ordering the expulsion of the New Tribes missionaries, he accused the group of “imperialist infiltration” and exploitation of indigenous tribes, and suggested New Tribes personnel worked with the CIA.
In their Oct. 31 letter to Chavez, the two religious groups noted that New Tribes is a member of the Evangelical Council and had been officially recognized by the Justice and Worship Board of Venezuela’s Ministry of Justice since 1984.
They said Chavez’s charges do not correspond to the work of New Tribes as they know it.
New Tribes, which has worked in Venezuela for almost 60 years, places special emphasis on Bible translation and literacy education and on integrating the often isolated and marginalized indigenous tribes into the national life of the country.
_ David E. Anderson
Coalition of Religious and Human Rights Groups Asks Bush To Condemn Torture
(RNS) A broad coalition of religious, legal and human rights organizations has urged President Bush to condemn acts of torture.
“For more than a century United States policy prohibited torture,” reads the coalition’s Nov. 3 letter to the president.
“The prohibition served us well and must be restored in U.S. policy and practice. U.S. engagement and complicity in torture and inhumane treatment are grave legal and moral wrongs.”
Religious signatories include organizations representing Muslims, Quakers, Catholics and Unitarian Universalists. They joined groups ranging from the American Humanist Association to Amnesty International USA to the National Immigrant Solidarity Network.
“The degrading practices that have been used in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and the practice of rendering prisoners to countries known to use torture, are absolute wrongdoings in themselves,” they wrote.
“In addition to inflicting pain, these acts have made both our country and the world less safe from terrorism.”
They said recent U.S. policy has reduced the country’s standing with other nations.
When asked on Monday (Nov. 7) about reports that Vice President Dick Cheney had asked that the CIA be exempt from legislation to ban torture, President Bush responded by saying, “We do not torture.”
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said in a press briefing that it is “flat-out false” to say that the administration is seeking such an exemption.
“There are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture,” McClellan said. “And we adhere to those laws.”
John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville, Va., civil liberties organization that is a signatory, said it is important for the United States to set an example.
“The United States must take the lead in condemning the use of torture as a grave legal and moral wrong,” he said. “If we are to help make the world a safe place, we must begin by showing that we are committed to respecting the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, whether they are U.S. citizens or prisoners of war.”
The religious groups that signed the letter included the Washington office of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Unitarian Universalist Association, American Muslim Voice, Friends Committee on National Legislation (the Quakers), and NETWORK, A National Catholic Social Justice Lobby.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Quote of the Day: Presbyterian Volunteer Cathryn Rolfe
“I know our mission trips overseas are important, but these are our neighbors, and you need to get off your duff and forgo your own comfort zone and get down here, because you cannot imagine the mental and emotional devastation.”
_ Cathryn Rolfe of Nashville, Tenn., a volunteer with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, on clean-up efforts from Hurricane Katrina in Long Beach, Miss. She was quoted by Presbyterian News Service.
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