c. 2006 Religion News Service
At Annual March, Abortion Foes Find Hope in Revamped Supreme Court
WASHINGTON (RNS) Abortion opponents who gathered in Washington Monday (Jan. 23) for their annual march expressed hope that President Bush’s newest nominee for the Supreme Court will help overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision.
The crowd, which included priests, parishioners, parents and children outside the Capitol, did their best not to let cold, drizzly weather dampen their mood as they recited chants in small groups representing religious and public advocacy groups.
“Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, that’s what’s new,” said Emilio DiCola, from nearby Fairfax Station, Va., referring to President Bush’s recent nominees to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge Samuel Alito.
At his recent Senate confirmation hearing, Alito discussed his controversial 1985 memos in which he said that the Constitution does not guarantee the right to an abortion
It has been widely assumed that Alito, if confirmed by the Senate as Roberts was, will be a foe of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that struck down state bans on abortion. The march is held annually on the anniversary of that decision.
Abortion rights advocates rallied outside the Supreme Court on Sunday evening, holding a candlelight vigil and holding signs urging the Senate to reject the Alito nomination.
President Bush spoke to the demonstrators by telephone from Manhattan, Kan., where he had given a speech earlier.
“This is a cause that appeals to the conscience of our citizens and is rooted in America’s deepest principles,” he said. “And history tells us that with such a cause we will prevail.”
But some abortion opponents at the rally expressed skepticism that their voices were being heard.
“I think some people are listening, but I don’t think the government is listening,” said Ransford Clark, a New York seminary student attending the march for the first time. “That goes for Republicans as well as Democrats. Republicans present themselves as Bible-toting do-gooders, but they haven’t been living up to that image.”
_ David Barnes
Religious Conservatives Claim Victory After NBC Shuts `The Book of Daniel’
(RNS) Conservative critics are claiming victory after NBC pulled “The Book of Daniel,” a racy primetime drama about an Episcopal priest struggling to hold his dysfunctional family together.
NBC officials in New York would not confirm or deny that the show has been cancelled, but the broadcaster’s Web site lists “Law and Order” during the Friday 10 p.m. time slot that had been occupied by “The Book of Daniel.”
A blog on NBC’s home page contained an entry from Jack Kenny, the show’s creator, who said the show will “no longer be aired on NBC on Friday nights” for “many reasons.”
“Whatever the outcome, I feel that I accomplished what I set out to do: a solid family drama, with lots of humor, that honestly explored the lives of the Webster family,” Kenny wrote, adding that he was “proud of our product.”
The show, which debuted on Jan. 6, had only aired four of its eight scheduled episodes. Conservatives criticized the show’s sex, drugs and alcohol and said its depiction of Jesus was disrespectful.
Complaints from the Mississippi-based American Family Association _ to the tune of 678,000 angry e-mails to NBC _ prompted advertisers to pull out. At least 11 NBC stations in six states declined to broadcast the show.
“This shows the average American that he doesn’t have to simply sit back and take the trash being offered on TV, but he can get involved and fight back with his pocketbook,” said AFA Chairman Donald Wildmon.
Kenny had hoped the show would survive at least until Feb. 10, when the Olympics will take over for most NBC programming. Kenny had called the “bullies” who sought to kill his show “un-Christian and un-American.”
For its part, the Episcopal Church declined to comment on the show since it was not consulted as the show was created.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Muslim Organizations Protest Germany’s Quizzing of Immigrants’ Beliefs
(RNS) Muslim organizations are protesting a new immigration policy in the southwestern German state of Baden-Wurttemberg that requires them to fill out a questionnaire of 30 moral and ethical questions.
The new policy, effective Jan. 1, is required only for immigrants from countries that belong to the Arab League. Before they can be considered for German residency. Questions include how they would react if an adult child announced his or her homosexuality and whether they believe it is acceptable to hit a spouse.
According to reports in German media, members of the Socialist, Green and Left parties have argued that many immigrants lack the language skills to understand the questions and that many immigration officials do not have the credentials to judge which answers are correct.
Turkish organizations in Germany advise immigrants not to answer the questions and to seek legal help if refusal blocks their residency application. Kenan Kolat, head of the federal organization of Turkish organizations in Germany, has appealed to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for a ruling. Turkish immigrants are one of the largest demographic groups in Germany.
According to Der Spiegel magazine, a complaint to the German Constitutional Court is also under consideration by the Central Committee for Muslims in Germany. Nadeem Elyas, the group’s leader, called the new questionnaire a “clearly illegal discrimination against Muslims.”
But Baden-Wurttemberg’s ruling coalition of Christian Democrats and libertarians stand by their new policy, arguing that immigration officials need to be able to gauge whether immigrants’ beliefs are in synch with the rest of Germany before they can be admitted. The state’s justice minister did tell Der Spiegel, however, that the test should not be focused on Muslims. The justice minister has also questioned whether questions about homosexuality ought to be removed.
_ Niels Sorrells
Vatican Charges Publisher $18,000 for Quoting Pope
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Are words of a man of God priceless? Not if they come from the pope.
The Vatican has come under heavy criticism for its decision to charge publishers to reprint excerpts from Pope Benedict XVI’s public statements and written works dating back to his professorial days as the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger.
According to La Stampa, a Turin newspaper, the Vatican publishing division Libreria Editrice Vaticana recently billed a Milan-based publisher 15,000 euros (about $18,000) for printing a total of 30 lines from speeches Benedict delivered as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The lines were spoken to fellow cardinals immediately before the conclave to choose a new pope and during his subsequent inauguration ceremony.
A statement released by Libreria on Monday (Jan. 23) said the decision was based on a Vatican decree, in which the Holy See assumed full copyrights to all of Benedict’s past, present and future writings and pronouncements.
The decree, issued by Secretary of State Angelo Sodano on May 31, was reportedly enacted in December and could also apply to news organizations that regularly quote the German pontiff. It was unclear, however, if the Vatican intended to enforce the new policy on journalists.
It was also unclear if the Vatican reserved the right to take legal action against news organizations that publish leaked material, such as lengthy encyclicals and instructions.
Both Benedict’s long awaited encyclical and the highly controversial Vatican document on homosexuals in the priesthood were widely leaked to the Italian press prior to their official release.
The move has drawn pointed criticism from prominent journalists covering the Vatican, including papal biographer Vittorio Messori, who co-authored books with John Paul II and the then Cardinal Ratzinger.
Messori said he was “perplexed and alarmed” by the new policy, which he characterized as a form of “economic ransom” that undercut the pope’s ability to communicate freely _ and for free.
“Once again the odor of money surrounds the clergy,” Messori said.
Under the new policy, the Vatican can charge a publisher from three to five percent of a book’s cover price to quote the pontiff at length.
According to La Stampa, the $18,000 bill that the Milan publisher received accounted for 15 percent of the book’s cover price plus $4,200 of “legal expenses.”
_ Stacy Meichtry
Billy Graham Might Preach Again, in New Orleans
(RNS) Evangelist Billy Graham, at 87 still a dominant figure on the American religious landscape, has decided to join his son, Franklin, and perhaps even preach in New Orleans at an event in March.
The elder Graham has told members of his organization he was moved by the suffering of New Orleans and the surrounding region after Hurricane Katrina and wants to come “to encourage pastors, churches and the people” of the area, said A. Larry Ross, a Graham spokesman.
The event, called Celebration of Hope, is scheduled for the New Orleans Arena on March 11 and 12. Billy Graham may preach March 12.
The event is a product of Katrina. After the storm, New Orleans pastors and the Graham organization revived dormant plans to stage a gathering, said Jeff Anderson, coordinator of the event.
Ross cautioned that whether Graham preaches or delivers a short “greeting” _ or whether he can come at all _ will be dictated by his health.
Debilitated by an array of ailments, most visibly Parkinson’s disease, Graham is no longer the robust figure who has held an open Bible aloft in pulpits in 185 countries. He has prostate cancer and hydrocephaly, or water on the brain, and must use a walker because of the effects of a broken pelvis and hip.
In recent years he has scaled back his preaching, turning over to his son, Franklin, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Graham’s last major public engagement was a three-day crusade in New York City in June before 230,000 people. Given his condition, the common wisdom was that last summer’s public appearance might well be his last. But Graham himself left the door open, even as he acknowledged his infirmity.
_ Bruce Nolan
Turkish Court: Man Who Shot Pope John Paul II Must Go Back to Jail
(RNS) Mehmet Ali Agca, the gunman who shot John Paul II in 1981, was back in custody Friday after a Turkish appeals court ruled that his controversial release from prison for the murder of a journalist had “no legal basis.”
The decision to return Agca came amid a torrent of public outrage that followed his Jan. 12 release from prison for the slaying of a well-known Turkish journalist in 1979.
Agca was extradited to Turkey in 2000 after serving nearly 20 years in an Italian prison for repeatedly shooting John Paul as he rode through St. Peter’s Square in an open-air jeep.
Upon his arrival in Turkey, Agca was initially sentenced to serve 10 years in prison for the Ipekci slaying. But a November 2004 court ruling drastically reduced Agca’s term by taking into account the time he served in Italy and a national amnesty passed in 2000.
According to the Friday ruling, Agca only qualified for the amnesty.
Turkish media reported that Agca was arrested after the ruling without incident in Istanbul. Turkish broadcaster NTV quoted Agca’s lawyer Mustafa Demirbag as saying he was “respectful of all decisions by Turkish courts.”
The public outcry that followed Agca’s release a week ago prompted Turkey’s Justice Minister Cemil Cicek to immediately call for further judicial review of the controversial court ruling.
On Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to endorse the move, saying the Justice Ministry had “fulfilled its responsibility.”
Agca has been linked to the Gray Wolves, an ultra-nationalist group that clashed with leftist groups during the 1970s violence that roiled Turkey.
He killed Abdi Ipekci, the liberal editor-in-chief of Turkey’s Milliyet daily newspaper, for writing editorials that criticized rightist groups.
Agca’s motives for attacking John Paul have never been clear. But media speculation has alleged he was acting on behalf of the Bulgarian secret services and the Soviet KGB, which considered the Polish pontiff antagonistic to communism.
_ Stacy Meichtry
Bush Aide Tells Vatican Officials of Foes’ `Ruthless Secularization’
ROME (RNS) Enforcing a strict separation between church and state curtails religious freedom and deprives state-funded social programs of a “spiritual dimension,” a top aide to President Bush told an audience of Vatican officials.
Jim Towey, who heads Bush’s program to provide federal funding to “faith-based” social services, made his comments Tuesday (Jan. 17) at a conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of “Dignitas Humanae,” the ground-breaking 1965 Vatican document that recognized the rights of individuals to freedom of religion and the validity of separation between church and state.
Towey decried the “ruthless secularization” of public life by Bush opponents who he said have falsely cast the president as a `chaplain-in-chief.”
“I think we can agree to disagree with those who wish to banish religious voices from the public square,” Towey said.
Critics of the Bush administration have accused the president of improperly trying to increase federal funding for poverty fighting religious organizations and lowering the wall of separation between church and state.
A Catholic lawyer who served as counsel to Mother Teresa for 12 years, Towey said federally funded social programs required a “spiritual dimension” to effectively serve recipients such as drug addicts.
“The struggle of these individuals was not just a social problem but at its core a spiritual problem,” Towey said.
Towey was joined in Rome by Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, who criticized gay marriage initiatives and other federal regulations, such as abortion rights laws requiring Catholic hospitals to perform abortions, as “a really subtle attack on everything we stand for.”
_ Stacy Meichtry
Evangelical Leaders Cold About Global Warming Position
(RNS) Some prominent evangelical leaders have signed an open letter to the National Association of Evangelicals, asking it not to take an official position on global warming.
“Global warming is not a consensus issue, and our love for the Creator and respect for his creation does not require us to take a position,” reads the letter signed by Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and 20 others.
The letter was circulated by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a new Washington-based coalition that in November issued a report that challenged the idea that there is a scientific consensus on climate change.
“We are evangelicals and we care about God’s creation,” the letter reads. “However, we believe that there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue.”
The Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for government affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, said the NAE is not planning to take a position on the issue.
“The NAE was never going to adopt a policy on climate change,” he said. “Like on a lot of issues, evangelical leaders are across the board on this subject and have a variety of views.”
Other signatories on the open letter, which was released Jan. 6, included Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition; and the Rev. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The signatories signed as individuals, not as representatives of their churches or organizations.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Editors: To obtain a photo of Mayor Ray Nagin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
New Orleans Mayor Apologizes for Calling Hurricane God’s Will
NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Faced with howls of protest, Mayor Ray Nagin apologized Tuesday (Jan. 17) for claiming that a vengeful God smote New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina because of heavenly disapproval of America’s involvement in Iraq and of rampant violence within urban black communities.
Nagin also offered a less sweeping apology for his remarks about the city’s future demographics in the aftermath of the storm and subsequent catastrophic flood. His comments came in a speech, delivered on Martin Luther King Day with City Hall as a backdrop, in which the mayor said God intended New Orleans to rise again as a “chocolate city,” which he defined as a “black-majority city.”
Nagin said he was in error on his claim that Katrina’s devastation was a result of God’s will.
“I sincerely apologize for that and if there was anything I could take back, that would be it,” Nagin said. “I think it was inappropriate.”
Nagin acknowledged consulting with religious leaders since Katrina, and in his myriad public appearances he has commented eloquently on the important role faith must play if New Orleans is to endure. He said he regrets delivering a different message on Monday.
“That whole God thing, I don’t know how that got mixed up in there,” Nagin said.
Part of what propelled Nagin’s remarks around the country was the mixture of race and controversial theology _ notably the observation that God chose to punish several states with hurricanes as a way to express anger at the United States.
Nagin is not the first to make such an observation: In the months after the storm, sources as diverse as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli rabbi and an East Texas fundamentalist preacher all have publicly offered the same explanation. They have said God sent Katrina to convey his displeasure at, respectively, American aggression in Iraq, Bush’s support for dismantling West Bank settlements in Israel and the alleged sexual sins of New Orleans.
But Katrina as the so-called “fist of God,” as the explanation is sometimes called, “would not be the theology of the vast cross-section of mainline Christian theology,” said Robert Parham, director of the liberal Baptist Center for Ethics.
_ James Varney and Bruce Nolan
Human Rights Watch: `War on Terror’ Has Hampered Religious Freedom
NEW YORK (RNS) The governments of a number of countries, including China and Uzbekistan, are branding political opponents as Islamic terrorists and using the “war on terror” as a way to stifle dissent, Human Rights Watch said in its annual global survey of human rights conditions.
The report by the New York-based human rights watchdog and advocacy group, covering the year 2005, was issued Wednesday (Jan. 18). It said that counterterrorism policies are having a harmful effect on the global defense of human rights.
“Fighting terrorism is central to the human rights cause,” said Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch’s executive director. “But using illegal tactics against alleged terrorists is both wrong and counterproductive.”
The report was particularly critical of Bush administration policies it said had condoned torture and made it difficult for the United States to pressure other states to respect international law. It also noted that other countries are using the war on terror to crack down on opponents, with religious and cultural identity often a factor in stifling dissent.
It noted that in 2005, the government of China continued to crack down on the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Some Uighurs are waging a separatist campaign, and the Chinese government has responded with measures that have included the destruction of mosques, Human Rights Watch said.
Campaigns against Uighurs have also included secret and summary trials, the survey said, as well as imposition of the death penalty.
China, also criticized in the report for its strict policies of trying to regulate religious practice within the country, has used the war on terrorism, the report said, “to justify its policies, making no distinction between the handful of separatists who condone violence and those who desire genuine autonomy or a separate state.”
The survey noted similar policies in the onetime Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, where authorities reportedly killed hundreds of unarmed protesters during a May 13, 2005, demonstration in the eastern part of the country.
Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government, the report said, continues a campaign against those whose religious practice falls outside strict government controls. “The government justifies this campaign by referring to the `war on terror,’ failing to distinguish between those who advocate violence and those who peacefully express their religious beliefs,” the survey said.
_ Chris Herlinger
Retired Anglican Bishop Pleads for Help to Stop `Genocide’ in Uganda
WASHINGTON (RNS) Macleord Baker Ochola II, a retired Anglican bishop from Uganda, has called on the world to stop the “genocide” of women and children in his home country.
In a Monday (Jan. 23) event sponsored by the Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom and the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, Ochola said the world has remained silent about the atrocities committed by rebel forces on women and children in Northern Uganda. If the violence does not end, “the whole Acholi population is headed toward extinction,” said Ochola, who lost his wife and daughter in the conflict.
Since 1986, a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, has been raiding villages, terrorizing locals and turning kidnapped children into soldiers or sex slaves. More than 30,000 children have been kidnapped, according to some estimates. Many children now spend their night-time hours walking in city streets or in public buildings to avoid being abducted during attacks on their homes.
An estimated 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes into Internally Displaced Persons Camps, where inadequate supplies of food, water and sanitation have caused thousands to die.
Despite repeated efforts, the three factions in conflict, including Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and profiteering army officers, have not reached a peaceful agreement.
Speaking at the Capitol, Ochola said his people “are now aware they have been abandoned by the world but not by God.” He said the international community had a moral responsibility to stop the war, as 50 percent of the country’s national budget was from external aid.
Ochola also called for the church in Northern Uganda to “identify itself with the suffering and not keep silent.”
Faith McDonnell, representative for the Institute on Religion and Democracy, said her organization was encouraging U.S. churches to show a documentary, “Invisible Children,” about the abductions in Northern Uganda.
Evan Baehr, congressional fellow at the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, said his group is organizing at least two events in March to discuss practical solutions for the crisis.
_ Enette Ngoei
Quote of the Week: Filmmakers of `End of the Spear’
(RNS) “We cast Chad Allen because he had the best audition of anyone else by far. We know that the character in the film and the actor are not the same. If as a film company we could only work with people who were completely sanctified, then the film would never have been made.”
_ Filmmakers of “End of the Spear,” a new movie about American missionaries and tribesmen of Ecuador, responding to concerns that the actor portraying the lead character is gay. They were quoted in Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention.
MO END RNS
