c. 2008 Religion News Service
Atheists sue over Ky. Law tying homeland security to God
(RNS) The American Atheists have sued the commonwealth of Kentucky after learning that a law requires the state’s Office of Homeland Security to declare its reliance on God for safety.
The New Jersey-based atheist group filed suit Tuesday (Dec. 2) in a Kentucky court seeking a ruling that a 2002 law stating that “the safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance on God” is unconstitutional.
The atheists are particularly concerned about a 2006 law that calls for the divine-reliance wording to be spelled out on a plaque at the entrance of the state’s Emergency Operations Center.
“It’s part of the law to publicize that God is necessary for homeland security,” said David Silverman, spokesman for American Atheists. “That’s part of the law and it’s patently unconstitutional. It’s so offensive, not just from an atheistic point of view but from an American point of view because these people are trying to bring the religious debate into homeland security.”
The laws were both sponsored by Democratic delegate Tom Riner of Louisville, Ky., who also is a Southern Baptist minister.
“It’s a frivolous lawsuit that American Atheists has launched to attempt to censor and suppress the publication of a key law that acknowledges divine providence,” said Riner, pastor of Christ is King Baptist Church.
He said the laws did not get much attention when he sponsored them.
But he’s getting attention now, and the state is being sued, after the Lexington News-Leader wrote a story about them in late November.
Jay Blanton, a spokesman for Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, said he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the lawsuit but added: “There’s a law in place and it’s our intent to follow the law.”
_ Adelle M. Banks
Jews, Muslims plan joint memorial tribute to Mumbai victims
NEW YORK (RNS) In an effort to continue interfaith cooperation and prevent backlash against Muslims, Jews and Muslims are coming together here to memorialize the Jewish victims of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.
Imam Mohammed Shamsi Ali and Rabbi Marc Schneier, who recently appeared together in Manhattan during November’s national Jewish-Muslim “Weekend of Twinning,” will each speak this Friday (Dec. 5) at New York City’s Islamic Cultural Center.
On Saturday morning, the Consul General of India in New York, Ambassador Prabhu Dayal, will join them at the New York Synagogue for a second tribute.
“We don’t allow the terrorists to divide us and we don’t allow the terrorists to defeat us,” Ali said. “Terrorism doesn’t know God, terrorism doesn’t have any religion. All religious people are united against these terrorist attacks because all religions are enemies of terrorism.”
Mumbai’s Chabad House, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community center directed by Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, was one of the targets in the attacks in late November. The Holtzbergs were among more than 170 people killed in the Indian metropolis over the three-day period.
Ali and Schneier say they hope the joint tributes will help prevent grieving Jews, Hindus and others targeted in the Mumbai attacks from turning their anger towards Muslims, a major concern for Muslim groups in India and the United States.
On Tuesday (Dec. 2), the Muslim Public Affairs Council sent a letter to the Bush administration and the Obama transition team, calling on them to promote a message of tolerance and to encourage India to take precautions against a possible backlash against its Muslim minority, about 13 percent of the country’s population.
Schneier, who helped organize the recent Weekend of Twinning events involving more than 100 mosques and synagogues, said there have been several interfaith statements condemning the attacks, but he wasn’t yet aware of any other Jewish-Muslim memorial events.
As a Muslim cleric, Ali said he felt compelled to explain that terrorists, despite calling themselves Muslims, do not represent his faith.
“It’s very painful and sad to us whenever a Muslim commits terrorism and says it’s in the name of religion,” he said. “Terror and terrorism cannot be justified at all.”
_ Nicole Neroulias
Odetta, Folk Singer Who Gave Voice to Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
(RNS) Odetta, the folk singer whose deep and powerful voice became a soundtrack for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, died Tuesday (Dec. 1) in New York after a decade-long fight with heart disease. She was 77.
Born Odetta Holmes, in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, she was one of the most well-known folk and blues singers of the 1950s and 1960s; her rich voice was equally at home in the anguish of prison and work songs, the gentlest of English ballads, as well as the anger and hope of spirituals.
But it was at the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and Odetta sang the slave-era “O Freedom,” with its lines “before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free” that forever linked her voice with the hopes, aspirations and tragedies of the movement.
Odetta moved to Los Angeles with her widowed mother in 1940 and earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was, she told an interviewer, “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life.”
In 1950 she began performing professionally and found a following singing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. It was in mining the rich tradition of blues and spirituals that she found her distinctive style _ a style that would influence and shape the rising generation of folk singers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and such groups as Peter, Paul and Mary.
Dylan, in a 1978 interview, recalled that, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta,” and he noted he learned many of the songs on her first album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues.”
In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts’ Medal of the Arts and Humanities.
After the civil rights movement peaked, Odetta’s career also moved off center stage but she continued to perform and be hailed by critics.
_ David E. Anderson
Rastafarian can seek trial on religious discrimination, court says
BOSTON (RNS) _ Massachusetts’ high court on Tuesday (Dec. 2) ruled that a Rastafarian man is entitled to a trial on possible religious discrimination for refusing to cut his hair or beard to comply with Jiffy Lube’s policy on grooming.
The state Supreme Judicial Court ruled for Bobby T. Brown, a Rastafarian and former lube technician at a Jiffy Lube in Hadley, Mass., owned by F. L. Roberts & Co. Inc. of Springfield.
Brown, who has a full beard and dreadlocks, said that his religion forbids him from shaving his beard or cutting his hair. Rastafarianism is a religious movement among Jamaicans that teaches the eventual redemption of blacks and their return to Africa. It employs the ritualistic use of marijuana and forbids the cutting of hair.
The company launched a new policy in January 2002 that required employees to be clean shaven and to have neatly trimmed hair if they work with customers. Brown was permanently assigned to work in a lower bay of the oil change business.
Brown filed suit against F. L. Roberts & Co. in 2006, saying that under state law, the company discriminated against him because of his religion.
Associate Justice Roderick L. Ireland, of the state Supreme Judicial Court, wrote that under state law, an employer is required to provide a reasonable accommodation for an employee’s religious needs unless there is an “undue hardship” on the company.
The company failed to prove that it would suffer an undue hardship, Ireland wrote.
“We … conclude that an exemption from a grooming policy cannot constitute an undue hardship as a matter of law,” Ireland wrote.
Claire L. Thompson, lawyer for F. L. Roberts & Co., said she was disappointed in the high court’s decision. The policy affected everyone who had facial hair, she said.
“The policy had absolutely nothing to do with religion,” Thompson said.
_ Dan Ring
Mass. Catholic diocese pays $4.5 million to abuse victims
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (RNS) The Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, Mass., announced on Tuesday (Dec. 2) that it has paid $4.5 million to 59 alleged victims of clergy abuse, including two men who named former Springfield Bishop Thomas L. Dupre as their abuser.
The payments went out on Nov. 20 and ranged from $5,000 to $200,000, according to statements released by the diocese.
This resolution followed a $7.7 million payout to dozens of claimants in 2004. They were recently offset by an $8.5 million settlement three insurance companies paid to the diocese of Springfield, after initially resisting coverage of the abuse claims.
Some claimants said the recent payments they received from the diocese after years of negotiations left them cold, and still haunted by decades-old memories.
Donald Smith Henneberger, 50, of Springfield, said he feels unsatisfied by the $75,000 he received for abuse he suffered when he was 11 and 12.
“This second round of victims, who seemed to have to wait and suffer more, are being treated like second-class citizens,” said Henneberger, who estimates that he was abused between 75 and 100 times by a priest in Pittsfield while he was a paper delivery boy for a church there.
Dupre resigned abruptly in 2004 when questioned about the abuse allegations. He fell under a criminal probe and was indicted by a grand jury that year for sexual assault of a child.
However, Hampden County District Attorney William M. Bennett said he could not prosecute because the legal deadline to pursue the allegations had run out.
Dupre went to a Maryland treatment center for troubled priests after resigning. A lawyer for Dupre refused to confirm the cleric’s whereabouts.
Diocesan spokesman Mark E. Dupont said the diocese intends to support the claimants beyond the settlement.
“We didn’t cut these checks to walk away from these people,” he said. “The harm that has been done to many of these individual will take a lifetime to heal, if ever.”
_ Stephanie Barry
Quote of the Day: C. Brian Walton, retiring executive director of Catholic Charities of Onondaga County, N.Y.
(RNS) “We’re good about pulling people out of the water, but we don’t ask who threw them in the water.”
_ C. Brian Walton, retiring executive director of Catholic Charities of Onodaga County, N.Y. Quoted by The Post-standard in Syracuse, N.Y., Walton was advocating for a systemic approach to fighting poverty.
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