POTUS went to Capitol Hill last night to assess the state of our Union, and gave a shout-out to American Muslims — “the conviction that American Muslims are a part of our American family,” and a nod to members of the military, be they “Christian and Hindu, Jewish and Muslim. And, yes, we know that some of them are gay.”
After laying low for a couple of weeks, House GOP conservatives vowed to mount a bid to ban same-sex marriage in WDC. House Speaker John Boehner, meanwhile, is teaming up with outgoing Sen. Joe Lieberman in a bid to revive the city’s voucher program — most of which went to the city’s struggling Catholic schools. Kansas lawmakers want a Medal of Honor for a Catholic chaplain (and potential saint) who died in a Korean POW camp in 1951.
Evangelical PR guru Mark DeMoss is trying, again, to make the case for evangelicals to support Mitt Romney in 2012. A Virginia lawmaker thinks it would save the state money to castrate sex offenders rather than pay for ongoing treatment.
I saw an advance screening for “The Rite” last night, the new exorcist film starring Anthony Hopkins, and the San Jose Mercury News profiles the real-life priest behind the film. As for the film, I’d give it a B. Hopkins, as always, was spell-binding, but the ending was a whole lot of let-down.
The WSJ reports that some 200 U.S. churches have faced foreclosure since 2008 for an inability to pay their mortgages; that’s up from eight cases in all of 2006 and 2007. Catholic hospitals are returning to Nawlins for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
Catholic University has a new president, and observers have already noted that he’s shaking things up a bit. Officials in Temecula, Calif., gave the go-ahead to a controversial mosque construction project — with a vote at 3:34 a.m.
The 9th Circuit ruled a second time in favor of World Vision, the evangelical humanitarian group that fired employees who no longer agreed with the agency’s mandatory statement of faith. A federal judge in St. Louis blocked a law intended to keep protesters affiliated with Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps away from funerals.
A federal judge in Atlanta said there’s no proof worshippers need to pack heat in order to freely exercise their religion in churches, and California’s attorney general says a Sikh man’s right to wear a beard doesn’t trump prison rules that prohibit them. Also in Georgia, there’s a growing movement to allow beer, wine and liquor sales on Sundays, which had been blocked by the state’s conservative Southern Baptist former governor.
Looks like Padre Alberto, the telegenic former Catholic priest who lost his “Father Oprah” media empire when he was caught canoodling with his girlfriend on a Florida beach, is getting another talk show.
From the Dept. of Wrong Turns, a faulty GPS devise landed an elderly British couple in the wall of a 19th-century German church.
From the Dept. of Stories That Will Never End, the Christian innkeepers in Britain who were fined for turning away a gay couple launched an appeal.
And finally, from the Dept. of Stuff We Already Knew, Houston megachurch pastor Joel Osteen thinks homosexuality is a sin, and Elton John thinks “the church” is “stuck in the stone ages” on homosexuality.
