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INQUISITORIAL NEWS
LIGHT OF THE WORLD
Reporting on the Folly of Faith,
the Aberrations of Belief,
the Ruse of Religion

VOLUME II
2010

VOLUME I ~ 2009

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VOLUME II ~ 2010

RELIGION

"THOSE WHO BELIEVE ABSURDITIES WILL COMMIT ATROCITIES."
~ VOLTAIRE

RICHARD COHEN

 

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the grinch who stole the story of christmas

the true story

There Goes the Sun
By RICHARD COHEN, OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Author of “Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life”
The New York Times: December 20, 2010


WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.

Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod (> left) and Homer (> right). The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. ... Pleasing, that idea. ... As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

Virtually all cultures have their own way of acknowledging this moment. The Welsh word for solstice [Byrddydd] translates as “the point of roughness” [when Rhiannon (left) gave birth to the sacred son, Pryderi] while the Talmud calls it “Tekufat Tevet,” first day of “the stripping time.” For the Chinese, winter’s beginning is “dongzhi,” (> left) when one tradition is making balls of glutinous rice, which symbolize family gathering. In Korea, these balls are mingled with a sweet red bean called pat jook (> right). According to local lore, each winter solstice a ghost comes to haunt villagers. The red bean in the rice balls repels him.

In parts of Scandinavia, the locals smear their front doors with butter so that Beiwe, sun goddess of fertility [and sanity] (left), can lap it up before she continues on her journey. (One wonders who does all the mopping up afterward.) Later, young women don candle-embedded helmets, while families go to bed having placed their shoes all in a row, to ensure peace over the coming year.

Street processions are another common feature. In Japan, young men known as “sun devils,” their faces daubed to represent their imagined solar ancestry, still go among the farms to ensure the earth’s fertility (and their own stocking-up with alcohol). In Ireland, people called wren-boys take to the roads, wearing masks or straw suits. The practice used to involve the killing of a wren, and singing songs while carrying the corpse from house to house.


wren

Sacrifice is a common thread. In areas of northern Pakistan, men have cold water poured over their heads in purification, and are forbidden to sit on any chair till the evening, when their heads will be sprinkled with goats’ blood. (Unhappy goats.) Purification is also the main object for the Zuni and Hopi tribes of North America, their attempt to recall the sun from its long winter slumber. It also marks the beginning of another turning of their “wheel of the year,” and kivas (sacred underground ritual chambers, right) are opened to mark the season.

Yet, for all these symbolisms, this time remains at heart an astronomical event, and quite a curious one. In summer, the sun is brighter and reaches higher into the sky, shortening the shadows that it casts; in winter it rises and sinks closer to the horizon, its light diffuses more and its shadows lengthen. As the winter hemisphere tilts steadily further away from the star, daylight becomes shorter and the sun arcs ever lower. Societies that were organized around agriculture intently studied the heavens, ensuring that the solstices were well charted.

Despite their best efforts, however, their priests and stargazers came to realize that it was exceptionally hard to pinpoint the moment of the sun’s turning by observation alone — even though they could define the successive seasons by the advancing and withdrawal of daylight and darkness.

The earth further complicates matters. Our globe tilts on its axis like a spinning top, going around the sun at an angle to its orbit of 23 and a half degrees. Yet the planet’s shape changes minutely and its axis wobbles, thus its orbit fluctuates. If its axis remained stable and if its orbit were a true circle, then the equinoxes and solstices would quarter the year into equal sections. As it is, the time between the spring and fall equinoxes in the Northern Hemisphere is slightly greater than that between fall and spring, the earth — being at that time closer to the sun — moving about 6 percent faster in January than in July.

The apparently supernatural power manifest in solstices to govern the seasons has been felt as far back as we know, inducing different reactions from different cultures — fertility rites, fire festivals, offerings to the gods. Many of the wintertime customs in Western Europe descend from the ancient Romans, who believed that their god of the harvest, Saturn, had ruled the land during an earlier age of abundance, and so celebrated the winter solstice with the Saturnalia, a feast of gift-giving, role-reversals (slaves berating their masters) and general public holiday from Dec. 17 to 24.

The transition from Roman paganism to Christianity, with its similar rites, took several centuries. With the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, customs were quickly appropriated and refashioned, as the sun and God’s son became inextricably entwined. Thus, although the New Testament gives no indication of Christ’s actual birthday (early writers preferring a spring date), in 354 Pope Liberius declared it to have befallen on Dec. 25.

The advantages of Christmas Day being celebrated then were obvious. As the Christian commentator Syrus wrote: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same Dec. 25 the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity .... Accordingly, when the church authorities perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”

In Christendom, the Nativity gradually absorbed all other winter solstice rites, and the co-opting of solar imagery was part of the same process. Thus the solar discs that had once been depicted behind the heads of Asian rulers became the halos of Christian luminaries.

Egypt - Ra	Buddah	Buddah	Roman - Apollo	Christian

Despite the new religion’s apparent supremacy, many of the old customs survived — so much so that church elders worried that the veneration of Christ was being lost. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo and Pope Leo the Great felt compelled to remind their flocks that Christ, not the sun, was their proper object of their worship.

While Roman Christianity was the dominant culture in Western Europe, it was by no means the only one. By millennium’s end, the Danes controlled most of England, bringing with them “Yule,” their name for winter solstice celebrations, probably derived from an earlier term for “wheel.” For centuries, the most sacred Norse symbol had been the wheel of the heavens, represented by a six- or eight-spoked wheel or by a cross within a wheel signifying solar rays [the symbol adopted by Opus Dei, (right)].

The Norse peoples, many of whom settled in what is now Yorkshire, would construct huge solar wheels and place them next to hilltop bonfires, while in the Middle Ages processions bore wheels upon chariots or boats. In other parts of Europe, where the Vikings were feared and hated, a taboo on using spinning wheels during solstices lasted well into the 20th century. The spinning-wheel on which Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger may exemplify this sense of menace.

Throughout much of Europe, at least up until the 16th century, starvation was common from January to April, a period known as “the famine months.” Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed over the winter, making the solstice almost the only time of year that fresh meat was readily available. The boar’s head at Christmas feasts represents the dying sun of the old year, while the suckling pig — with the apple of immortality in its mouth — the new.

The turning of the sun was perhaps even more important in the New World than the Old. The Aztecs, who believed that the heart harbored elements of the sun’s power, ensured its continual well-being by tearing out this vital organ from hunchbacks, dwarves or prisoners of war, so releasing the “divine sun fragments” entrapped by the body and its desires.

The Incas would celebrate the solar festival of Inti Raymi by having their priests attempt to tie down the celestial body. At Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes, there is a large stone column called the Intihuatana, (“hitching post of the sun,”) to which the star would be symbolically harnessed. It is unclear how the Incas measured the success of this endeavor, but at least the sun returned the following day.

Yet above all other rituals, reproducing the sun’s fire by kindling flame on earth is the commonest solstice practice, both at midsummer and midwinter. Thomas Hardy, describing Dorset villagers around a bonfire in “The Return of the Native,” offers an explanation for such a worldwide phenomenon:

“To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, ‘Let there be light.’ ”

So there is good reason to celebrate the winter solstice — but maybe that celebration is still touched with a little fear.

Celestial Holidays
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: December 21, 2010

This is it, the shortest day of the year, the longest night. Winter, which begins Tuesday at 6:38 p.m. Eastern time, will get no darker than this. Slowly, inexorably, the days will begin to yawn wider and wider, and night will begin to contract. The change is just a few seconds at first — New Year’s Eve in Manhattan will be only 28 seconds longer than Christmas Eve. By mid-March, the days will be growing by some 2 minutes and 40 seconds apiece, and then the rate of change slows again until late June.

We come to the winter solstice with mixed feelings. It will be lovely to have more light in the day. But there’s something equally wonderful about these long hibernal nights. By 4:30 every day — just as the sun is disappearing — we start to feel a little ursine, ready to dig a hole and sleep away the winter. How different our species would be if only we’d learned that one great trick!

We are all deeply habituated, in this northern clime, to the annual accordioning of the day — so much so that an equatorial place like Quito, Ecuador, where the length of day changes only by a second from solstice to solstice, sounds almost like a city out of science fiction. In some ways, that daily constancy seems more disorienting here, where the length of day changes by almost six hours, than the reversal of seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas comes in summer.

Another important astronomical holiday follows soon after the winter solstice (which included a lunar eclipse). At 2 p.m., New York time, on Jan. 3, the Earth reaches Perihelion — the closest approach to the Sun in our elliptical orbit, a little more than 91 million miles away.

For some reason, this is a moment that goes uncelebrated, entirely unheralded. So we say to you all,

Merry Solstice and have a Happy Perihelion!

 

NYC 'cross' walk
Protest march over art 'censor'
By AMBER SUTHERLANwith David K. Lin
The New York Post: December 20, 2010

More than 200 protesters hit Fifth Avenue yesterday with fire in their bellies over the Smithsonian's yanking of a controversial work by famed gay artist David Wojnarowicz.

The chanting demonstrators clogged the avenue between 81st and 82nd streets to demand that the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, restore the Wojnarowicz piece, a video called "A Fire in My Belly," which showed ants crawling over a crucified Jesus, angering Christian groups.

"We're here to send a very loud message to the Smithsonian. Put the Wojnarowicz video back now!" said Bill Dobbs, a protest organizer.

The protesters looped around the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art before marching up to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate, at 91st Street.
As the group hit 84th Street, members briefly blocked eastbound traffic before cops restored order.

They waved signs and banners that included slogans such as: "Smithsonian: Stop the Censorship of Art" and
"Silence = Death."

Demonstrators chanted: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, censorship has got to go!"

Wojnarowicz's video was pulled from the portrait gallery's exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" on Nov. 30, after the institution received heated complaints from the Catholic League and conservative politicians.

"This street demonstration in New York reflects rising anger in the heart of the art community," Dobbs said. "Almost every professional art organization has condemned the censorship."

Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas yesterday said curators had no choice but to pull "Fire," lest the greater exhibit be overshadowed by the controversy. "It was becoming all about the video," St. Thomas said. "We tried to avoid removing it. But it would have been the focal point, and everyone would have gone straight to that. It was overwhelming everything else. That's all everyone was talking about."

St. Thomas insisted the greater exhibit is "ground-breaking" and sheds a historic light on gender and sexuality in art.

(Full article)

JOEL WACHS
President of the Warhol Foundation

 

G. WAYNE CLOUGH
Secretary of the Smithsonian

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warhol Foundation Says It’s Ending Smithsonian Support
By KATE TAYLOR
The New York Times: December 14, 2010

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is threatening to stop its financial support of Smithsonian exhibitions if the institution does not restore a work of art that was removed from a current show following attacks by the president of the Catholic League and two Republican Congressmen. The Warhol Foundation gave $100,000 to the Smithsonian for the exhibition, “Hide/ Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, one of the Smithsonian museums. The work was removed on Nov. 30.

In a letter sent on Monday by e-mail and FedEx to G. Wayne Clough, the secretary of the Smithsonian, Joel Wachs, the president of the Warhol foundation, said the board had voted unanimously Friday to demand that the Smithsonian reinstate the work, an excerpt of a video by the artist David Wojnarowicz, or the foundation would not finance any future Smithsonian shows.

“I regret that you have put us in this position, but there is no other course we can take,” Mr. Wachs wrote in the letter, which the foundation also sent to the news media.

“For the arts to flourish, the arts must be free, and the decision to censor this important work is in stark opposition to our mission to defend freedom of expression wherever and whenever it is under attack.”

On Monday afternoon Mr. Clough said through a spokeswoman, “While we regret the foundation’s action, the Smithsonian’s decision to remove the video was a difficult one, and we stand by it.”

“We felt it was really necessary to take this strong step, and we are going to back it,” Mr. Wachs said in a telephone interview, adding that he hoped that other donors would follow suit. The Smithsonian “can’t just bow to this kind of bigoted attack,” he said, “and not feel the consequences.”

Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Warhol photo: Gagosian Gallery

RICHARD KURIN
Undersecretary for art, history and culture
National Museum of American History

REP. JOHN A. BOEHNER
R - OH

REP. ERIC CANTOR
R - VA

Board member resigns over crucifix controversy
By Jacqueline Trescott
The Washington Post:12/ 9/2010

The staff at the National Museum of American History met Monday with Richard Kurin, the undersecretary for art, history and culture, and a member of the senior staff who decided the excerpt from David Wojnarowicz's video was what the Smithsonian called a "distraction" to the overall groundbreaking show.

One participant at the meeting said Kurin explained Smithsonian officials moved fast because criticism from Capitol Hill and other critics was coming so quickly.

"The Secretary had to move quickly because the news cycle moves so fast now," said the long-time employee. "He also said the video wasn't an essential part of the show and had been added late."

Because the objections on Capitol Hill came initially from two powerful Republicans, John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Eric Cantor (R-Va.), and the Congress controls 70 percent of the Smithsonian's budget, employees said they feared to go public with their viewpoints.

Since removing the video, which contained an 11-second segment that showed ants crawling over a crucifix, the Smithsonian has taken steps to control the damage. The action has also been criticized by artists, who staged a protest outside the Portrait Gallery last week, and by the Association of Art Museum Directors, an influential group.

Last week commissioner JAMES T. BARTLETT resigned from the advisory panel in protest. "I believe it is a fundamental right of museums and their curatorial staffs to make such decisions [about exhibition content], even if some art is deemed objectionable by external critics," said Bartlett in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post. "I choose firmly and resolutely not to be part of an institution that is and can be put ad infinitum in this position."

JONATHAN D. KATZ
Co-curator
Chair, Visual Studies Doctoral Program
SUNY, Buffalo

DAVID C. WARD
Co-curator, Historian
National Portrait Gallery

MARTIN E. SULLIVAN
Director
Nationmal Portrait Gallery

After Dispute Over Video, Curators to Discuss Smithsonian Show
By KATE TAYLOR
The New York Times: December 9,2010

The curators of a Smithsonian art exhibition that has sparked a firestorm in the last week — first because of the inclusion of a video that included an image of ants crawling on a crucifix, then because of the video’s removal from the show — will talk about the show at the New York Public Library next Wednesday [15 Decvember].

The exhibition, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, is titled “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” and is devoted to representations of homosexual desire in American art. Early last week, after the head of the Catholic League and some House Republicans attacked the show, focusing on a video by the artist David Wojnarowicz that included the crucifix image, partly as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, the Smithsonian decided to remove the video from the exhibition. That drew accusations of censorship from, among others, one of the show’s two curators, Jonathan Katz, a professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Mr. Katz told The Buffalo News that he was outraged not to have been consulted, and called the Smithsonian’s decision “incredibly stupid.”

On Wednesday Mr. Katz will discuss the show with the other curator, David Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery’s director, Martin Sullivan, will also be in attendance. The discussion will be moderated by Jason Baumann, who coordinates the library’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender collections.

(Full article)

FRANK RICH
New Tork Times
Op-Ed Columnist

 

BILL DONOHUE
Catholic League

 

REP. ERIC CANTOR
R - VA

 

REP. JACK KINGSTON
R - GA

 

MARTIN E. SULLIVAN
Director
Nationmal Portrait Gallery

 

SEN. THAD COCHRAN
R - MS

 

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY
D - VT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian
By FRANK RICH
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times: December 12, 2010

EACH Aug. 4, my wife Alex and I visit a church to light candles for two people we loved who both died tragically on that day two years apart — my mother, killed at 64 in a car crash, and Alex’s closest friend from graduate school, killed by AIDS at half that age. My mother was Jewish but loved the meditative serenity of vast cathedrals. Alex’s friend, John, was a Roman Catholic conflicted by a religion that demonized his sexuality. Our favorite pilgrimage is to an Episcopal church, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, not as some sectarian compromise but because of its AIDS chapel, a haunting reminder of the plague that ravaged that city’s population, especially its gay men, some time ago.

What helps give us some solace is the chapel’s mesmerizing altarpiece. It was the New York artist Keith Haring’s (left) last completed work in the weeks before his death by AIDS at age 31 in 1990, titled “The Life of Christ” (right).... You needn’t be a believer to be inspired by the beauty of his vision.

Not every artist struck down by AIDS could hit so generous a note. Such was the case with David Wojnarowicz (left), a painter, author and filmmaker, who, like Haring, was a fixture of the East Village arts scene in the 1980s. When his mentor and former lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, fell ill with AIDS in 1987, Wojnarowicz created a video titled “A Fire in My Belly” to express both his grief and his fury. As in Haring’s altarpiece, Christ figures in Wojnarowicz’s response to the plague — albeit in a cryptic, 11-second cameo. A crucifix is besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on.

Wojnarowicz would die at age 37, also of AIDS, in 1992. This is now ancient, half-forgotten history. When a four-minute excerpt from “A Fire in My Belly” was included in an exhibit that opened six weeks ago at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, it received no attention. That’s hardly a surprise, given the entirety of this very large show — a survey of same-sex themes in American portraiture titled “Hide/Seek.” It’s an exhibit that would have been unimaginable in a mainstream institution in Wojnarowicz’s lifetime.

The story might end there — like Haring’s altarpiece, a bittersweet yet uplifting postscript to a time of plague. But it doesn’t because “Fire in My Belly” was removed from the exhibit by the National Portrait Gallery some 10 days ago with the full approval, if not instigation, of its parent institution, the Smithsonian. (The censored version of “Hide/Seek” is still scheduled to run through Feb. 13.) The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America.

The Smithsonian’s behavior and the ensuing silence in official Washington are jarring echoes of those days when American political leaders stood by idly as the epidemic raged on. The incident is also a throwback to the culture wars we thought we were getting past now — most eerily the mother of them all, the cancellation of a [Robert] Mapplethorpe exhibit (after he died of AIDS) at another Washington museum, the Corcoran, in 1989.

Like many of its antecedents, the war over Wojnarowicz is a completely manufactured piece of theater. What triggered the abrupt uproar was an incendiary Nov. 29 post on a conservative Web site. The post was immediately and opportunistically seized upon by William Donohue, of the so-called Catholic League, a right-wing publicity mill with no official or financial connection to the Catholic Church.

Donohue is best known for defending Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism by declaring that “Hollywood is controlled by Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.” A perennial critic of all news media except Fox, he has also accused The Times of anti-Catholicism because it investigated the church pedophilia scandal. Donohue maintains the church doesn’t have a “pedophilia crisis” but a “homosexual crisis.” Such is the bully that the Smithsonian surrendered to without a fight.

Donohue’s tactic was to label the 11-second ants-and-crucifix sequence as “anti-Christian” hate speech. “The irony,” wrote the Washington Post art critic, Blake Gopnik, is that the video is merely a tepid variation on the centuries-old tradition of artists using images of Christ, many of them “hideously grisly,” to speak of mankind’s suffering. Those images are staples of all museums — even in Washington, where gory 17th-century sculptures of Christ were featured in a recent show of Spanish sacred art at the National Gallery.

But of course Donohue was just using his “religious” objections as a perfunctory cover for the homophobia actually driving his complaint. The truth popped out of the closet as Donohue expanded his indictment to “pornographic images of gay men.” His Republican Congressional allies got into the act. Eric Cantor called for the entire exhibit to be shut down and threatened to maim the Smithsonian’s taxpayer funding come January. (The exhibit was entirely funded by private donors, but such facts don’t matter in culture wars.) Jack Kingston, of the House Appropriations Committee, rattled off his own list of exaggerated gay outrages in “Hide/Seek,” from “Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts” (above left) to “naked brothers kissing.”

It took only hours after Donohue’s initial battle cry for the video to be yanked. “The decision wasn’t caving in,” the museum’s director, Martin E. Sullivan, told reporters. Of course it was. The Smithsonian, in its own official statement, rationalized its censorship by saying that Wojnarowicz’s video “generated a strong response from the public.” That’s nonsense. There wasn’t a strong response from the public — there was no response. As the museum’s own publicist told the press, the National Portrait Gallery hadn’t received a single complaint about “A Fire in the Belly” from the exhibit’s opening day, Oct. 30, until a full month later, when a “public” that hadn’t seen the exhibit was mobilized by Donohue to blast the museum by phone and e-mail.

The Post’s Gopnik (left) has been heroically relentless in calling out the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery for their capitulation. But few in Washington’s power circles have joined him, including the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents — a gilded assembly of bipartisan cowardice that ranges from Senator Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, to Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont.

Above right: Portrait of the Artist with Donors by Robert Coane, 1990,
attacking censorship at the height of the "culture wars" of the '80s and depicting Senators Jesse Helms and Alphonse D'Amato
the then self-appointed Senate censors and former Corcoran Gallery director Christina Orr-Cahall, who cancelled the Robert Maplethorpe exibit.
Click √ on image to read iconographic description

DONALD WILDMON
American Family Association

 

BILL DONOHUE
Catholic League

 

REP. JOHN A. BOEHNER
R - OH

 

GUIDO RENI
(1575 - 1642)

 

JEAN GENET
(1910 - 1986)

 

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
(1905 - 1980)

 

HOLLAND COTTER
New York Times
Art Critic
√

As Ants Crawl Over Crucifix, Dead Artist Is Assailed Again
by HOLLAND COTTER
The New York Times: December 11, 2010

In 1989, Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, mailed a pamphlet reproducing details from collages by the New York artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) to every member of Congress, to various news media outlets and to religious leaders across the country.

Mr. Wildmon, a Methodist minister, had prepared the pamphlet himself; he considered the images pornographic or blasphemous. He had copied them from the catalog for an exhibition partly supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the real object of his protest. Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch), furious at having his work selectively edited, sued Mr. Wildmon for misrepresenting his art and won the case.

Twenty years later, history is repeating itself, with variations. Wojnarowicz’s work is under similar attack, this time by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and several members of Congress (most notably Representative John A. Boehner, R - OH, future Speaker of the House).

The offending material is again a detail of a larger work, an image of ants crawling over a crucifix, excerpted from a Wojnarowicz video [“A Fire in My Belly”] that was included in a large group show called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

On Dec. 1 the gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, took the video off view.

A raw, moving, disturbing piece of art ... comes in two sections: one is 13 minutes; the other is 7 minutes, video of the same title found on a separate reel after Wojnarowicz’s death from AIDS. In an added complication, the two tapes were edited down to one that is roughly 4 minutes for the National Portrait Gallery show.
(Click √ on images above for related videos)

That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.

He felt, with reason, mortally embattled, and the video is filled with symbols of vulnerability under attack: beggars, slaughtered animals, displaced bodies and the crucified Jesus. In Wojnarowicz’s nature symbolism — and this is confirmed in other works — ants were symbols of a human life mechanically driven by its own needs, heedless of anything else. Here they blindly swarm over an emblem of suffering and self-sacrifice.

Am I giving the image too benign a reading? Possibly, but I’m basing it on what Wojnarowicz had to say about another image of Jesus that he used in his art, one that Mr. Wildmon and the American Family Association called blasphemous. Part of a detail of a 1979 collage called “Untitled (Genet),” (left) it is an altered version of the familiar 17th-century painting “Christ Crowned With Thorns,” by Guido Reni (right). Reni’s Jesus, who looks both agonized and ecstatic, is here shown with a heroin syringe in his arm.

But the changed image is part of a larger picture. Wojnarowicz has placed it atop an altar inside what looks like a bombed-out church swarming with antlike figures of soldiers as a flock of large angels descends into the church from the sky. In the center of everything stands a haloed figure, the French homosexual writer Jean Genet, dubbed “St. Genet” by Jean-Paul Sartre.

In response to questions during his courtroom testimony against the American Family Association, Wojnarowicz explained that he made the piece after returning to New York from a stay in France, where he had been reading Genet. Back in New York, he was struck by the rampant and rising use of hard drugs among people he knew and the self-destruction that resulted. He said that in his own upbringing as a Roman Catholic he’d been taught that Jesus took on the sufferings of all people in the world.

“I wanted to make a symbol that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction that I saw on the streets,” Wojnarowicz testified. “And I did this because I saw very little treatment available for people who had this illness.”

I don’t believe Wojnarowicz was being disingenuous. He was speaking under oath and, in any case, he was nothing if not passionate about his belief in the moral purpose of art, as passionate as his religious accusers have been in questioning his morality. It’s an interesting thing about passion, how coming from ostensibly opposite beliefs and directions, it can sometimes end up meeting in the same place.

(Above left: A protest against removing a David Wojnarowicz video from a National Portrait Gallery show)
Click √ on photo of Holland Cotter, left botom, for his review of “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture"

BILL DONOHUE
Catholic League president

JAMES P. MOLINARO
Staten Island
Borough president

Baby Jesus ousted from St. George Ferry Terminal
Tom Wrobleski
SILive.com: Friday, December 10, 2010


STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Christ is out of Christmas at the St. George Ferry Terminal.

In what Catholics see as political correctness run amok, the city Department of Transportation (DOT) has removed a Nativity scene from the terminal, with an agency spokesman saying that the display was not authorized to be there. But a menorah, marking the celebration of Hanukkah, and a Christmas tree remain on display in the terminal.

Catholics said the move was a nightmare before Christmas. "We take this as a tremendous affront," said Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a watchdog of religious and civil rights.

The controversy reflects church-and-state battles that erupt nationwide each Christmas over the placement of religious symbols in public spaces.

Other public institutions here balance the religious and secular themes of the season.

At Borough Hall, for example, a Nativity scene, a menorah, a Christmas tree and a display for Kwanzaa share space next to each other in the lobby.

"They’re all religious symbols," Borough President James P. Molinaro, a Catholic, said tonight as he prepared to host a Christmas-tree lighting ceremony at Borough Hall. "Remove them all, or remove none. My opinion? Leave them all there."

JULIAN ASSANGE

GENNARO Di VIRGILIO

DOGGIE GIFTS
at the DOGHOUSE

 

 

 

AP-Petside.com poll: Dogs are Santa's favorites
By SUE MANNING
Associated Press: December 8, 2010

LOS ANGELES - While fewer than half of those who attend religious services weekly or more often say they plan to buy their pets a gift, 60 percent of those who never attend services do.

DOGHOUSE Solstice pitchoors

TERRY McDONALD
Dallas-Fort Worth
Coalition of Reason

 

GARY HAVENER
Fort Worth Transportation Authority Board member

TERRY McDONALD
Chairman of Metroplex Atheists

 

FRED EDWORDS
National Director of the United Coalition of Reason

 

REV. KYEV TATUM SR.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atheist Ads on Buses Rattle Fort Worth
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times: December 15, 2010

FORT WORTH — Stand on a corner in this city and you might get a case of theological whiplash.

A public bus rolls by with an atheist message on its side:

“Millions of people are good without God.”

Seconds later, a van follows bearing a riposte: “I still love you. — God,” with another line that says, “2.1 billion Christians are good with God.”

A clash of beliefs has rattled this city ever since atheists bought ad space on four city buses to reach out to nonbelievers who might feel isolated during the Christmas season. After all, Fort Worth is a place where residents commonly ask people they have just met where they worship and many encounters end with, “Have a blessed day.”

“We want to tell people they are not alone,” said Terry McDonald, the chairman of Metroplex Atheists, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason, which paid for the atheist ads.

“People don’t realize there are other atheists. All you hear around here is, ‘Where do you go to church?’ ”

But the reaction from believers has been harsher than anyone in the nonbeliever’s club expected. Some ministers organized a boycott of the buses, with limited success. Other clergy members are pressing the Fort Worth Transportation Authority to ban all religious advertising on public buses. And a group of local businessmen paid for the van with the Christian message to follow the atheist-messaged buses around town.

The face-off here follows efforts in other cities by several coalitions of atheists — American Atheists, the United Coalition of Reason and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, to name a few — that have mounted ad campaigns to encourage nonbelievers to seek out others of like mind. Some have compared their efforts to the struggle of gay men and lesbians to “come out” and win acceptance from society.

The Fort Worth group is affiliated with the United Coalition of Reason, whose local chapters have bought bus ads in Detroit, northwest Arkansas, Philadelphia and Washington, as well as billboards in more than a dozen cities, among them Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Seattle and St. Louis. Most show a blue sky with variations on this message:

“Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

The ads have incited anger in some places. Vandals destroyed two bus ads in Detroit, ruined a billboard in Tampa, Fla., and defaced 10 billboards in Sacramento. One billboard in Cincinnati was taken down after the landlord received threats.

And the local rapid transit authority in Des Moines pulled atheist ads off its buses in August last year because of complaints from local religious leaders. Four days later, however, the authority reversed its position after the local group that had bought the ads threatened legal action on First Amendment grounds.

But nowhere has the reaction of believers been so forceful as in Fort Worth, to the delight of Fred Edwords, the national director of the United Coalition of Reason.

The coalition’s local chapter spent only $2,400 for four bus ads, which will run through the month in a city with about 200 buses.

“That’s more brouhaha for the buck than we have seen anywhere,” Mr. Edwords said.

Some of the fiercest criticism has come from black religious leaders. The Rev. Kyev Tatum Sr., president of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has called for a boycott of the buses, saying the ads are a direct attack during a sacred time in the Christian calendar.

“It’s a season to share good will toward all men,” Mr. Tatum said. “To have this at this time come out with a blatant disrespect of our faith, we think is unconscionable.”

While Mr. Tatum and about 20 other pastors have urged their congregations to avoid the buses, a smaller group met recently with the transportation authority’s president to demand that the policy allowing religious advertising on buses be reversed Wednesday at a meeting of the authority’s board. The bus system in nearby Dallas bans all religious ads.

Mr. McDonald, chairman of the local atheist group, said the ad was intended not to insult Christians, but to console atheists. The initial plan, he said, was to run the ad on the Fourth of July, which is why it features dozens of portraits of Texas atheists in an American flag motif.

“It can be pretty lonely for a nonbeliever at Christmastime around here. There is so much religion,” Mr. McDonald said. “We thought, ‘What the heck? Nobody owns December.’ ”

CENTRE FOR INQUIRY

Weird but true
By DAVID K. LI
POST WIRE SERVICES:: December 6, 2010

Cetre for Inquiry, an atheist group in Canada, is taking its message to the streets -- or, at least, to bus stops.

The Extraordinary Claims Campaign wants to roll out ads on Toronto city buses saying that Jesus and Allah are no more authentic than UFOs.

If officials approve the ads, the group hopes to post them later on buses in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Montreal.

DAVID SILVERMAN

MADALYN MURRAY O'HAIR

For the Holidays, an Atheism Billboard
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
The New York Times: November 29, 2010

Among the many advertisements lining I-495 in New Jersey en route to the Lincoln Tunnel is a new one promoting atheism for the holidays rather than another gift.

The billboard shows three crowned men riding camels toward a humble manger in which a man and woman kneel beside a straw-filled bassinet, all silhouetted beneath a prominent six-pointed star. The message — “You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason!” — is emblazoned in large white letters above the nativity scene.

The provocative 14-by-48-foot billboard was rented for $20,000 by American Atheists, a national atheist organization, and went up Nov. 22. It is the latest in a series of campaigns promoting atheism in the city in recent years, most notably advertisements on city subways and buses. (Those campaigns were the work of the New York City Coalition of Reason, an umbrella group of secular organizations, and NYC Atheists, a local American Atheists affiliate, respectively.)

David Silverman, the president of American Atheists and the man behind the billboard, said it would remain in place at least until the winter solstice on Dec. 21 and possibly through Christmas. He said the billboard was partly inspired by one that American Atheists’ founder, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, set up in Dallas in the 1970s proclaiming “Atheism: It’s not what you believe.”

Mr. Silverman said the billboard served two purposes. The first was to get the many people who do not actually believe in God but practice religious rituals to “come out,” in his words.
He said the billboard’s location was especially effective because commuters “drive by this sign very slowly every day for a month, right in the Christmas season.”

“And when they go into New York to go shopping,” he said, “they’re going to see it.”
The billboard also stands up to what Mr. Silverman described as a reactionary assault on atheists driven mainly by the religious right.

“Every year, atheists get blamed for having a war on Christmas, even if we don’t do anything,” he said. “This year, we decided to give the religious right a taste of what war on Christmas looks like.”

(Full article)

REV. ZHAODENG PENG

REV. HECTOR LAPORTA

REV. KENNY YI

Brooklyn Immigrant Congregations Clash
By SAM DOLNICK
The New York Times: December 29, 2010

Two pastors preach from the same pulpit and live in the same parsonage next door, but they are barely on speaking terms and openly criticize each other’s approach to the faith.

In the church’s social hall, two camps eye each other suspiciously as one finishes its meal of rice and beans while the other prepares steaming pans of chicken lo mein.

Two very different congregations share the soaring brick building on Fourth Avenue: a small cadre of about 30 Spanish-speaking people who have worshiped there for decades and a fledgling throng of more than 1,000 Chinese immigrants that expands week by week — the fastest-growing Methodist congregation in New York City.

The Latinos say they feel steamrolled and under threat, while their tenants, the Chinese, say they feel stifled and unappreciated. Mediators have been sent in, to little effect. This holiday season, there are even two competing Christmas trees.

“This pastor is very rude to us,” said the Rev. Zhaodeng Peng, who heads the Chinese congregation with his wife.

The Rev. Hector Laporta, leader of the Latino church, responded, “He really has an anger problem.”

“We are trying to rely on God to see which direction the Lord is leading the two congregations,” the Rev. Kenny Yi, the denomination’s district coordinator, said. “We will find out sooner or later.”

LARS VILKS

KURT WESTERGAARD

Police Arrest 5 in Danish Terror Plot
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
The New York Times: December 29, 2010

A group of men arrested in Denmark on Wednesday were about to mount a “Mumbai style” attack on the Danish newspaper that ignited Muslim fury around the world by publishing satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, the head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service said.

The police said the suspects who lived in Sweden did not appear to have connections to a botched Dec. 11 suicide bombing near a crowded commercial area of downtown Stockholm. The bomber in that case was a 28-year-old Swedish citizen of Iraqi origin; in a message, he singled out Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who has also been threatened repeatedly with death since a drawing he made of Muhammad’s head on the body of a dog was published by a Swedish newspaper in 2007.

The earlier satirical cartoons of Muhammad were commissioned and published by Jyllands-Posten as a statement of freedom of expression. But they were seen as blasphemous and a deliberate provocation by many Muslims, and prompted rioting in some countries and repeated attempts at violent retribution. In January, a Somalian man armed with an ax and a knife attacked the home of one cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, in Aarhus, Denmark.

METROPOLITAN
SERAPHIM OF PIRAEUS

Greek Bishop Equates Zionism to ‘Satanism’
By ROBERT MACKEY
The New York Times: December 24, 2010

A Greek Orthodox bishop who was criticized by Jewish groups, the Greek government and some coreligionists for blaming Greece’s financial problems on a conspiracy of Jewish bankers and claiming that the Holocaust was orchestrated by Zionists issued a statement on Thursday in which he denied that he was anti-Semitic but also equated Zionism to “Satanism.”

The bishop, known as Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus, said during an interview on Greek television on Monday that Jews “control the international banking system.” He added: “Adolf Hitler was an instrument of world Zionism and was financed from the renowned Rothschild family with the sole purpose of convincing the Jews to leave the shores of Europe and go to Israel to establish the new Empire.”

In response to the outrage caused by his remarks, the cleric posted a statement (in Greek) on his Web site in which he stood by his theories and described himself as a friend of the Jewish people but an enemy of Zionism, a Greek newspaper, To Vima, reported.

December 23, 2010

On the occasion of the concerns raised by the European Jewish Congress with regard to my interview with the MEGA television channel on December 20, I have to say the following:

1. The things I said during my television appearance on the show “Society Hour Mega” are strictly my personal views and opinions, which I have repeatedly expressed… verbally and in writing.

2. I respect, revere and love the Jewish people like any other people of our world according to the teaching of the incarnated Son of God and the true Messiah the Lord Jesus Christ the Savior and Redeemer, who was heralded by all the Prophets and was incarnated through the Jewish nation.

3. My public vehement opposition against International Zionism refers to the organ that is the successor of the “Sanhedrin” which altered the faith of the Patriarchs, the Prophets and the Righteous of the Jewish nation through the Talmud, the Rabbinical writings and the Kabbalah into Satanism, and always strives vigorously toward an economic empire set up throughout the world with headquarters in the great land beyond the Atlantic for the prevalence of world government and pan-religion.

4. I consider like any sane person on the planet the Nazi regime and the paranoid dictator Adolf Hitler as horrible criminals against humanity and take a stand with all honor and respect against the Jewish Holocaust and any other heinous genocide such as that of the Pontic Greek and Armenian people. Besides, the Greek nation mourns thousands of martyrs from the criminal Nazi atrocities.

MORE

A Greek Bishop’s Anti-Semitic Tirade
December 22, 2010
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/a-greek-bishops-anti-semitic-tirade/

The Text of a Bishop’s Semi-Apology
February 27, 2009
xhttp://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/the-text-of-a-bishops-semi-apology/

BISHOP L. RICKEN

REV. JOHANN ROTEN

Wisconsin on the Map to Pray With Mary
By ERIK ECKHOLM
The New York Times: December 24, 2010

CHAMPION, Wis. — In France, the shrine at Lourdes is surrounded by hundreds of hotels and has received as many as 45,000 pilgrims in a single day. Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico, draws millions of fervent worshipers a year.

Now, a little chapel among the dairy farms here, called Our Lady of Good Help, has joined that august company in terms of religious status, if not global fame. This month, it became one of only about a dozen sites worldwide, and the first in the United States, where apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been officially validated by the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1859, the year after Mary is said to have appeared in Lourdes, a Belgian immigrant here named Adele Brise said she was visited three times by Mary, who hovered between two trees in a bright light, clothed in dazzling white with a yellow sash around her waist and a crown of stars above her flowing blond locks. As instructed, Ms. Brise devoted her life to teaching Catholic beliefs to children.

On Dec. 8, after a two-year investigation by theologians who found no evidence of fraud or heresy and a long history of shrine-related conversions, cures and other signs of divine intervention, Bishop David L. Ricken of Green Bay declared “with moral certainty” that Ms. Brise did indeed have encounters “of a supernatural character” that are “worthy of belief.”

Catholic leaders described the decree in Wisconsin as a bolt of joy at a trying time for the Catholic church, which is troubled by revelations of sex abuse.

“This is a gift to the believers,” said the Rev. Johann Roten, director of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton.

“It would be devious to say that this was somehow pulled out of the attic to exorcise the problems of the church today,” Father Roten said in a telephone interview. “But hopefully this will have a beneficial impact on the people, showing them that there are ways of living with faith that are very pure.”

The Diocese of Green Bay is under fire from lawyers in an abuse-related lawsuit, who charge that it has obstructed justice by destroying potentially incriminating files on former priests.

GUADALUPE 1531	LOURDES 1858	FATIMA 1917

MARGARET McBRIDE

A Matter of Life or Death
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: December 23, 2010

St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix announced on Tuesday that it will continue to provide life-saving abortion care to patients even though it means losing its affiliation with the local Roman Catholic Diocese.

This commendable decision by St. Joseph’s and the hospital network that oversees it, Catholic Healthcare West, upholds important legal and moral principles. It also underscores the need to ensure that religiously affiliated hospitals comply with their legal duty to provide emergency reproductive care.

The decision follows a standoff between the hospital and the leader of the Phoenix diocese, Bishop Thomas Olmsted. In November 2009, a 27-year-old mother of four in her third month of pregnancy arrived at St. Joseph’s. She was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension, a serious complication that might well have killed her if she had continued the pregnancy.

The hospital performed an abortion, leading Bishop Olmsted to declare Sister Margaret McBride, a member of the hospital’s ethics committee, “automatically excommunicated” because she had consented to the therapeutic abortion necessary to save the woman’s life.

Just last month, Bishop Olmsted threatened to remove his endorsement of the hospital unless he received a written acknowledgement that the abortion violated Catholic policy and “will never occur again at St. Joseph’s Hospital.” The hospital refused to bow to these demands, summing up its position with elegant simplicity: “Morally, ethically, and legally we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save.”

It is hardly reassuring that following the incident at St. Joseph’s, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said Sister Margaret was properly punished and seconded Bishop Olmsted’s stance against providing the abortion, even to save a woman’s life. No one has suggested that Catholic hospitals should be required to perform nonemergency abortions. But as St. Joseph’s recognized, the need to accommodate religious doctrine does not give health providers serving the general public license to jeopardize women’s lives.

This is no small matter. Catholic hospitals account for about 15 percent of the nation’s hospital beds and are the only hospital facilities in many communities. Months ago, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services to investigate reported instances where religious doctrine prevailed over the need for emergency reproductive care, and to issue a formal clarification that denying such treatment violates federal law.

Arizona: Hospital Loses Catholic Affiliation
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The New York Times: December 22, 2010

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix announced on Tuesday that St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center could no longer identify itself as Roman Catholic because it violated church teachings by ending a woman’s pregnancy in 2009. Hospital administrators said the procedure was necessary to save her life, and stood by their decision even after Bishop Olmsted excommunicated a nun on the hospital ethics committee. The hospital, which receives no money from the Phoenix diocese, can no longer hold Masses. But Catholics can continue to work and be treated there.

(full text)

LISA HOWE

 

MIKE STRICKLAND
Athletic Director

MARTY DICKENS
Belmont President

 

 

 

 

 

Sweden’s Near Miss
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: December 14, 2010

No country is immune from terrorism in today’s world, not even Sweden, with its unusually open society, traditional commitment to peace and wariness of military alliances.

On Saturday night, Stockholm had a narrow brush with catastrophe when a man tentatively identified as an Iraqi-born Swede (who had studied in Britain) detonated an explosives-laden car on a busy downtown street at the height of the Christmas shopping season. As in New York City’s Times Square seven months ago, hundreds of innocent bystanders might have been killed. Fortunately, the would-be terrorist was the only fatality.

The bomber appears to have acted alone, incensed by the publication of Swedish cartoons he considered blasphemous and the sufferings of fellow Muslims in Afghanistan, where 500 Swedish soldiers serve under NATO command.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has responded in keeping with Sweden’s finest traditions. Denouncing the attacks as “unacceptable,” he urged Swedes to “stand up for tolerance,” not jump to premature conclusions and “let the justice system do its job.”

Mr. Reinfeldt’s firm and timely championing of traditional Swedish tolerance showed political courage. In elections three months ago, his center-right coalition fell short of an absolute majority as a result of alarming gains by the misleadingly named Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party of the extreme right.

Center-right politicians elsewhere in Europe — France and the Netherlands, for example — have been quick to pander to similar xenophobic parties and their supporters. Mr. Reinfeldt declared defiantly on Monday that Sweden’s open society is worth defending. We couldn’t agree more.

(Full text)

A Kashmiri Shiite Muslim boy bleeds as he flagellates himself during a Muharram procession in Srinagar, India.
AP PHOTO
December 14, 2010

MALCOLM A. KING

ATTORNEY
FRED THIAGARAJAH

A Holiday When Needed
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: December 13, 2010

California: An Orange County inmate who disliked salami was able to receive kosher meals in jail after his lawyer cited the “Seinfeld” holiday Festivus [December 23] as his religious belief. The Orange County Register reported Monday that Malcolm A. King, 38, a convicted drug dealer, asked for kosher meals at the Theo Lacy jail in Orange to maintain his physique. County sheriff’s officials reserve such meals for inmates with religious needs, so a judge demanded a religious reason for Mr. King to get the meals. Mr. King’s lawyer, Fred Thiagarajah, cited his client’s devotion to Festivus, the holiday celebrated on the “Seinfeld” series. A sheriff’s spokesman, Ryan Burris, said Mr. King got salami-free meals for two months before the county got the order thrown out in court.

(Full article)

SISTER MARIE THORNTON

DAVID GAL

DEREK RUCKER

Social Science Palooza
By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times: December 7, 2010

Classic research has suggested that the more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them. David Gal and Derek Rucker published a study in Psychological Science in which they presented some research subjects with evidence that undermined their core convictions. The subjects who were forced to confront the counterevidence went on to more forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming the earlier findings.

REV. ED SOMBILON

RABBI DENNIS TOBIN

REV. ROBERT CHODO
CAMPBELL

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Blessing of the Burger to End a Restaurant Jinx
By DIANE CARDWELL
The New York Times: December 6, 2010

The three holy men made their pilgrimages to Chelsea, braving snow and frigid winds, from as far away as New Jersey and the Bronx.

But they had not come on Monday to tend to the sick or minister to the poor. They had come bearing the prayers and totems of their various faiths — Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist — to cleanse any lurking evil from that most hallowed of American institutions: a burger joint. There was to be a private Native American ceremony at some point; an Episcopalian minister, running late, would officiate later in the day.

“This is the first time I blessed hamburger,” said the Rev. Ed Sombilon of Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Fort Lee, N.J. “But God works in mysterious ways, even crooked ways.”

The operators of a new outpost of New York Burger Company, scheduled to open next week at 470 West 23rd Street, cooked up the ceremony along with their publicist in the hopes that the blessings — or at least the media attention they would draw — would help the restaurant succeed in a spot where so many had failed.

Holy Cow painting by Jimmy Ovadia
Holy Burgers photo by William Hundley

GOV. STEVEN L. BESHEAR

NOAH
Drunk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Kentucky, Noah’s Ark Theme Park Is Planned
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The New York Times: December 6, 2010

Facing a rising tide of joblessness, the governor of Kentucky has found one solution: build an ark.

The state has promised generous tax incentives to a group of entrepreneurs who plan to construct a full-size replica of Noah’s ark, load it with animals and actors, and make it the centerpiece of a Bible-based tourist attraction called Ark Encounter.

Since Gov. Steven L. Beshear announced the plan on Wednesday, some constitutional experts have raised alarms over whether government backing for an enterprise that promotes religion violates the First Amendment’s requirement of separation of church and state. But Mr. Beshear, a Democrat, said the arrangement posed no constitutional problem, and brushed off questions about his stand on creationism.

“The people of Kentucky didn’t elect me governor to debate religion,” he said at a news conference. “They elected me governor to create jobs.”

The theme park was conceived by the same Christian ministry that built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., where dioramas designed to debunk evolution show humans and dinosaurs coexisting peacefully on an earth created by God in six days. The ministry, Answers in Genesis, believes that the earth is only 6,000 years old — a controversial assertion even among many Bible-believing Christians.

Although the Creation Museum has been a target of ridicule by some, it has drawn 1.2 million visitors in its first three years — proving that there is a sizable paying audience for entertainment rooted in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

On Friday, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky’s second-largest newspaper, criticized Mr. Beshear in an editorial for a plan that it said would result in low-wage jobs and a poor image for the state.

“Anyone who wants to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible has that right,” the editorial said. “However, the way the Beshear administration handled this makes it appear Kentucky either embraces such thinking or is desperate to take advantage of those who do.

• • •

Ark incentives: cheap jobs, poor state image
Opinion - Editorial
The Lexington Herald-Leader: Friday, Dec. 03, 2010

The wall of separation between church and state will unlikely be breached if a private company planning an Ark Encounter theme park in Grant County qualifies for tax incentives under the Kentucky Tourism Development Act.

If a church or a religious organization sought the same incentives for the same purpose, there would be clear reason to object on constitutional grounds.

Ark Encounters is a private company seeking to make a profit off of a biblical theme.

As such, it seems as entitled to apply for incentives from promised profits as any other private, for-profit company in Kentucky. Yet, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about the announcement.

Despite some progress in economic development, Kentucky continues to use tax incentives in pursuit of mostly low-paying, part-time seasonal jobs that would further lower the state's average wage and do little to increase the demand of higher education. This is similar to past shortsighted subsidies of chicken processing plants and customer call centers.

We understand that even low-paying jobs are welcome while rebounding from a recession and heading into an election year.

But these incentives could have been awarded without Gov. Steve Beshear's public embrace of an expansion of the Creation Museum — a project rooted in outright opposition to science.
Hostility to science, knowledge and education does little to attract the kind of employers that will provide good-paying jobs with a future.

Anyone who wants to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible has that right. However, the way the Beshear administration handled this makes it appear Kentucky either embraces such thinking or is desperate to take advantage of those who do.

Neither is appealing.

(Full editorial)

REP. RANDY FORBES

REV BARRY LYNN

Congressional Prayer Caucus Off Base With Attack On Obama
Church-State Watchdog Group Urges President To Ignore Missive Whining About National Motto
Americans United for Separation of Church and State: December 6, 2010

Members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus have criticized President Barack Obama for telling an audience in Indonesia last month that the phrase “E Pluribus Unum” is a good summary of the American experience.

The Prayer Caucus, led by U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), wrote to Obama today complaining that he called “E Pluribus Unum” the national motto during a Nov. 10 speech at a university in Jakarta. The national motto, the caucus insists, is actually “In God We Trust.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State says members of the Prayer Caucus should reconsider if they think this is an important issue.

“Given the state of the economy, the unemployment rate and the precarious state of world affairs, the president has a lot to do,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “Members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, by contrast, appear to have a lot of time on their hands.”

AU pointed out that “E Pluribus Unum” appears on the Great Seal of the United States, which was codified in 1782, and the phrase is still used on coinage. In citing it, Obama was trying to make the point that even though Americans are of diverse backgrounds, they have joined together as one nation.

The caucus also complained about Obama omitting the word “Creator” when quoting passages from the Declaration of Independence and offered to meet with him about these issues.

“The Prayer Caucus should just admit that it is looking for any opportunity to bash the president,” Lynn remarked. “It’s not very Christian of them, but I expect nothing less from a body that takes its marching orders from the Religious Right.”

Added Lynn, “This is one of the silliest manufactured controversies I’ve ever seen, and I would advise the president to deal with it by tossing the caucus’ letter into the nearest wastebasket.”

(Full release)

YEMEN

Yemen Loses in Soccer, but Scores a P.R. Victory
Reuters: December 5, 2010


Saudi Arabian fans in Aden, Yemen, on Sunday for the Gulf Cup finals.
“The games are great!,” a critic of the Yemeni government said. “We are all Arabs!”

Mohammed Dabbous/Reuters

PENELOPE ZANNIKOS

Sick pay for LI 'psychic'
Afterlife peek for the dying
By GINGER ADAMS OTIS
The New York Post: December 5, 2010

Paging Dr. Psychic -- the afterlife is calling.

A self-proclaimed clairvoyant from Long Island says she can help sick patients find out who's waiting to greet them on "the other side."

Penelope Zannikos, 44, charges $125 for hospital "transition sessions" with seriously ill people who want to know who's behind the white light.

"Sometimes the information surprises people -- it's not always who you think will be waiting for you," said Zannikos, who believes she inherited her gift from her Puerto Rican mother -- although it could also be from her dad, who was born in Romania to Greek parents.

She says she once visited an elderly woman battling cancer who wanted a sneak peek at her guide to the Pearly Gates. The name that came to Zannikos' lips was William. William was the old woman's former flame -- and she'd spurned him, Zannikos learned.

"She said, 'Oh, my ex-boyfriend. I had to choose between him and my husband when I was young,' " the so-called seer said. "I told her he was waiting for her. And she responded, 'Well, I'm not going anywhere yet!' Some people get like that -- nervous."

Zannikos swears her gift is legit, but the hospitals she visits probably think differently, said one hospital executive. "It's certainly neither medicine nor patient care," said the exec, who works with several leading NYC facilities.

Zannikos admits she keeps the true purpose of her visits a secret from hospital staffers. "Sometimes a nurse will understand what I'm doing -- many of the Caribbean nurses seem to get it right away," she said. "They don't say anything."

(Full article)

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Junkie and the Atheist
By TIMOTHY EGAN
The New York Times: December 4, 2010

As an Irish-American, I don’t usually trumpet the work of a nation that kept my ancestors under its boot heel for nearly 300 years. But having just finished the memoirs of two great exports of Britain, I rise to praise a pair of Brits in the season of book-buying.

Christopher Hitchens, the polemical polymath, is to modern American discourse what Lenny Bruce was to comedy. He changed the game, and in so doing forced us to examine our core beliefs. His story, “Hitch-22,” was hitting the best-seller lists this year just as he was diagnosed with a killer type of esophageal cancer. He has vowed to go to his grave as an intellectually curious atheist.

The beautiful ruin that is Keith Richards, guitarist and guiding musical force behind the Rolling Stones, is best known for being a living cadaver. A heroin addict during his most productive years, Richards the author is now competing with former President George W. Bush for bragging rights to the most popular nonfiction book in this country. In his story, “Life,” the United States and its black music saved him as a man and an artist.

The atheist poked the most religious of Western democracies, assailing us for flabbiness of spirit and outright ignorance. The junkie found the best of Chicago blues lost in the back alley of American pop culture, and made those soul-stirring chords mainstream forever.

Both men, on paper at least, are hard to love, but impossible to dislike. In the United States, they got what so many from other shores have obtained — renewal.

“Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry,” Hitchens writes of his move across the Atlantic in 1981, becoming a citizen 26 years later.

A product of Oxford, he displays none of the educated English habit of using unnecessary modifiers and disclaimers — no “bit of cancer” or “spot of bad luck” from him. He greeted one reporter in August with, “How am I? I’m dying.”

In his words, Sarah Palin is “a disgraceful opportunist and real moral coward.” The jihadists who attacked the United States represent “the mirthless, medieval, death-obsessed barbarism of Islamic fundamentalism.” And recreational drugs — Keith Richards’s nutrients — are a form of “weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion.”

Of course, he does share his countrymen’s taste for the grape and grain, describing his daily intake as at least one bottle of wine and two drinks of “Mr. Walker’s amber restorative.” And as with any English bad boy, he fell in with the wrong crowd for a time, finding common cause with President Bush in a dishonest war of choice against Iraq.

That was his one-off, and it was a big one. His lasting contribution will be his challenge to religion. Once, while waiting in line for coffee with Hitchens, I asked him why his book “God Is Not Great” was such a big hit in a nation with so many believers. He said it was because many of those believers are actually skeptics.

And, indeed, after reading his provocative but not entirely convincing tract against faith, I kept hearing the voice of a Jesuit teacher from my high school, who urged us to “be in constant search of your God and yourself.”

Hitchens may not have long to live. But he will not go gently. A few days ago he debated religion with Tony Blair, comparing God to “a kind of benign North Korea.” By audience consensus, Hitchens handily won the match with the former British prime minister.

VICTOR KOLTUN

Rabbi busted in cop 'hit'
By JOHN DOYLE
The New York Post: December 3, 2010

A Brooklyn rabbi was charged yesterday in the contract killing of a former suburban police officer and his nephew, authorities said.

Victor Koltun, 41 -- whose rap sheet includes mortgage-fraud allegations -- is accused of hiring two ex-cons to kill Frank Piscopo, 49, and Gerald Piscopo, 28, in Newburgh, Orange County. Both Piscopos were found dead Nov. 4.

Frank had been a police sergeant in the Ulster County town of Lloyd before he quit in 1990 amid allegations he stole items from the department.He had a criminal record that included arrests for theft and drug selling, the Times Herald-Record of Middletown reported.

Gerald had been deep in credit-card debt and emerged from personal bankruptcy in March. He had spent 21⁄2 years in state prison from 2003 to 2005 on burglary charges.

Koltun, of Sheepshead Bay, already faces a possible 15-year prison term on separate charges that he pocketed proceeds of a $225,000 mortgage on several Brooklyn houses he did not own.

Newburgh cops also busted Frank Lewis, 56, of Manhattan, and Craig Fennell, 51, of Brooklyn, for allegedly carrying out the killings. Both Lewis and Fennell are parolees with convictions for violent crimes.

All three suspects were arraigned yesterday in Newburgh city court and ordered jailed without bail.

(Full article)

BILL DONOHUE

CATHOLIC LEAGUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Catholics Fire Back At Atheists In Billboard Battle
Catholic League Takes $18,500 Shot At 'Militant Atheism'
NEW YORK (CBS 2 / 1010 WINS: December 2, 2010

An atheist group struck first. Now the Catholic League is counterpunching.
Approach the tunnel from the Jersey side and you’ll see it – a billboard from an atheist group saying of Christmas: “You know it’s a myth — this season, celebrate reason.”

On the other side of the tunnel sits the other side of the yuletide tussle — a Catholic League billboard proclaiming “You know it’s real — this season celebrate Jesus.”

“Ninety-six percent of Americans celebrate Christmas. Somebody on our side needs to put down a cultural marker, and that’s what we’ve done,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue told CBS 2.

Donohue said the billboard is a “counterpunch” against what he calls militant atheism. The big billboard cost some pretty big cash — $18,500. The Catholic League said it came from an anonymous donor who put up the cash because he was offended by the atheists’ message.

The atheists said they did not intend to offend — but to provoke debate about religious beliefs.

“Bringing the differences out is what’s important, and that’s why we put the billboard up in the first place, to get people talking to each other,” said David Silverman, President of American Atheists.

In the shadow of the Catholic billboard people were talking. “If it wasn’t for Jesus Christ, I wouldn’t be here! I love [the billboard],” James Bennett said.

“I’m scared of most organized religion and I think a lot of it is based on myth,” Mike Flannery said.

“I support what the Catholic people are doing, and kind of, the atheists, eh …” Joe Cippolone added.

The billboards, part of a Christmas culture clash, will stay up through December. American atheists also paid big money to make their billboard statement — $20,000.

JOHNNY COME LATELY:
Bad copy, fake beard, no reason, no rhyme

(Full article)

HAROLD CAMPING

Nashville billboards claim Jesus will return May 21, 2011
BY BOB SMIETANA
THE TENNESSEAN: DECEMBER 1, 2010

There are 24 shopping days left till Christmas.

And 171 days left until Jesus' second coming.

That's the message on 40 billboards around Nashville, proclaiming May 21, 2011, as the date of the Rapture. Billboards are up in eight other U.S. cities, too.

Fans of Family Radio Inc., a nationwide Christian network, paid for the billboards. Family Radio's founder, Harold Camping, predicted the May date for the Rapture.

Their message is simple — "He Is Coming Again" — and their aim is to get unbelievers to turn around quickly. But critics say the billboards are a waste of time, one more failed attempt to predict the end of the world.

The Rapture is going to be a great day for God's people but awful for everyone else, said Allison Warden, 29, who orchestrated Nashville's billboard campaign. She's a volunteer with WeCanKnow.com, a website set up by followers of Family Radio. She and other fans designed the billboards, along with T-shirts, bumper stickers and postcards to get Camping's predictions out.

Warden traveled from her home in Raleigh, N.C., to Nashville last week to check out the billboards, purchased through the end of the year. She wouldn't say how much they cost or name who paid for them.

She is absolutely sure that Camping's prediction is right.
"It's a certainty," she said.

MIKE LEE

W. CLEON SKOUSEN

BILL NORTON

CLARENCE THOMAS

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL

 

Radical Constitutionalism
By JEFFREY ROSEN
The New York Times: November 28, 2010

Of the newly elected Tea Party senators, Mike Lee, a 39-year-old Republican from Utah, has the most impeccable establishment legal credentials: the son of Rex Lee, a solicitor general under President Reagan, he attended law school at Brigham Young and later clerked for Samuel Alito on the U.S. Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. But on the campaign trail, especially during his heated primary battle with the three-term Republican incumbent Bob Bennett, Lee offered glimpses of a truly radical vision of the U.S. Constitution, one that sees the document as divinely inspired and views much of what the federal government currently does as unconstitutional.

Lee, who is a Mormon and a social conservative, also has equated the founding fathers’ invocations of a deist God with the moral values of the Mormon Church.

Like the Tea Party movement itself, Lee’s constitutional vision may appear to be an incohesive mixture of libertarianism and social conservatism, of opposition to federal power and support for tearing down the wall of separation between church and state.... Much of the Tea Party movement’s more-strident rhetoric, seen in light of this constitutional vision, may be best understood not as scattershot right-wing hostility to government but as a comprehensive, if startling, worldview about the proper roles of government and faith in American life.

Many of the positions Lee outlined on the campaign trail appear to be inspired by the constitutional guru of the Tea Party movement, W. Cleon Skousen, whose 1981 book, “The 5,000-Year Leap,” argued that the founding fathers rejected collectivist “European” philosophies and instead derived their divinely inspired principles of limited government from fifth-century Anglo-Saxon chieftains, who in turn modeled themselves on the Biblical tribes of ancient Israel.

[Skousen] wrote several volumes about the providential view of the U.S. Constitution set out in Mormon scripture, which sees the Constitution as divinely inspired and on the verge of destruction and the Mormon Church as its salvation. Skousen saw limited government as not only an ethnic idea, rooted in the Anglo-Saxons, but also as a Christian one, embodied in the idea of unalienable rights and duties that derive from God, and he insisted that the founders’ “religious precepts turned out to be the heart and soul of the entire American political philosophy.”

[Bill Norton, a contractor from Arizona who was mentored by Skousen], explained Skousen’s salvation narrative..., the founding fathers “unleashed the mind of man” by codifying religiously based free-market principles in a written constitution....

...several of Skousen’s 28 principles stress the role of religious virtue. The fourth principle, “Without religion the government of a free people cannot be maintained,” criticizes the Supreme Court for having misinterpreted Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall” separating church and state.” Skousen argued that the First Amendment’s prohibition on a federal establishment of religion wasn’t intended to separate church and state but to prevent the federal government from disestablishing religion in the seven states that had officially established denominations during the founding era.

...in Skousen’s view, the implications of this history are radical: Skousen would encourage the states today to require “universally accepted” religious teachings in public schools, as long as they don’t favor one denomination over another. Justice Clarence Thomas — whose wife, Virginia Thomas, stumped at Tea Party rallies and helped create the Tea Party organization Liberty Central — has argued in a similar vein that the founders intended to prevent the federal government from disestablishing state churches, not from promoting religion. “Congress need not observe strict separation between church and state, or steer clear of the subject of religion,” Thomas wrote in a 2005 concurring opinion. (Embracing religious conservatism, states’ rights and opposition to elites, Thomas can be seen as the model of a Tea Party justice avant la lettre.) This kind of thinking may help to make sense of the otherwise perplexing constitutional views of the unsuccessful Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell, who famously asked in a debate, “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?”

“Nobody owns yoga.”
DEBBIE DESMOND
Instructor

ARCHBISHOP SERAPHIM
Kenneth William Storheim

Canada: Orthodox Church Leader is Charged With Sexual Assault
By IAN AUSTEN
The New York Times: November 26, 2010

The archbishop for Canada of the Orthodox Church in America was charged with two counts of sexual assault, the police in Winnipeg, Manitoba, said on Thursday. The allegations against the archbishop, Kenneth William Storheim, who is known as Archbishop Seraphim within the church, date back 30 years, according to a statement issued last month by the church. The police declined to give any details about the charges, citing a publication ban.

(Full article)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

 

AL-MUTAWAKEL TAHA

REV. CEDRIC MILLER

Anti-Facebook Pastor Taking Leave
CBS New York: November 24, 2010

NEPTUNE TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) — A New Jersey pastor who barred church officials from using Facebook, saying it can lead to adultery, is temporarily stepping down from the pulpit following his admission that he engaged in a three-way sexual relationship a decade ago.

The Rev. Cedric Miller made worldwide headlines last week when he urged congregants at his Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune, N.J., to drop their Facebook accounts because he believes the social networking site facilitates affairs.

Days later, Miller offered to step down after The Asbury Park Press reported on a 10-year-old affair of his own involving a three-way sexual relationship with his wife and a male church assistant.

On Wednesday, Miller told The Associated Press that he would be “taking some time off” following a church vote Tuesday night on his status as senior pastor. He said he will resume his pastorate “eventually.” He says church members gave him a vote of confidence, subject to some restrictions he wouldn’t list.

“For any pain that my past mistakes has caused you, I again ask for your forgiveness,” the pastor said from the pulpit.

The church had no immediate comment.

REV. ROBERT ROBINSON

Suffering, Haitians Turn to Charismatic Prayer By ANNE BARNARD The New York Times: November 24, 2010 The pastor, the Rev. Robert Robinson, likes to sing in tongues on his daily walk around the park. Certain women in his parish say so many Hail Marys on their own that he no longer assigns them the prayers as penance for sins; instead, he may prescribe a pedicure. On a Saturday night in the basement of his mostly Haitian church in Queens, in a bare white room vibrating with hymns and exclamations, a young woman may find herself channeling the Holy Spirit to reveal news from Haiti. The earthquake that killed an estimated quarter-million Haitians 10 months ago has made the noisy devotion of the parish, SS. Joachim and Anne, even more exuberant. On Jan. 12, barely two hours after the quake visited devastation on their homeland, Haitian immigrants flooded the church, dancing, singing, waving their arms above their heads — and praising God. Amid the lamentations and the laying on of hands and the surprising deluge of thanksgiving from people who did not yet know if their relatives were alive or dead, they ran out of tissues. The pain continued into the spring. The church overflowed as more and more survivors turned for solace to charismatic prayer, the growing, fervent brand of worship that is reinvigorating the parish and infuses much of Haitian Catholicism. Charismatics, both Catholic and Protestant, seek an ecstatic state open to unmediated communion with God. They dance, sing, speak in tongues, issue prophecies and even, they believe, heal the sick. They call these spontaneous acts gifts — charismata in Greek — from the Holy Spirit. Catholic charismatics holler and weep beneath their stained glass like Pentecostals in their storefronts, but they begin and end with rosaries and Hail Marys. In October, people packed into SS. Joachim and Anne, chanting and dancing and holding sick relatives’ pictures heavenward for healing as a revered nun visiting from Haiti invoked the Holy Spirit. Photos: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

MICHAEL BREA

Sword-swinging 'Ugly Betty' actor Michael Brea slays mother for being 'sinner,' police sources say
BY MATTHEW LYSIAK, ALISON GENDAR AND LARRY MCSHANE
The New York Daily News: Wednesday, November 24th , 2010

Convinced his church-going mom was possessed by Satan, a Scripture-spouting killer hacked her to death with a 3-foot sword as she knelt in their apartment, police sources said.

Deranged killer Michael Brea "told the doctors that he saw the Devil, and that the Devil was somehow in his mother," a police source told the Daily News after the gruesome slaying.

Neighbors insisted the brutal killing of Yannick Brea early Tuesday occurred as police ignored their desperate demands to kick in the dying woman's front door.

Yannick Brea, 55, was found kneeling - as if offering a final prayer - after she was butchered during her son's demented diatribe about repentance, police said.

"Sinner! Sinner!" howled Michael Brea, a bit-part actor who once appeared on "Ugly Betty," neighbors and police sources said. "You never accepted Jesus!"

The suspect, still in full "fire and brimstone" babble when carried out on a stretcher, was clutching his Bible and a Masonic ceremonial sword when cops busted into a bedroom, police sources said.
"He yelled, 'The greatest architect in the universe!' " - a term sometimes used by Masons for God - while he was being taken away.


A History of the Illuminati and Freemasonry
Click √ on the Dollar

SHARIF EL-GAMAL

ASIA BIBI

SALMAAN TASEER

PRESIDENT
ASIF ALI ZARDARI

Pakistani Sentenced to Death May Get a Pardon
By JANE PERLEZ
The New York Times: November 23, 2010

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Christian woman who was sentenced to death by a municipal court for blasphemy against Islam could be pardoned by the president in the next few days, a senior government official said Monday.

Asia Bibi, 45, an agricultural worker and mother of five, is the first woman to be sentenced to death for blasphemy, according to human rights groups.

The governor of Punjab Province, Salmaan Taseer, where Ms. Bibi has been in jail for more than a year, said he had forwarded a petition presenting the facts of the case to President Asif Ali Zardari on Monday.

Mr. Taseer, a political ally of Mr. Zardari, said he believed that Ms. Bibi had been unfairly treated since she was arrested last year. “I hope the president will pardon Asia in a day or two,” Mr. Taseer said.

The case against Ms. Bibi began in the fields of Ittan Wali, a village 60 miles west of Lahore, when agricultural workers picking berries with her protested that she had been asked by a landlord to fetch water for them to drink. The other workers declined to touch the water bowl because Ms. Bibi had carried the container, according to accounts by her husband, Ashiq Masih, and others.

“Suddenly she saw men and women walking towards her with angry gestures,” Mr. Masih, a laborer, said in a telephone interview. “They started beating her and shouting that she had made derogatory remarks against the Prophet Muhammad,” he said.

A mob dragged Ms. Bibi to a local police station, where she was jailed and charged with blasphemy, Mr. Masih said.

Announcing the guilty verdict this month, Judge Naveed Iqbal ruled in a Punjab municipal court that Ms. Bibi had not been wrongly accused, saying that “the chances of false implication of the accused are totally ruled out.”

Even if Ms. Bibi is pardoned or the Lahore High Court overturns the sentence, there are concerns about her safety. Many people acquitted on blasphemy charges continue to be hounded and are forced to move, change their identity or hide.

SHARIA

 

 

Lessons of Hate at Islamic Schools in Britain
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times: November 23, 2010

LONDON — A British network of more than 40 part-time Islamic schools and clubs with 5,000 students has been teaching from a Saudi Arabian government curriculum that contains anti-Semitic and homophobic views, including a textbook that asks children to list the “reprehensible” qualities of Jews, according to a BBC documentary broadcast on Monday.

On the BBC TV program, a book (right) used in Islamic schools in Britain showed where to amputate hands and feet as a punishment.

The 30-minute “Panorama” program quoted the Saudi government-supplied textbook as saying that Jews “looked like monkeys and pigs,” and that Zionists set out to achieve “world domination.” The program quoted a separate part of the curriculum — for children as young as 6 — saying that someone who is not a believer in Islam at death would be condemned to “hellfire.”

On Monday, the embassy did not respond to requests for comment, but Saudi officials quoted by the BBC disavowed direct responsibility for the schools and clubs and described the teachings cited in the program as having been “taken out of their historical context.”

One of the textbooks, according to the BBC program, prescribed execution as the penalty for gay sex, and outlined differing viewpoints as to whether death should be by stoning, immolation by fire or throwing offenders off a cliff. Another set out the punishments prescribed by Shariah law for theft, including amputation of hands and feet. A BBC video accompanying an article on the program’s Web site showed a textbook illustration of a hand and a foot marked to show where amputations should be made.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Flawed Faith-Based Fix
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: November 22, 2010

President Obama has issued an executive order revamping the rules covering religious-based and neighborhood programs receiving federal dollars. It makes some good changes to better ensure that the faith-based initiative begun by George W. Bush and extended by Mr. Obama respects religious liberty.

Most notably, last Wednesday’s order requires that government grants to religious organizations and other groups providing social services be listed on federal Web sites. The order also requires that agencies offer referrals to alternative service providers when individuals object to receiving services at a religious charity.

But the revisions have a glaring omission. Ignoring one of Mr. Obama’s own important campaign promises, and a large coalition of religious, education and civil rights groups, the new decree fails to draw a firm line barring employment discrimination on the basis of religion. The order leaves untouched a 2007 Justice Department memo that dubiously concluded that the government cannot order religious groups not to discriminate as a condition of federal financing. That memo should have been withdrawn long ago by this administration.

Missing, too, from the new decree are any standards to govern the Justice Department’s promised “case-by-case” review of employment practices by religiously affiliated grantees. It remains unclear how many such reviews have been conducted since Mr. Obama took office, and whether groups that engage in religion-based discrimination are in any real jeopardy of losing money.

What is needed is a careful constitutional balance. Groups running worthy social service programs should not be disqualified from receiving federal financing simply because they have a religious affiliation. But they should get no special exemption from antidiscrimination laws. Public money should not be used to underwrite discrimination.

President Obama firmly asserted that principle on the campaign trail in 2008. He seems to have forgotten.

(Full Editorial)

AMINA ABAZA
Activist

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activist Relies on Islam to Fight for Animal Rights
By ROBERT F. WORTH
The New York Times: November 21, 2010

CAIRO — It is never easy to be an animal rights activist in the Arab world. But on
Id al-Adha, the annual Muslim religious holiday when the streets run red with the blood of slaughtered sheep, cows and camels, it is a nightmare.

“Ah, I can’t stand it!” wailed Amina Abaza, wincing as she drove through a gantlet of hanging carcasses and entrails, with doomed sheep bleating all around her. “Islam is all about compassion, but we don’t practice it!”

An ebullient 55-year-old with a big mane of blond hair, Ms. Abaza has spent a decade campaigning to spare the animals, or at least require more humane slaughtering methods. She has a long way to go.

The scene in Cairo’s working-class Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood Tuesday morning was fairly typical: camels bellowed as blood-soaked butchers wrestled dozens of animals to the ground and slashed their throats for an admiring crowd.

Neighbors leaned out their windows to watch and cheer, or snap cellphone pictures. Little boys daubed their hands in the blood and spattered one another, and teenagers helped remove steaming entrails from the carcasses. Scores of people pressed forward to buy fresh meat for the ritual holiday meal, standing in puddles of clotted gore.

What bothers Ms. Abaza and other activists is not the principle of Id al-Adha — the Feast of Sacrifice — which commemorates the biblical story (right: Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac) in which God allows Abraham to slaughter a ram instead of his own son (Isaac).

Amateurs slaughter their own sheep at home in many Arab countries, with no special training on how to spare the animals pain. It is common to see men hurling terrified sheep into the backs of trucks, and beating the animals as they herd them to the killing grounds. In abattoirs, some workers sodomize the beasts with knives to drive them into the pens, Ms. Abaza and other activists said.

“If you want to give a good image of Muslims and the Koran, why do you do this?” Ms. Abaza said, her operatic voice rising in indignation. “Why are we Muslims the ones known for this kind of behavior?”

Egyptians gather to watch bulls be slaughtered in accordance with Eid al-Adha tradition at a streetside butchery
in the Sayeda Zeinab district of Cairo, Egypt.

Photo: Scott Nelson for The New York Times

ROBERT CORLEW
Rutherford County Chancellor

Tennessee: Bid to Stop Mosque Fails
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS : November 18, 2010

A judge refused Wednesday to stop construction of a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro that was opposed by some local residents who tried to argue that there was a conspiracy by Muslims to impose extremist law on the United States. Rutherford County Chancellor Robert Corlew ruled that he could not find that the “county acted illegally, arbitrarily or capriciously” in approving the plan.

(Full article)

REV. BARRY W. LYNN

PRESIDENT
BARACK OBAMA
with
JOSHUA DuBOIS
Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships

Obama Executive Order On ‘Faith-Based’ Initiative Is Disappointing,
Americans United: November 17, 2010

Today’s White House executive order on “faith-based” funding fails to correct significant constitutional problems and leaves important civil rights issues unresolved, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Americans United applauded President Barack Obama’s decision to require federal agencies to provide alternatives for people who do not want to receive social services at religious charities and also welcomed a process to create greater transparency in the program by requiring that recipient organizations be listed on government Web sites.

But AU is disappointed that the order allows public funds to go directly to houses of worship, allows publicly funded faith-based charities to display religious signs and scriptures and entirely dodges the issue of religious hiring bias by faith-based charities that receive federal funds.

“I’m disappointed,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United. “This leaves much of George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative in place. That’s not the change many Americans hoped for when President Obama took office.

“I am particularly frustrated that President Obama still has done nothing to ban hiring bias by publicly funded religious charities,” continued Lynn. “That’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room. No American should be denied a government-funded job because he or she holds the ‘wrong’ views about religion.”

Lynn noted that Obama, as a candidate, vowed to repeal this policy. Today’s order, however, leaves the Bush-era rules in places. A wide array of religious, civil rights and civil liberties organizations have appealed to the president to take action on the issue, and polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose faith-based employment bias.

Lynn said he is still hopeful Obama will see the basic unfairness of publicly funded job discrimination and rescind the Bush policy.

“I don’t believe Barack Obama wants to go down in history as the president who helped George W. Bush roll back civil rights and religious liberty,” Lynn said. “At a time when jobs are scarce, it is especially troubling that qualified applicants can be rejected from government-funded positions because they don’t go to the ‘right’ church.

“Taxpayer money should never be used to underwrite religion or religious bias,” Lynn concluded. ”That’s a fundamental constitutional principle, and it needs to be observed.” Americans United has been wary of the faith-based initiative since the concept was first introduced in the 1990s by then-Sen. John Ashcroft. AU maintains that a special government program that looks for ways to funnel public funds to religious entities is inherently problematic under the First Amendment.

(Full article)

COPTIC CROSS

Rumor of Coptic-Muslim Affair Leads to
Burning of Christians’ Homes
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: November 17, 2010

EGYPT - Muslims set fire overnight to at least 10 houses belonging to Coptic Christians in a southern Egypt village over rumors that a Christian resident had an affair with a Muslim girl, security officials said Tuesday. They said security forces sealed off the village of Al Nawahid in Qena Province, about 290 miles south of Cairo, to prevent the violence from spreading, and several people were arrested. The village was calm by nightfall, after religious leaders from both sides persuaded their followers to end the confrontation. Coptic Christians make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 80 million. Coptic Christians and Muslims generally live in peace, though violence occasionally occurs in the south, mostly over disputes about land or church construction.

(Full article)

WALEED KHALID HASAYIN
aka
Waleed Al-Husseini

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palestinian Blogger Angers West Bank Muslims
By ISABEL KERSHNER
The NJew York Times: November 15, 2010

QALQILYA, West Bank — It is hard to imagine that a dingy Internet cafe buzzing with flies in this provincial Palestinian town could have spawned a blogger who has angered the Muslim cyberworld by promoting atheism, composing spoofs of Koranic verses, skewering the lifestyle of the Prophet Muhammad and chatting online using the sarcastic Web name God Almighty.

But many people in Qalqilya seem convinced that this Facebook apostate is none other than a secretive young man who spent seven hours a day in the corner booth of a back-street hole-in-the-wall here. Until recently the man, Waleed Hasayin, in his mid-20s, led a relatively anonymous existence as an unemployed graduate in computer science who helped out a few hours a day at his father’s one-chair barber shop. Several acquaintances described him as an “ordinary guy” who prayed at the mosque on Fridays.

But since the end of October Mr. Hasayin has been detained at the local Palestinian Authority intelligence headquarters, suspected of being the blasphemous blogger who goes by the name Waleed al-Husseini. The case has drawn attention to thorny issues like freedom of expression in the Palestinian Authority, for which insulting religion is considered illegal, and the cultural collision between a conservative society and the Internet.

While Mr. Hasayin has won some admiration and support abroad — a Facebook group has formed in solidarity, along with several online petitions — others on Facebook are calling for his execution.

In his hometown, the reaction seems to be one of uniform fury. Many here say that if he does not repent, he should spend the rest of his life in jail.

“Everyone is a Muslim here, so everyone is against what he did,” said Alaa Jarar, 20, who described himself as not particularly pious. “People are mad at him and will not respect the Palestinian Authority if he is released. Maybe he is a Mossad agent working for Israel.”

Aside from his Facebook pages, which have now been deleted, Mr. Husseini, the online persona, also posted essays in Arabic on a blog called Noor al-Aqel (Enlightenment of Reason) and in English translation on Proud Atheist, identifying himself as “an atheist from Jerusalem — Palestine.”

The essays offer some relatively sophisticated arguments in a blunt and racy style. In one, titled “Why I left Islam,” Mr. Husseini wrote that Muslims “believe anyone who leaves Islam is an agent or a spy for a Western State, namely the Jewish State.”

He added, “They actually don’t get that people are free to think and believe in whatever suits them.”

He went on to describe the Islamic God as “a primitive, Bedouin and anthropomorphic God,” and Muhammad as “a sex maniac” who bent his own rules “to appease his voracious desire.”

If Mr. Hasayin is to be tried, Mr. Arouri said, it would be according to a 1960 Jordanian law against defaming religion, still valid in the West Bank.

JOE BRANDON, JR.

JIM COPE

COURT BATTLE OVER MURFREESBORO MOSQUE
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: November 12, 2010

TENNESSEE: Islam is suddenly on trial in a booming city south of Nashville, where opponents of a new mosque have spent six days in court trying to link it to what they claim is a conspiracy to take over America by imposing restrictive religious rule.

The hearing in Murfreesboro is supposed to be about whether Rutherford County officials violated Tennessee’s open meetings law when they approved the mosque’s site plan. Instead, Joe Brandon Jr., a lawyer for the plaintiffs, has used it as a forum to question whether the world’s second-biggest faith even qualifies as a religion. Mr. Brandon has repeatedly conflated a moderate version of Sharia law with its most extreme manifestations. At one point, Jim Cope, a lawyer for the county, objected during the proceedings, saying, “This is a circus.”

(Full article)

GLENN BECK

GEORGE SOROS

ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN

Glenn Beck’s Attacks on George Soros Draw Heat
By BRIAN STELTER
The New York Times: November 12, 2010

The Fox News host Glenn Beck was criticized Thursday by the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish advocacy organization, in response to a televised segment about the financier George Soros and the Holocaust.

Throughout three programs this week, Mr. Beck has portrayed Mr. Soros, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, as a “puppet master” who is “notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world” and whose “next target” is the United States. Citing Mr. Soros’s statements about the decline of the dollar, Mr. Beck said, “Not only does he want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, took issue with Mr. Beck’s depiction of Mr. Soros as a “Jewish boy helping sending the Jews to the death camps,” calling it “offensive” and “horrific.”

On Tuesday on his Fox program, watched by about 2.8 million people, Mr. Beck said that during the Holocaust, the 14-year-old Mr. Soros “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off.”

Mr. Beck continued: “I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he’s 14 years old. He was surviving. So I’m not making a judgment. That’s between him and God.” He also said that “many people” would call Mr. Soros “an anti-Semite,” though “I will not.”

Fox stood by Mr. Beck. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president at Fox News, said in a statement Thursday afternoon that the “information regarding Mr. Soros’s experiences growing up were taken directly from his writings and from interviews given by him to the media, and no negative opinion was offered as to his actions as a child.”

Still, Mr. Foxman asserted that Mr. Beck’s invoking of the childhood experience was “unacceptable,” adding, “To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant.”

Writing on The Daily Beast, the author Michelle Goldberg said Mr. Beck’s Tuesday and Wednesday programs were a “symphony of anti-Semitic dog whistles.”

Mr. Beck has stirred controversy in the past for repeatedly invoking the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. But some Jewish leaders have backed him up in the past, and on Tuesday, Mr. Beck said he was “probably more supportive of Israel and the Jews than George Soros is."

(Full article)

Blogger Arrested Over Posts Seen as Heresy for Satirizing Koran
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: November 11, 2010

West Bank -- An atheist blogger whose postings satirizing the Koran set off an uproar in the Arab world has been arrested by the Palestinian authorities and faces a possible life sentence if convicted of heresy, officials said. The blogger, Walid Husayin, 26, a barber from Qalqilya, is suspected of posting atheistic rants on English and Arabic blogs and creating three Facebook groups where he spoofed the Koran, including by declaring himself God and ordering his followers to smoke marijuana. Mr. Husayin has been detained but not charged, a Palestinian security spokesman said.

(Full article)

ANNIE LAURIE GAYLOR
Freedom from Religion
Foundation

 

WASHINGTON DC BILLBOARD
from
United Coalition
of Reason

 

TODD STEFEL
Stiefel Freethought
Foundation

Atheist Groups Promote a Holiday Message: Join Us
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The New York Times: November 9, 2010

Just in time for the holiday season, Americans are about to be hit with a spate of advertisements promoting the joy and wisdom of atheism.

Four separate and competing national organizations representing various streams of atheists, humanists and freethinkers will soon be spreading their gospel through advertisements on billboards, buses and trains, and in newspapers and magazines.

The latest, announced on Tuesday in Washington, is the first to include spots on television and cable. This campaign juxtaposes particularly primitive — even barbaric — passages from the Bible and the Koran with quotations from nonbelievers and humanists like Albert Einstein and Katharine Hepburn.

The godless groups say they are mounting this surge because they are aware that they have a large, untapped army of potential troops. The percentage of American adults who say they have no religion has doubled in the last two decades, to 15 percent, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford and released in 2008. But the ranks of the various atheist organizations number only in the tens of thousands.

Relying on the largess of a few wealthy atheists, these groups are now capable of bankrolling efforts to recruit and organize a population that mostly has been quiet and closeted.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., one of the groups running advertisements, said, “We feel the only way to fight the stigma toward atheists and agnostics is for people to feel like they know them, and they’re your neighbors and your friends. It’s the same idea as the out-of-the-closet campaign for gay rights.”

The groups’ leaders say they are trying to marshal secularists at a time when the religious right and politicians who say America is a “Christian nation” are on the march, thanks to the recent midterm elections when not only deficit hawks won seats in Congress, but many religious conservatives as well.

Several of the campaigns are pitched not just to nonbelievers, but also to liberal believers who might be alarmed about breaches in the wall of separation between church and state. The atheist groups believe that people who are religious and politically liberal have more in common with atheists and seculars than they do with religious conservatives.

“We must denounce politicians that contend U.S. law should be based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments,” said Todd Stiefel, a retired pharmaceutical company executive who is underwriting most of the ad campaign that cites alarming Scripture passages. “It has not been based on these and should never be. Our founding fathers created a secular democracy.”

PREET BHARARA
United States Attorney
in Manhattan

OUR LADY OF SALVATION
CHURCH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Grief and Defiance, Baghdad’s Christians
Return to Scene of Attack
By JOHN LELAND
The New York Times: November 8, 2010

BAGHDAD — To get to Mass at Our Lady of Salvation Church on Sunday, worshipers had to pass through a blockade of police trucks, past armed sentries on the rooftop, and through a security checkpoint where they were frisked for weapons and explosives. Some came in mourning black, many in tears, most in a spirit of quiet defiance.

“This gives us more strength,” said Sama Wadie, 32, a teacher, his hand wrapped in a bandage. “We’re not afraid of death because Jesus died for us. Of course we cry, but they’re tears of happiness, because we die for God.”

One week ago Our Lady of Salvation, a Syrian Catholic church, was the scene of the worst attack on Iraqi Christians since the American-led invasion in 2003. Gunmen in explosive suicide vests jumped the church’s security wall and took more than 100 worshipers hostage, identifying themselves as members of the Islamic State of Iraq, a Qaeda-linked terrorist group. It began a night of bloodshed in which 51 worshipers and two priests were killed. The terrorist group promised more attacks, declaring Christians everywhere “legitimate targets.”

In an emotional service interrupted twice by applause, the Rev. Muklis Shisha told the congregation, “The church is a martyr,” adding: “The cross needs blood, and the blood is happiness because Jesus is our happiness. I congratulate our country and ourselves for our martyrs.”

For many Christians here, the attack underscored a bitter irony of the American-led invasion. It opened the door for warfare on one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

“I don’t think the American people care about this,” said the Rev. Meyassr al-Qaspotros of the nearby Sacred Church of Jesus, whose cousin was one of the priests killed at Our Lady of Salvation, adding, “The Americans are the cause of all this.”

In his sermon to his own congregation, he said, he planned to stress the existential meaning of human suffering and the need for forgiveness, even in the face of horrific bloodshed. “God allowed man to torture Jesus, he will allow this as well, because he gave freedom to all people,” Father Qaspotros said.

JASJIT SINGH
Sikh American Legal Defense
and Education Fund

RLICK DeMATO

SARAH PALIN

ANN COULTER

ROMA / GYPSIES

BISHOP
DEMETRIO FERNÁNDEZ

CHARLES A. CURTIS
Mount Olivet Baptist pastor

SEPARATION
of
CHURCH and STATE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Crack in the Wall
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: November 5, 2010

When the Supreme Court took up a case about a school choice program in Arizona this week, Justice Elena Kagan said she had been “puzzling and puzzling” over it. Why, she asked the state’s lawyer, instead of providing families with vouchers, is Arizona’s program “so much more complicated and complex and unusual”?

The short answer is that the state’s Constitution prohibits direct aid to private schools. A more important one is that the convolutions hide a problem we’re not supposed to see. The program appears to be unconstitutional. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled, it appears to violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause by disbursing state funds on the basis of religion.

Last year in Arizona, $52.1 million in scholarships helped support more than 27,500 students at private and parochial schools. The money came from letting people who owe state income taxes take a credit, up to $500. They can contribute the amount to 50 or so nonprofit tuition organizations that give money to parents who want to send their children to schools they serve.

Arizona boasts that it gives taxpayers an incentive to take part in the program, and why not? It’s a use-it-or-lose-it, free-money scheme. They can give up to $500 to a school tuition organization or add exactly that amount to their tax payment. What the state calls voluntary cash contributions are really redirected tax payments. They have to be made when a taxpayer files a state tax return.

In the first year of the program in 1998, 85 percent of the scholarship money went to students attending religious schools. By last year, when the program had grown much bigger, an estimated 70 percent went for that sectarian purpose.

The choice offered parents and children through the program sounds great but is often restricted. Most scholarships are awarded by school tuition organizations that choose students on the basis of religion, to go to religious schools. Handing out the funds on the basis of religion is unconstitutional. It is a government spending program directed by tens of thousands of taxpayers.

When Paul Bender, the lawyer for the program’s challengers and a former dean at Arizona State University’s law school, presented his argument, Justice Anthony Kennedy said dryly, “I have some difficulty that any money that the government doesn’t take from me is still the government’s money.” Justice Antonin Scalia made the point with exasperation. Justice Samuel Alito did so impatiently, as if Mr. Bender didn’t fully grasp the issue.

At 77, Mr. Bender has been around the court for more than 50 years, since the days he was a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter. He is among the country’s experts on the tax-credit issue at the heart of the case.

If the court resolves the case on the merits, a split along ideological lines will not be surprising. But Mr. Bender ably exposed the Arizona program as a crack in the wall between church and state. The court should mend it by calling for the program to stop discriminating on the basis of religion.

(Full editorial)

Justices Revisit Tax Credits for Religious Schools
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times: November 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday returned to a subject that produced a major and closely divided decision eight years ago: how far may the government go in aiding religious schools?

In 2002, in a 5-to-4 ruling, the court upheld a school voucher system in Cleveland that parents used almost exclusively to pay for religious schools.

Four new justices have joined the court since then, but there was nothing in Wednesday’s arguments to suggest that the issue has become any less polarizing.

The program at issue on Wednesday gives Arizona taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar state tax credit of up to $500 for donations to private “student tuition organizations.” The contributors may not designate their dependents as beneficiaries. The organizations are permitted to limit the scholarships they offer to schools of a given religion, and many do.

The program was challenged by Arizona taxpayers who said it effectively used state money to finance religious education and so violated the First Amendment’s prohibition on the official establishment of religion.

JEAN-LUC GODARD

An Honorary Oscar Revives a Controversy
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
The New York Times: November 2, 2010

LOS ANGELES — Late last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was still coming to terms with that most deeply confounding of European filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard.

No one had yet signed on to present an honorary Oscar to Mr. Godard, who has said he will not be on hand anyway at the academy’s awards banquet in Hollywood a week from Saturday. But there was also the touchy question of how to deal with newly highlighted claims that Mr. Godard, a master of modern film, has long harbored anti-Jewish views that threaten to widen his distance from Hollywood, even as the film industry’s leading institution is trying to close the gap.

Over the last month, articles in the Jewish press — including a cover story titled “Is Jean-Luc Godard an Anti-Semite?” in The Jewish Journal — have revived a simmering debate over whether Mr. Godard, an avowed anti-Zionist and advocate for Palestinian rights, is also anti-Jewish.

UGANDA GAYS

Paper Runs Photos of Gay Ugandans
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: November 1, 2010

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — A newspaper in Kampala on Monday published photographs, along with the names and home addresses, of gay Ugandans. This was the second time the newspaper has done so, prompting a human rights group to seek a legal injunction against the publication.

The newspaper’s managing editor, Giles Muhame, said he planned to continue publishing photographs of gay men so that he could “help them live responsible lives.” Earlier this month the newspaper, called Rolling Stone, published a front-page story featuring a list of what the newspaper said were Uganda’s 100 “top” homosexuals. Rights activists said the article prompted attacks against at least four gay Ugandans.

An organization called Sexual Minorities Uganda has asked the country’s highest court to issue an injunction against publishing the faces of homosexuals in future editions.

(Full article)

JUXTAPOSED
Halifax Chronicle-Herald: October 31, 2010

Insanity on Parade

A Call for Sanity

HALA and KHALID

Syrian Boy, 5, Engaged to Girlfriend, 3
CBS News: October 25, 2010

Two Syrian children may be the youngest couple ever to get engaged.

The families of both children are not only taking the betrothal seriously, they insist the school children are in love and are already planning a wedding for 10 years down the road -- when Khalid will be 15 and Hala 12.

The parents arranged the engagement ceremony in their home town of Homs, about 100 miles north of Damascus. They invited family friends and even bought rings which the prepubescent couple exchanged in adult fashion.

According to Syria's English-language Forward Magazine, Syrian marriages are traditionally arranged at an early age for both males and females. When a boy reaches puberty, his female relatives begin searching for a suitable wife, who generally will be a few years younger than him.

ROBERT H. SCHULLER

SHEILA SCHULLER COLEMAN

ROBERT A. SCHULLER

Dispute Over Succession Clouds Megachurch
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The New York Times: October 24, 2010

GARDEN GROVE, Calif. — The 10,664 windows did not get washed this year at the Crystal Cathedral, the iconic glass church founded by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, one of the original religious broadcasters. Volunteers are tending the church’s 40 landscaped acres, now that the gardeners have been laid off. And its renowned Christmas pageant — with live camels and horses, and angels flying overhead on cables — has been canceled for now.

The empire that Mr. Schuller built may be in jeopardy, tarnished by an unseemly family feud and a $43 million debt that even by megachurch standards is serious.

When the Crystal Cathedral, which many church historians call the nation’s first modern megachurch, filed for bankruptcy protection last week, Sheila Schuller Coleman, the senior pastor and Mr. Schuller’s eldest daughter, blamed the bad economy.

But the church was in trouble long before the economic downturn, according to church insiders and family members interviewed last week. It was already suffering from the botched succession of Mr. Schuller, one too many vanity building projects and changes in the religious broadcasting industry.

When Mr. Schuller announced in 2006 that he was turning over the pulpit to his only son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, the church was already carrying a huge debt from its last lavish building project. But in a little more than two years, the son was pushed out before he ever really took the reins, and some of his sisters and their husbands stepped in.

The family feud left the church without clear leadership, just when its programs badly needed a makeover to attract a new generation of followers.

FREEDOM FROM RELIGION

Name That Freedom
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The New York Times: October 24, 2010

On Tuesday, during a debate, Ms. O’Donnell asked her opponent, Chris Coons, “Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” The question drew gasps and laughter from the law school audience.

When Mr. Coons pointed out that the first words of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” are the foundation of the concept, she replied, “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”

She was, she later said, attempting to point out that the actual words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the text of the Constitution. This is true in the strictest sense, and has become a popular argument among religious conservatives who believe that courts have gone too far.

Still, the moment has been held up as a flub of the first order.

Yet in her comments, Ms. O’Donnell may have been, to an extent, fulfilling a catchphrase from one of her campaign ads: “I’m you.” Because Americans really don’t know a lot about the founding documents of our republic. Later in the debate, Mr. Coons himself could not recite the five main freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

How much do we need to know? Clearly, many of us are lacking even the basics. The First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University has looked at Americans’ familiarity with its eponymous portion of the Bill of Rights, and the results would make Thomas Jefferson weep. While 61 percent of those surveyed this year knew that the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, just 23 percent volunteered that it also supports freedom of religion

FAINTING SPELL

 

 

 

 

Spirits blamed as girls faint in Cambodia
AFP: October 24, 2010

Teachers of 10 teenage girls who collapsed one after another at their rural Cambodian school blamed the mysterious ailment on angry spirits on Saturday.

The girls, aged between 14 and 18, were treated in hospital after fainting but doctors could not ascertain why the youngsters were struck down, said Ruos Lim Chhee, head of the high school in Pnov, northern Cambodia. He said that all of the girls were found to be healthy, with no signs of food poisoning, although two were a little low on glucose.

"We are afraid we are under a spell because we didn't offer any traditional dancing and music to the spirits on the opening day this year," he said. "But we have just offered fruits, boiled chickens and wine to the spirits today, and we hope the students will get better and the spirits will take care of us."

Mil Khim, a teacher who witnessed the string of incidents on Thursday, said one of his students started to complain of chest pains early in the morning and then suffered convulsions before falling unconscious. "The strange phenomenon lasted only a few hours, as eight seventh graders and two from eighth and ninth grade fainted subsequently," he said.

Cambodians in rural areas often believe supernatural forces are behind unexplained events.

"We think that perhaps the spirits are angry because the doctors, teachers and even police found no trace of poison or physical weakness," said district governor, Pech Sophea.

(Full article)

ALBRECHT DÜRER
Praying Hands

Lord’s Prayer Dispute In NJ Town Could Continue
ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 23, 2010

TOMS RIVER, N.J. (AP) — A dispute in a southern New Jersey town over the saying of the Lord’s Prayer at public meetings could take on a new life.

Point Pleasant Beach Borough’s council has already agreed to discontinue saying the prayer at the start of meetings, a practice that dates back to the mid-1990s. The action came after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit last month after a borough resident objected to the reading, saying it was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

Earlier this month, the council agreed to hold a moment of silence to replace the prayer at the start of meetings. But a group of parishioners from a local church recited the prayer during that time.

Last week, the council approved a resolution that allows council members, on a rotating basis, to begin meetings with a nonsectarian prayer. An attorney representing the ACLU told the Asbury Park Press of Neptune that the resolution could lead to another lawsuit.

The two sides attended a hearing in state Superior Court on Friday. Borough attorney Kevin Riordan told state Superior Court Judge Vincent Grasso that, although he could advise council members not to say the Lord’s Prayer when their turn arose, he could not stop them.

(Full article)

VICKI NOBLE

SAGE OSTERFELD

TOMME ARTHUR
Recovering Catholic

Witches Say Beer’s O.K.,
but Lose the Fire and Stake
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
October 23, 2010

She was not looking for controversy. Vicki Noble was just looking for a fine ale.

Ms. Noble, who is famous in the pagan and Wiccan communities for her astrology readings, shamanic healing and writings about goddess spirituality, says she discovered Witch’s Wit last week on one of her regular excursions to 41st Avenue Liquors, in Capitola, Calif.

“I like beer,” Ms. Noble said, and as a practitioner of religious traditions that revere the earth and women’s special powers, she also feels a special connection to brewing. “It was the women who brewed beer from ancient times right up to the Reformation,” she says. She thinks some were burned as witches to destroy “the ancient traditions of shamanistic medicine, which in every indigenous culture includes the brewing of medicinal fermented beverages.”

But one does not have to agree with Ms. Noble’s interpretation of history to share her offense at a picture on the label of Witch’s Wit, a limited-edition pale ale — “wit” means “white” in Dutch — produced by Lost Abbey, a division of the Port Brewing Company of San Marcos, Calif.

It was a painting of a witch being burned at the stake.

Ms. Noble went home and wrote to her e-mail list. “Can we stop this brewer from their hate imagery?” read the subject line, in all capitals. “Can you imagine them showing a black person being lynched or a Jewish person going to the oven?” she wrote. “Such images are simply not tolerated in our society anymore (thank the Goddess) and this one should not be, either.

“We have been accused of inspiring violence against women, and we have been compared to the violence in Darfur,” said Sage Osterfeld, a spokesman for Port Brewing. “It has run the gamut from people saying politely, ‘This is offensive to pagans,’ to people saying we are responsible for all that is wrong in the world.”

And far from being an attack on women, Mr. Osterfeld said, Witch’s Wit is in a line of Catholic-themed beers, like Inferno Ale and Judgment Day, conceived in the spirit of gentle satire by Tomme Arthur, another of the brewery’s owners. Mr. Arthur says he is “a recovering Catholic.”

JUÁN WILLIAMS

SIKH TURBAN

NON-SIKH
TEMPLE VISITOR

A Question of Appearances: Obama Will Bypass Sikh Temple on Visit to India
By LYDIA POLGREEN
The New York Times: October 20, 2010

NEW DELHI — The Golden Temple, a sprawling and serene complex of gleaming gold and polished marble that is the spiritual center of the Sikh religion, is one of India’s most popular tourist attractions. Revered by Indians of all faiths, it is a cherished emblem of India’s religious diversity. So it was no surprise when the gold-plated marvel was promoted as the likely third stop on President Obama’s visit to India, scheduled for early November.

The United States has ruled out a Golden Temple visit, according to an American official involved in planning. Temple officials said that American advance teams had gone to Amritsar, the holy city that is the site of the temple, to discuss a possible visit. But the plan appears to have foundered on the thorny question of how Mr. Obama would cover his head, as Sikh tradition requires, while visiting the temple.

“To come to golden temple he needs to cover his head,” said Dalmegh Singh, secretary of the committee that runs the temple. “That is our tradition.”

Mr. Obama, a Christian, has struggled to fend off persistent rumors that he is a Muslim, and Sikhs in the United States have often been mistaken for Muslims.

Baseball caps are not considered appropriate. Sikh scriptures require that men tie a piece of cloth on their heads, not simply put on a hat that can be easily taken off, because the act of tying has spiritual significance. Most non-Sikh visitors tie on kerchiefs sold by vendors outside the temple.

CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL

CLIFFORD STANLEY
Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness

Don’t Stay the ‘Don’t Ask’ Ruling
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: October 17, 2010

Although President Obama and the Pentagon’s top leaders have all said they want the law repealed, the Justice Department on Thursday asked Judge Phillips to stay her injunction while it files an appeal.

As justification, the administration made overheated claims that a precipitous change in wartime would have adverse effects on morale, good order, discipline and unit cohesion. Those are the same specious arguments used to justify the benighted policy in the first place. The administration wants to leave it in place while it finishes a study on how to carry out a repeal.

Clifford Stanley, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in a court filing that ending the antigay policy would require training, and reworking regulations on issues like housing, benefits and standards of conduct. He said the Army had to consider the “rights and obligations of the chaplain corps.”

RICHARD DAWKINS

SAM HARRIS

PZ MEYERS

Atheists Debate How Pushy to Be
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
The New York Times: October 15, 2010

LOS ANGELES — Energized by a recent Pew Research Center poll showing that atheists are more educated about religion than religious people, 370 atheists, humanists and other skeptics packed a ballroom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel last weekend to debate the future of their movement.

They agreed on two things: People can be good without religion, and religion has too much influence. But they disagreed about how stridently to make those claims.

The conference, sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism, drew members from all the major doubters’ organizations, including American Atheists and the American Humanist Association. The largely white and male crowd...came to hear panels that included several best-selling atheist pamphleteers, like Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” and Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith” and is a rock star in the atheist world (he traveled with bodyguards because he receives death threats from both Christians and Muslims).

The conference came on the heels of a change in leadership at the council and a rumored rift there, which some described as a standoff between atheists, who focus on God’s nonexistence, and humanists, who are also nonbelievers but seek an alternative ethical system, one that does not depend on any deity.

Some of the weekend’s speakers alluded to the turmoil at the council, where several longtime employees have resigned or been laid off. But in general they emphasized unity: They shared common enemies, like religious fundamentalism and “Intelligent Design.” And they believed morality was possible without God.

The disagreement was not, then, between atheism and humanism. It was about making the atheist/humanist case in America. A central question was, “How publicly scornful of religion should we be?"

Those trying to find common ground with religious people were called “accommodationists,” while the more outspoken atheists were called “confrontationalists” and accused of alienating potential allies, like moderate Christians.

PZ Myers [a biologist and blogger — a confrontationalist, to put it mildly. In 2008, to make a stand for freedom of speech, he publicly desecrated a Communion wafer, a Koran and (for good measure) a copy of Mr. Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion.” He likes to say that he tries to commit blasphemy every day.] is way out of the closet as an atheist — proudly, outrageously so. "We’re here, he’s saying. And we don’t believe. And we have science and reason on our side. Get used to it."

"SAINT"
ANTHONY CARPENTIER

RABBI YEHUDA LEVIN

ASSEMBLYMAN
DOV HIKIND

SHIRLEY PHELPS

KRISTIAN
Markham Inntermediate

ENRIQUE CHAGOYA

Provocative Image of Christ Sets Off a Debate Punctuated With a Crowbar
By DAN FROSCH
The New York Times: October 11, 2010

LOVELAND, Colo. — For once, the quaint museum on Lincoln Avenue was all quiet. A sign inside was the only indication of the recent trouble.m “This piece was destroyed by an act of violence and is no longer on exhibit,” the sign read.

For weeks now, this bucolic northern Colorado city of just over 60,000, which has a vibrant arts community, has been bitterly divided over the controversial artwork that once sat in the empty display of the Loveland Museum Gallery where the sign now rests.

Some here interpreted the small image, which was part of a lithographic print exhibition by the San Francisco artist Enrique Chagoya, as showing Jesus Christ engaged in a sex act with another man, and demanded its removal. Others argued that Mr. Chagoya, an art professor at Stanford, had the right to create what he pleased.

Last Wednesday, amid heated public debate over the exhibit and daily protests in front of the museum, a 56-year-old Montana truck driver named Kathleen Folden (left) walked into the gallery. Wearing a T-shirt that read “My Savior Is Tougher Than Nails,” Ms. Folden strode up to the exhibit, took out a crowbar and proceeded to smash the plexiglass casing. To the horror of visitors, she then ripped up the print, just as police officers arrived.

“People were asking her, ‘Why’d you do this?’ ” recalled Mark Michaels, a Colorado art dealer, who witnessed the event and grabbed Ms. Folden. “She said, ‘Because it desecrates my Lord.’

Last week, a local deacon began to help organize protests outside the museum, and last Tuesday people packed a City Council meeting to speak out on the exhibit. Mr. Klassen estimated that most in attendance were opposed to the image.

The Rev. Ed Armijo, a deacon at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Loveland, said: “It is deeply offensive to see our Lord depicted that way. It is our position that this is not art. It’s pornography.”

CARL PALADINO
Republican candidate
for New York State
Governor

Paladino Attacks Gays in Brooklyn Speech
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS
The New York Times: October 10, 2010

The Republican candidate for governor, Carl P. Paladino, told a gathering in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Sunday that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable, and criticized his opponent, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, for marching in a gay pride parade earlier this year.

Addressing Orthodox Jewish leaders, Mr. Paladino described his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Click √ for video

“That’s not how God created us,” he said, reading from a prepared address. “I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t.”

Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

“Carl Paladino is simply expressing the views that he holds in his heart as a Catholic,” his campaign manager, Michael R. Caputo, said in a telephone interview.

“Carl Paladino is not homophobic, and neither is the Catholic Church.”

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Test Your Savvy on Religion
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times: October 9, 2010

The New York Times reported recently on a Pew Research Center poll in which religious people turned out to be remarkably uninformed about religion. Almost half of Catholics didn’t understand Communion. Most Protestants didn’t know that Martin Luther started the Reformation. Almost half of Jews didn’t realize Maimonides was Jewish. And atheists were among the best informed about religion.

So let me give everybody another chance. And given the uproar about Islam, I’ll focus on extremism and fundamentalism — and, as you’ll see, there’s a larger point to this quiz.

Note that some questions have more than one correct choice; answers are at the end.

1. Which holy book stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death?
a. Koran
b. Old Testament
c. (Hindu) Upanishads

BABRI MASJID
MOSQUE

Test of India Verdict Will Lie in Public Reaction
By JIM YARDLEY
The New York Times: September 29, 2010

NEW DELHI — The case has existed almost as long as independent India itself. Dating from 1950, the legal battle between Hindus and Muslims over a religious site in the city of Ayodhya began as a little-noticed title dispute. With a ruling finally expected on Thursday, the case has become something altogether different: a test of India’s secular soul.

The test is not so much in the verdict, which will deal with a handful of issues, including the central question of which side controls the site of a 16th-century mosque known as the Babri Masjid. Rather, the test will come in the public reaction. In 1992, an enraged mob of Hindu extremists destroyed the mosque, asserting that the site was the birthplace of the Hindu deity, Ram. Riots erupted, claiming about 2,000 lives, mostly Muslims, and horrifying a nation founded on the ideal of religious tolerance.

The Babri Masjid mosque destroyed in 1992 by a mob of 75,000 hindu extremists

Senator
CURTIS PETERSON

 

MARTIN GILL

JUDGE
GERALD COPE, JR.

DR. GEORGE REKERS*
Baptist Minister

 

 

 

 

Victory for Families
EDITORIAL
The New York Times: September 27, 2010

A state appeals court in Florida toppled a monument to bigotry last week, declaring unconstitutional a 33-year-old state law that prohibited gay people from adopting children. The animus behind the ban is unmistakable. Its sponsor in the Florida State Senate, Curtis Peterson, declared in 1977 that its purpose was to send a message to the gay community that “we’re really tired of you” and “we wish you’d go back into the closet.”

The unanimous decision by three judges on Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal — Republican appointees — found “no rational basis” to the state’s approach of banning adoption by gay men and lesbians while allowing them to be foster parents. The court said it violated the State Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The case was brought by Martin Gill, a gay man seeking to adopt two brothers he took in as foster children more than five years ago. When they arrived, at ages 4 years and 4 months, they were in bad shape. Both had ringworm; the younger brother also had a raging ear infection while the older one did not speak for a month. Today both boys are thriving.

Mr. Gill’s side provided extensive evidence at trial to show there is no difference in the well-being of children raised by loving gay parents versus loving heterosexual parents. Reviewing that evidence, as well as Mr. Gill’s efforts, the appeals court agreed, and praised Mr. Gill for being “an exceptional parent.”

The state had nothing credible to offer to justify the adoption ban. It presented only two expert witnesses, noted Judge Gerald Cope Jr., who wrote the main opinion. One witness undercut the state’s case by saying adoption decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis. Opposing experts quickly discredited the state’s second witness, Dr. George Rekers, a Baptist minister and clinical psychologist (subsequently caught up in a sex scandal*) whose pseudo-scientific research was laughable.

The court’s decision is a victory for Mr. Gill and his family and for many hundreds of foster children in Florida in need of a good home. In recent months, there have also been several major federal court rulings voiding other discriminatory laws against gay people on equality grounds. That is heartening progress.

(Full Editorial)

* Christian right leader George Rekers takes vacation with "rent boy"
Miami New Times: May 6, 2010

For The New York Times coverage of Dr. George Rekers'
"rent-boy" story, click on photo at left, bottom.

BISHOP
EDDIE L. LONG

BISHOP
EDDIE L. LONG

Sex Scandal Threatens a Georgia Pastor’s Empire
By JAMES C. McKINLEY and ROBBIE BROWN
The New York Times: September 26, 2010

LITHONIA, Ga. — Over the last two decades, Bishop Eddie L. Long has built a religious and financial empire from scratch, transforming a small, faltering church into a modern cathedral with one of the largest and most influential congregations in the country.

His message that God wants people to prosper has attracted celebrities, professional athletes and socialites, swelling the membership to 25,000. The church hosted four United States presidents for the funeral of Coretta Scott King in 2006.

The rapid expansion of the church — often called “Club New Birth” because it attracts so many young black singles — has also made Bishop Long a powerful political player, especially in DeKalb County, home to one of the wealthiest black communities in the country. The church has become a mandatory stop for many politicians — local, state and national — and Bishop Long supports candidates of both parties.

But Bishop Long’s reputation and sprawling enterprises now stand threatened by a sex scandal.

Four former members of a youth group he runs have accused him of repeatedly coercing them into homosexual sex acts, and of abusing his considerable moral authority over them while plying them with cash, new cars, lodging and lavish trips.

The accusations are all the more explosive because Bishop Long styles himself a social conservative, rails against homosexuality and calls for a ban on same-sex marriage. His church even holds seminars promising to “cure” homosexuals.

The accusations center on the LongFellows Youth Academy, an exclusive group of teenage boys handpicked by Bishop Long for spiritual mentoring.

The boys went through a bonding ritual, known as a “covenant ceremony,” in which Bishop Long gave them jewelry and exchanged vows with them while quoting from Scripture as ceremonial candles burned, according to court complaints filed against the pastor. Reciting Bible verses, the pastor promised to protect them from harm and called them “spiritual sons.”

But four former members of the group now say the real purpose of the academy was to provide Bishop Long with young men whom he could lure into sex.

B. J. Bernstein, a lawyer for the four young men who claim to have been coerced into sexual affairs with Bishop Long, said the pastor exerted a paternalistic and, at times, autocratic influence over young men.

The four complaints filed in court describe how Bishop Long arranged for the church to provide cars to the young men and put them on the church payroll. Two of them also said they received free lodging in church-owned houses, where, they said, Bishop Long visited them for sessions of kissing, oral sex or masturbation. He also took them on trips to other cities and abroad, sharing rooms with them, with the knowledge of several church officials, the complaints say.

“There are biblical and spiritual passages that were given to them to make them comfortable and make them believe that they were not gay,” Ms. Bernstein said.

INTERNATIONAL
ATOMIC ENERGY
AGENCY

Agency Will Not Ask Israel to Sign
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
REUTERS : September 24, 2010

The United Nations nuclear watchdog narrowly rejected an Arab-sponsored resolution Friday calling on Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency was a victory for the United States after a tough diplomatic battle. Washington had urged countries to vote down the symbolically important but non-binding resolution, saying it could derail broader efforts to ban nuclear warheads in the Middle East and threaten the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

(Full article)

"Every time anyone says that Israel is our only friend in the Middle East, I can't help but think that before Israel, we had no enemies in the Middle East."
~ JOHN SHEEHAN, S.J.

Group Protests Planned Religious Rally at Fort Bragg
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The Neww York Times: September 23, 2010

North Carolina - Americans United for Separation of Church and State has sent a letter to the Secretary of the Army [John McHugh] saying it is unconstitutional for the military to hold an evangelistic rally scheduled for Fort Bragg this Saturday. The event is sponsored by the base’s chaplains, local churches and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, now led by the famous evangelist’s son, the Rev. Franklin Graham. The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, said, “It is not the Army’s job to convert Americans to Christianity.”

(Full article)

MICHAEL ENRIGHT

BISHOP
EDDIE L. LONG

Lawsuits Accuse Megachurch Leader of Sexual Misconduct
By ROBBIE BROWN
The New York Times: September 21, 2010

ATLANTA — Two young men in Georgia said Tuesday that the pastor of a 33,000-person Baptist megachurch, Bishop Eddie L. Long, had repeatedly coerced them into having sex with him.

In two lawsuits filed in DeKalb County, the men said that Bishop Long, a prominent minister and television personality, had used his position as a spiritual counselor to take them on trips out of state and perform sexual acts on them.
Bishop Long is the pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, an Atlanta suburb. It is one of the largest churches in the country.

“Defendant Long has a pattern and practice of singling out a select group of young male church members and using his authority as bishop over them to ultimately bring them to a point of engaging in a sexual relationship,” said a suit filed by one of the men, Maurice Robinson, 20. The other man who filed suit is Anthony Flagg, 21.

FOLLOW UP
Another Allegation Against Church Leader
By ROBBIE BROWN
The New York Times: September 22, 2010

A third man said Wednesday that he had been molested by Bishop Eddie L. Long, the prominent pastor of a Baptist megachurch in suburban Atlanta. A lawsuit filed by Jamal Parris, 23, a former member of the church’s congregation, alleges that Bishop Long gave him gifts in exchange for sexual acts while Mr. Parris was a teenager. Bishop Long is a nationally known author, the pastor at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., and an outspoken critic of homosexuality. On Tuesday, two men who also claim that Bishop Long sexually abused them when they were teenage members of his 25,000-person congregation filed suits against him.

BACHA POSH
"Dressed Up as a Boy”

Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part
By JENNY NORDBERG
The New York Times: September 20, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — Six-year-old Mehran Rafaat is like many girls her age. She likes to be the center of attention. She is often frustrated when things do not go her way. Like her three older sisters, she is eager to discover the world outside the family’s apartment in their middle-class neighborhood of Kabul.

But when their mother, Azita Rafaat, a member of Parliament, dresses the children for school in the morning, there is one important difference. Mehran’s sisters put on black dresses and head scarves, tied tightly over their ponytails. For Mehran, it’s green pants, a white shirt and a necktie, then a pat from her mother over her spiky, short black hair. After that, her daughter is out the door — as an Afghan boy.

There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari.

REYNA MARISOL CHICAS

Cops search for missing 'cult' members who were
awaiting the Rapture
ASSOCIATED PRESS: September 19, 2010

PALMDALE, Calif. — Deputies searched a wide swath of Southern California early Sunday for a break-off religious sect of 13 people that included children as young as three and left behind letters indicating they were awaiting an apocalyptic event and would soon see Jesus and their dead relatives in heaven, authorities said.

The group of El Salvadoran immigrants, described as “cult-like” by sheriff’s officials, was led by Reyna Marisol Chicas, a 32-year-old woman from Palmdale in northeast Los Angeles county, sheriff’s Captain Mike Parker said.
The group left behind cell phones, identifications, deeds to property, and letters indicating they were awaiting the Rapture.
AP
This undated photo provided by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department shows Reyna Chicas, leader of the "cult-like" group missing in Southern California.
“Essentially, the letters say they are all going to heaven to meet Jesus and their deceased relatives,” sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said. “Some of the letters were saying goodbye.”
The items came from a purse that a member of the group had left with her husband Saturday and asked him to pray over. He eventually looked inside and he and another member’s husband called authorities, Parker said.
The men told investigators they believe group members had been “brainwashed” by Chicas, and one expressed worries that they might harm themselves, Parker said.

FOLLOW UP
Missing Religious Group Found Alive in California
By IAN LOVETT
The New York Times: September 20, 2010

PALMDALE, Calif. — The frantic search began after police issued an alert: Members of a cult on the edge of the Mojave Desert had disappeared, leaving behind handwritten notes that raised fears they had planned a mass suicide.

Members of a breakaway religious sect prepared to leave after they were located by Los Angeles County officers at Jackie Robinson Park in Littlerock, Calif., on Sunday.
But Sunday afternoon, the search ended when the women from a small breakaway religious sect were found praying with their children on a blanket at a local park.

The police had been searching the region for the five women and eight children since Saturday afternoon, after the husbands of two of the missing women brought letters their wives had left behind, in purses filled with cellphones, identification and legal papers, to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office.

The letters mentioned “taking refuge,” “going to heaven” and wanting their families to join them. One of the husbands told the police that his wife and others were part of a cultlike group who had been “brainwashed” by the presumed leader, Reyna Marisol Chicas.

“Based upon the contents of the letters found in the purse, the missing people are possibly awaiting the rapture or some other type of catastrophic event,” Capt. Mike Parker of the sheriff’s office said. Though the letters made no specific reference to suicide, and the group has no history of violence, the apocalyptic talk incited fears of the worst in a part of the country that has seen cult suicides in the past.

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL

Christine O'Donnell: "I Dabbled Into Witchcraft"
CBS News: September 18, 2010

Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell doesn't need Facebook to dredge up her controversial past statements.

As a sometime conservative pundit a decade ago on Bill Maher's former show, "Politically Incorrect", O'Donnell said (in an appearance that wasn't aired) that she dabbled in witchcraft.

In the clip shown last night on Maher's current show, "Real Time," O'Donnell said:
"I dabbled into witchcraft -- I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. ... I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do. . . . "

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a Satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that. ... We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a Satanic altar."

GLEN URQUHART

Delaware GOP Candidate: Ask Liberals Why They're Nazis
CBS News: September 17, 2010

Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell may be getting all the attention these days, but Glen Urquhart, the Republican candidate for the state's open House seat, apparently doesn't want to get left out of the action.

The Tea Party-backed candidate appears in a video in which he says: "Next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they're Nazis." Democrats have seized on the comments and labeled Urquhart an extremist, The Hill reports.

Urquhart's full comment:

"Do you know, where does this phrase separation of Church and State come from? Does anybody know? ... Actually, that's exactly, it was not in Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. He was reassuring that the federal government wouldn't trample on their religion. The exact phrase 'separation of Church and State' came out of Adolph Hitler's mouth, that's where it comes from. Next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they're Nazis."

MOLLY NORRIS

 

ANWAR AL-AWLAKI

 

 

 

 

 

Cartoonist in Hiding After Death Threats
By BRIAN STELTER
The New York Times: September 16, 2010

A cartoonist in Seattle who promoted an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” last spring is now in hiding after her life was threatened by Islamic extremists. The cartoonist, Molly Norris, has changed her name and has stopped producing work for a local alternative newspaper, Seattle Weekly, according to the newspaper’s editor, Mark D. Fefer.

Mr. Fefer declined an interview request Thursday, citing “the sensitivity of the situation.” But in a letter to readers about Ms. Norris on Wednesday, he said that “on the insistence of top security specialists at the F.B.I., she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity.”
The F.B.I. declined to comment on the case.

Ms. Norris attracted attention after she published a poster on the Internet in April satirically proposing that people draw figures of the Prophet Muhammad on May 20.
She indicated that the proposal was a protest of censorship by Comedy Central, which edited out references to Muhammad from an episode of “South Park” that month. That episode also triggered threats from extremists. Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

In 2005, a Danish cartoonist named Kurt Westergaard published a depiction of Muhammad that led to multiple death threats and alleged assassination attempts. He was presented an award this month for freedom of speech by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The poster by Ms. Norris spread on the Internet and spawned Facebook groups both for and against the idea. She quickly tried to tamp down the controversy, apologizing to Muslims and at one point joking that the event should be renamed “Everybody Draw Al Gore Day.” The protest movement continued in the spring largely without her involvement.

In July, Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American cleric who is accused of ties to Al Qaeda, said in a document published on the Internet that Ms. Norris “should be taken as a prime target of assassination,” according to the NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites, which translated the document.

Mr. Awlaki stated that Ms. Norris and other unnamed people in the United States and Europe “are expressing their hatred of the Messenger of Islam through ridicule.”

BURQA

KAPAROT
CEREMONY

AYATOLLAH
ALI KHAMENEI

DEMONSTRATORS
IN KASHMIR

DAH ALIGBONON
AKPOCHIHALA

A KORANIC STUDENT
WITH HIS
BEGGING BOWL

ANTI MOSQUE

PRO MOSQUE

AFGHANS PROTEST
KORAN-B-Q

THE PRESS FAWNS
over
KORAN-B-Q
PASTOR T. JONES

PAKISTANIS PROTEST
KORAN-B-Q

BOOK BURNING

ROSH HASHANA

It’s Back to School. Then Back to Vacation
By JENNIFER MEDINA
The New York Times: September 8, 2010

A quirk in the calendar is giving the first week of school the feeling of an on-again-off-again relationship, with many students in the New York area having more days of vacation than instruction.

For decades, school systems throughout the region have begun just after Labor Day and have been closed in honor of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.

For the first time in recent memory, Rosh Hashana is coming just as the new school year has begun, falling on Thursday and Friday this week.

So in New York City, more than a million students will enter and exit the classroom Wednesday, their only day of school this week. And for thousands of students in the suburbs who went to class on Tuesday, two days of school will be followed by two days off before the weekend.

ROSH HASHANA

GEN. DAVID H. PETRAEUS

SAKINEH MOHAMMADI
ASHIANTI

JERRY FALWELL
with
RONALD REAGAN

God and Politics, Together Again
By SAM TANENHAUS
The New York Times: September 4, 2010

The rally at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, Aug. 28, organized by Glenn Beck and held on the 47th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was billed as a strictly religious affair, untainted by any political agenda.

In keeping with the spiritual message, Mr. Beck omitted his customary attacks on President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who he has implied, more than once, are socialists (or worse) in disguise. But in an interview taped after the event and shown the next day on Fox News, which also broadcasts his popular nightly program, Mr. Beck, a Mormon, was back on the attack, this time criticizing Mr. Obama’s religious views.

“He is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim,” Mr. Beck said, adding, “People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity.”

The episode was further evidence that Mr. Obama, who once looked as if he might be able to end the nation’s ideological polarization, has instead become engulfed in it, just like his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

BILL KELLER

From the Other Side of Ground Zero, Anti-Muslim Venom
By FERNANDA SANTOS
The New York Times: September 5, 2010

The Internet evangelist Bill Keller moved toward the dais in tiny, quick steps on Sunday, exhibiting the anticipation of a man ready to address a crowd. Roughly 60 people stood before him in a hotel meeting room in Lower Manhattan, temporary quarters of his Christian center, his response to the mosque planned for an empty building nearby.

“If we’re going to do something in New York City, we’re going to do something that’s not just bold and visible, but something that has a lasting presence,” said Mr. Keller, who is from the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

Later, he told reporters that Muslims “can go to their mosque and preach the lies of Islam and I’ll come here to preach the truth of the Gospel.”

Since its organizers attended a community board meeting four months ago, the mosque — part of a Muslim community center that would offer a day care center, an auditorium and a pool — quickly became fodder for a national debate. Much of the opposition is over its location: two blocks north of ground zero.

Mr. Keller promoted his center, which he called the 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero, as a religious counterweight to the mosque, which he repeatedly called a “victory mosque” or a monument to “a great Muslim military accomplishment,” as he explained it at the inaugural service at the New York Marriott Downtown Hotel on West Street, two blocks south of ground zero.

His career arc makes him a somewhat unusual standard-bearer: Mr. Keller became a preacher after serving a sentence in federal prison for insider trading.

He has also appeared on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show and once had a program on national television, which was canceled after he called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell.” The program is now carried by a small station in Florida.

Mr. Keller also described the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is behind the Muslim community center, as followers of false faiths.

PRESIDENT
BASHAR al-ASSAD

Syria’s Solidarity With Islamists Ends at Home
By KAREEM FAHIM
The New York Times: September 4, 2010

DAMASCUS, Syria — This country, which had sought to show solidarity with Islamist groups and allow religious figures a greater role in public life, has recently reversed course, moving forcefully to curb the influence of Muslim conservatives in its mosques, public universities and charities.

The government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and started to strictly monitor religious schools. Members of an influential Muslim women’s group have now been told to scale back activities like preaching or teaching Islamic law. And this summer, more than 1,000 teachers who wear the niqab, or the face veil, were transferred to administrative duties.

The crackdown, which began in 2008 but has gathered steam this summer, is an effort by President Bashar al-Assad to reassert Syria’s traditional secularism in the face of rising threats from radical groups in the region, Syrian officials say.

ANTHONY OGDEN
Charged with disrupting a religious service

CHARLES M. BLOW

BRYAN BUTVIDAS

A Niche of the Unreal in a World of Credulity
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
The New York Times: September 3, 2010

Since 2008, ChristWire.org has emerged as the leading Internet site for ultraconservative Christian news, commentary and weather reportage.

“Hurricane Earl Projected Path, Gay East Coast of America,” ChristWire opined on Monday. One headline in late August proclaimed, “Warning! Black Music Infiltrates the Minds of Future Homemaking White Women.” Last week, referring to Ken Mehlman, the former Republican Party chairman who came out of the closet last month, ChristWire asked, “Why does Ken Mehlman think that choosing the homosexual lifestyle is more important to him than the Republican values he once held so dear?”

ChristWire has lately reached new levels of popularity, in part thanks to an Aug. 14 column, “Is My Husband Gay?” Written by Stephenson Billings, the piece is a 15-point checklist to help wives detect possibly closeted husbands. “Gym membership but no interest in sports” is one warning sign. So is “Sassy, sarcastic and ironic around his friends” and “Love of pop culture.”

“Is My Husband Gay?” was picked up on The Huffington Post and mentioned by Ryan Seacrest on his radio show; so far it has been viewed 8.3 million times.
Oh, by the way: ChristWire is all one big joke.

Not the readership — which hit a high of 27 million page views in August — but the content, the opinions and the fake authors who write the stuff. (There is no “Stephenson Billings.”) Neither of the two founders is a conservative Christian. They are just like-minded 28-year-olds who met on the Internet, have never seen each other in person, and until this week had never given their real identities to a reporter.

Bryan Butvidas is a software developer who works out of his house in Southern California. Kirwin Watson is a former Pepperdine student who moved back home to Kansas, where he now works “on the patient-care staff” of a local hospital.

CARLA BRUNI

Iranian Newspaper Says Carla Bruni-Sarkozy ‘Deserves to Die’ for Objecting to Stoning
By ROBERT MACKEY
Reuters: August 31, 2010

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of the French president, at the Élysée Palace in Paris in July.

An Iranian newspaper with close ties to the country’s supreme leader has responded to a campaign by French celebrities to save the life of an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning by calling its most prominent member, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a “prostitute” who “deserves to die.”

Kayhan, the Tehran daily, first denounced the French president’s wife on Saturday, after she published an open letter in support of Sakineh Ashtiani, the Iranian woman given a death sentence for the crime of adultery. The official position of the paper’s editor is representative of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The fact that Kayhan called Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy, and the French actress Isabelle Adjani, the author of a previous open letter, “prostitutes” on Saturday led Iran’s foreign ministry to distance the government from the remarks. Ramin Mehmanparast, a foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters in Tehran on Tuesday, that “insulting the officials of other countries and using inappropriate words, this is not approved of by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

On Tuesday Kayhan responded to criticism of its first attack by going even further in a second volley against Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy, calling her “the singer and decadent actress who managed to break [up] the Sarkozy family.” The newspaper added:
Studying Carla Bruni’s record clearly shows the reason why this immoral woman is backing an Iranian woman who has been condemned to death for committing adultery and being an accomplice in her husband’s murder and, in fact, she herself deserves to die.

GLENN BECK

At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth
By KATE ZERNIKE and CARL HULSE
The New York Times: August 28, 2010

WASHINGTON — An enormous and impassioned crowd rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, summoned by Glenn Beck, a conservative broadcaster who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech 47 years ago to the day.

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck said in opening the event as the crowd thronged near the memorial grounds. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

Many in the crowd said they had never been to a Tea Party rally, but they described themselves as avid Glenn Beck fans, and many said they had been motivated to come by faith. Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Fla., because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ, and he is our savior.” Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with what she called the redistribution of wealth in the form of the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare.

Mr. Beck made a surprise visit on Friday to a convention held by FreedomWorks, a Tea Party umbrella group, for Tea Party supporters. He received a thunderous welcome from a crowd of about 1,600 in Constitution Hall.

He told the crowd that he had begun planning his march on Washington a year ago, thinking “it was supposed to be political.”

“And then I kind of feel like God dropped a giant sandbag on my head,” he said.
“My role, as I see it, is to wake America up to the backsliding of principles and values and most of all of God,” he said. “We are a country of God. As I look at the problems in our country, quite honestly, I think the hot breath of destruction is breathing on our necks and to fix it politically is a figure that I don’t see anywhere.”

TERRY JONES

OBAMA PRAYS

KALI
Hindu goddess of
Power

Bonalu Festival, Hyderabad, India
REUTERS: 17 August 2010

A devotee takes part in the annual Hindu religious festival of Bonalu in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. The word "Bonalu" is derived from the Telugu word "Bhojanalu", which refers to the food offered to Goddess Kali, the Hindu goddess of power. The main ritual in the month-long festival consists of offering cooked rice, jaggery, curd, water and other dishes brought by women in earthen pots to Goddess Kali. Devotees believe that the offerings will ward off evil and epidemics during the monsoon period.

(Full article)

MOSQUES ARE
MONUMENTS TO
TERRORISM
Temecula, Calif.

Across Nation, Mosque Projects Meet Opposition
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
The New York Times: August 7, 2010

While a high-profile battle rages over a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, heated confrontations have also broken out in communities across the country where mosques are proposed for far less hallowed locations.

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., arguments broke out over a planned Muslim center. In Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican candidates have denounced plans for a large Muslim center proposed near a subdivision, and hundreds of protesters have turned out for a march and a county meeting. In late June, in Temecula, Calif., members of a local Tea Party group took dogs and picket signs to Friday prayers at a mosque that is seeking to build a new worship center on a vacant lot nearby. In Sheboygan, Wis., a few Christian ministers led a noisy fight against a Muslim group that sought permission to open a mosque in a former health food store bought by a Muslim doctor.

"I do believe everybody has a right to freedom of religion. But Islam is not about a religion. It’s a political government, and it’s 100 percent against our Constitution.” ~ DIANA SERAFIN Temecula, Calif.

At one time, neighbors who did not want mosques in their backyards said their concerns were over traffic, parking and noise — the same reasons they might object to a church or a synagogue. But now the gloves are off.

In all of the recent conflicts, opponents have said their problem is Islam itself. They quote passages from the Koran and argue that even the most Americanized Muslim secretly wants to replace the Constitution with Islamic Shariah law.

These local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.

PAT ROBERTSON

NYC MAYOR
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

SAKINEH ASHTIANI

Brazil’s Plea for Asylum for Iranian Facing Stoning
Seems to Fail
By ROBERT F. WORTH
The New York Times: August 3, 2010

WASHINGTON — Iran’s conservative establishment appears to have reacted coldly to an entreaty by Brazil’s president to allow an Iranian woman convicted of adultery to take asylum in Brazil rather than face execution by stoning at home.

The reaction to the plea over the weekend by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may introduce a strain into what has been an increasingly cordial relationship between Iran and Brazil. It also reinforced what critics of Iran view as a barbaric form of justice that is especially repressive toward women.

While no Iranian government officials commented on the Brazilian president’s plea, that it was a “clear interference in Iran’s domestic affairs.”

Jahan News, an ultraconservative news service in Iran that is regarded as credibly reflecting the government’s thinking, said Sunday that the Brazilian offer was made “under the influence of foreign media” and that the defendant, Sakineh Ashtiani, 43,

might not be stoned to death because Iran’s judiciary was reviewing the lower court’s sentence.

She could be hanged instead.

MIGRANT CHILDREN
in Israel

Israelis Divided on Deporting Children
By ISABEL KERSHNER
The New York Times: August 2, 2010

JERUSALEM — Deep divisions emerged here on Monday over the fate of about 400 children of foreign workers who have no legal status in the country and are slated for deportation. The issue has touched on sensitive nerves in Israel, which sees itself as a nation of Jewish refugees and defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state.

The government decision was widely seen here as reasonable, though many said it would be more humanitarian to let the 400 remain. Others saw the decision as a bad precedent that could encourage more foreign workers to put down roots in Israel and threaten the Jewish character of the state.

ANTI-GAY PROTESTORS: Sick Perverts,
Get Out of Jerusalem

IMAM MUDA
CONTESTANTS

A Reality Show Where Islam Is the Biggest Star
By LIZ GOOCH
International Herald Tribune: July 28, 2010

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Bright studio spotlights illuminated the faces of four nervous young men, arms linked as they anxiously awaited their fate. Cameramen stood poised, ready to capture the climactic moment. Finally, the chief judge broke the suspense.

Reality show contestants had their hair and make up done before the filming of the show in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Two of the contestants had been eliminated. The other two had taken a step closer to their dream. Winners and losers, each clad in crisp, dark suits and formal black hats, took turns hugging each other.

The competition is called “Imam Muda,” or “Young Leader” — a Malaysian venture into religious-themed reality TV.

ANISA
Indonesian Ladyboy

Edict Aims at TV and Sex Changes
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
July 28, 2010

JAKARTA, Indonesia (Agence France-Presse) — Indonesia’s highest Islamic authority has followed up a series of contentious edicts with a new one barring Muslims from watching television gossip shows or having sex-change operations.

The authority, the Indonesian Ulema Council, said gossip shows about the intimate details of people’s private lives — a popular genre on Indonesian television — were immoral and threatened society. Gossip shows are allowed only if they “uphold the law, warn the public and help people,” the council said.

While the council’s edicts are usually ignored, they can be cited by religious hard-liners to justify vigilante-style crackdowns on “un-Islamic” activities. It has recently issued a steady stream of edicts including bans on interfaith marriages, smoking and yoga.

It was forced into an embarrassing apology recently when it corrected an edict ordering Muslims to pray toward the west, when in fact the holy sites in Saudi Arabia are northwest of Indonesia.

(Full article)

DAVID BROOKS

PETER RAILTON

MONKEY

CHARLES DARWIN

Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys?
By PETER RAILTON
The New York Times: July 19, 2010

Is the great show we make of morality just a civilized cover for our selfish opportunism?

After being shown proudly around the campus of a prestigious American university built in gothic style, Bertrand Russell is said to have exclaimed, “Remarkable. As near Oxford as monkeys can make.” Much earlier, Immanuel Kant had expressed a less ironic amazement, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe … the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” Today many who look at morality through a Darwinian lens can’t help but find a charming naïveté in Kant’s thought. “Yes, remarkable. As near morality as monkeys can make.”

So the question is, just how near is that? Optimistic Darwinians believe, near enough to be morality. But skeptical Darwinians won’t buy it. The great show we humans make of respect for moral principle they see as a civilized camouflage for an underlying, evolved psychology of a quite different kind.

This skepticism is not, however, your great-grandfather’s Social Darwinism, which saw all creatures great and small as pitted against one another in a life or death struggle to survive and reproduce — “survival of the fittest.” We now know that such a picture seriously misrepresents both Darwin and the actual process of natural selection. Individuals come and go, but genes can persist for 1000 generations or more. Individual plants and animals are the perishable vehicles that genetic material uses to make its way into the next generation (“A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg”). From this perspective, relatives, who share genes, are to that extent not really in evolutionary competition; no matter which one survives, the shared genes triumph. Such “inclusive fitness” predicts the survival, not of selfish individuals, but of “selfish” genes, which tend in the normal range of environments to give rise to individuals whose behavior tends to propel those genes into future.

SHISHA

Hamas Moves to Enforce Water Pipe Ban in Gaza
By FARES AKRAM
The New York Times: July 18, 2010

GAZA — In its latest attempt to try to impose a conservative Islamic way of life on Gaza, Hamas started this weekend to enforce a ban on smoking water pipes in public.

A spokesman for the Hamas police, Ayman al-Batniji, said that the ban applied only to women and that it was in line with “the Palestinian people’s customs and traditions.”

But many cafe owners said they had been ordered to ban water pipes for both men and women.

Smoking large water pipes called shisha, usually with bowls of flavored tobacco, is a longstanding pastime here.

There have also been orders for female lawyers to wear Islamic head scarves in courthouses, men not to work in hairdressing salons catering to women, and girls to wear long Islamic robes at schools, but these orders either have not been enforced or were quickly reversed.

SANTA MUERTE

FRANCISCO CAAMANO
Spanish Justice
Minister

FRANK RICH
Op-ed Columnist

 

MEL GIBSON
Mug shot

HUTTON GIBSON
Mel daddy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Good News About Mel Gibson
By FRANK RICH
The New York Times: July 18, 2010

FOR Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy’s couldn’t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.”

There’s little we enjoy more than watching a pampered zillionaire icon (Gibson’s production company is actually named Icon) brought low. The story would end there — just another tidy morality tale in the profuse annals of Hollywood self-destruction from Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan — were it not for Gibson’s unique back story.

Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today.

Does anyone remember 2004? It seems a civilization ago. That less-than-vintage year was in retrospect the nadir of the American war over “values.” The kickoff fracas was Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, which prompted a new crackdown against televised “indecency” by the Federal Communications Commission. By December Fox News and its allies were fomenting hysteria about a supposed war on Christmas, with Newt Gingrich warning of a nefarious secular plot “to abolish the word Christmas” altogether and Jerry Falwell attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg for using the euphemism “holiday tree” at the annual tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center. In between these discrete culture wars came a presidential election in which the Bush-Rove machine tried to whip up evangelical turnout by sowing panic over gay marriage.

It was into that tinderbox of America 2004 that Gibson tossed his self-financed and self-directed movie about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.” The epic was timed to detonate in the nation’s multiplexes on Ash Wednesday, after one of the longest and most divisive promotional campaigns in Hollywood history.

Gibson is in such disgrace today that it’s hard to fathom all the fuss he and his biblical epic engendered back then. The commotion began with the revelation that his father, Hutton, was a prominent and vociferous Holocaust denier and that both father and son were proselytizers for a splinter sect of Roman Catholicism that rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including the lifting of the “Christ-killers” libel from the Jews. Jewish leaders and writers understandably worried that “The Passion” might be as anti-Semitic as the Passion plays of old. Gibson’s response was to hold publicity screenings for the right-wing media and political establishment....

Once “The Passion” could be seen by ticket buyers — who would reward it with a $370 million domestic take (behind only “Shrek 2” and “Spider-Man 2” that year) — the truth could no longer be spun by Gibson’s claque. The movie was nakedly anti-Semitic, to the extreme that the Temple priests were all hook-nosed Shylocks and Fagins with rotten teeth. It was also ludicrously violent — a homoerotic “exercise in lurid sadomasochism,” as Christopher Hitchens described it then, for audiences who “like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.” Nonetheless, many of the same American pastors who routinely inveighed against show-business indecency granted special dispensation to their young congregants to attend this R-rated fleshfest.

It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.

BISHOP
MARIA JEPSEN

Germany: First Female Elected Lutheran Bishop Quits in Handling of Abuse Complaint
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 16, 2010

The first woman ever elected as a Lutheran bishop said Friday that she had resigned from her post in northern Germany amid accusations that she failed to thoroughly investigate reports of a sexually abusive pastor. In a statement, Bishop Maria Jepsen, 65, said that questions about her credibility had led her to feel that she was no longer able “to spread the good word, as I vowed to do at my ordination.” She was elected bishop of the Lutheran church in northern Germany in 1992, the first woman worldwide to hold the post. She insisted that she could not recall being told of the abuse by a priest in the northern town of Ahrensburg. Hundreds of people claiming sexual and physical abuse of children by Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy have come forward in Germany since January.

(Full article)

TOLL RISES
in Teheran

DAVID ROTEM

The Diaspora Need Not Apply
By ALANA NEWHOUSE
The New York Times: July 15, 2010

WHO is a Jew? If developments this week are any indication, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, might soon offer an official, surprising answer: almost no one.

On Monday, a Knesset committee approved a bill sponsored by David Rotem, a member of the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, that would give the Orthodox rabbinate control of all conversions in Israel. If passed, this legislation would place authority over all Jewish births, marriages and deaths — and, through them, the fundamental questions of Jewish identity — in the hands of a small group of ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, rabbis.

The move has set in motion a sectarian battle that is not only dividing Israeli society but threatening to sever the vital connection between Israel and the American Jewish diaspora.

The problem is not simply that some of these rabbinical functionaries, who are paid by the state and courted by politicians, are demonstrably corrupt. (To take the most salacious of a slew of examples, an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.) Rather, it is that the beliefs of a tiny minority of the world’s Jews are on the verge of becoming the Israeli government’s definition of Judaism, for all Jews.

It is hard to exaggerate the possible ramifications, first and foremost for Jewish Israelis. Rivkah Lubitch, an Orthodox woman who is a lawyer in Israel’s rabbinic court system, painted a harrowing picture of the future in a recent column on the Israeli Web site Ynet.

“Even if you didn’t go to register for marriage, and even if you didn’t go to a rabbinic court for any reason, and even if you didn’t pass by a rabbinic court when you walked down the street — the rabbinic court can summon you, conduct a hearing about your Jewishness and revoke it,” she wrote. “In effect, the entire nation of Israel is presumed to be Not-Jewish — until proven otherwise.”

Why are the rabbis doing this? What is driving this process is the desire of a small group of rabbis to expand their authority from narrow questions of conversion to larger questions of Jewish identity. Since what goes for conversion also goes for all other clerical acts, only a few anointed rabbis will be able to determine the authenticity of one’s marriage, divorce, birth, death — and every rite in between.

Bombers Strike in Uganda at Gatherings for World Cup
By JOSH KRON
The New York Times: July 12, 2010

KAMPALA, Uganda - At least three bombs exploded Sunday in a synchronized attack on large gatherings of World Cup soccer fans watching the finals on outdoor screens in this normally peaceful capital, turning a boisterous night of cheering into scenes of death and panic. The police and witnesses said more than fifty people were killed.

The bombs exploded Sunday in a synchronized attack on crowds watching the televised final on outdoor screens in this normally peaceful capital, police officials said on Monday.

Ugandan police officials said they suspected that the Shabab, a militant Islamic group in nearby Somalia, might have been behind the bombings. If so, it would be that group’s first attack outside Somalia. But the police said it was premature to draw conclusions.

The Shabab, one of the more fearsome militias vying for power in Somalia, ban music, dancing and sports, have links to Al Qaeda and have repeatedly threatened targets in Uganda as well as in Burundi because both countries contribute to the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, a lawless nation in the Horn of Africa.

DAVID BERKOWITZ
'Son of Sam'

ALI AKBAR
MOUSAVI KHOINI

Clerics to Work Within Schools of Iran’s Capital
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times: July 12, 2010

Iran’s educational authorities will send 1,000 religious clerics into schools in Tehran to tamp down Western influence and political opposition, newspapers reported on Sunday.

The newspapers quoted the deputy director of Tehran’s education department, Mohammad Boniadi, as saying that the clerics would start work at schools in the capital in September to make students “aware of opposition plots.”

Mr. Boniadi did not say what grade levels would be affected, but a similar plan was put into place in elementary, middle and high schools immediately after the 1979 revolution. At that time, thousands of “morality teachers” were sent to schools to promote the government ideology.

Last month, the government reinstituted its ban against teaching music in schools, which was imposed after the revolution but had been lifted in recent years, the semiofficial ILNA news agency reported. Cultural authorities have also issued guidelines for permissible male haircuts.

Last year’s protests, Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoini, a former reformist member of the Iranian Parliament, said, showed that despite efforts to Islamize universities for several years, youths had already developed their own political and cultural views.

YURI SAMODUROV

ANDREI YEROFEYEV

ALEXANDER
KOSOLAPOV

PATRIARCH KIRILL

SAKINEH ASHTIANI

Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, Iran Mother, Could Be Stoned To Death At Any Moment
By Nicholas Sabloff
Huffington Post: 07-6-10

A 42-year-old mother of two faces the punishment of death by stoning in Iran after authorities convicted her of adultery. And according to Mina Ahadi, who heads the International Committee Against Stoning and the Death Penalty, only international pressure can help save her.

As Ahadi told CNN: "Legally it's all over. It's a done deal. Sakineh can be stoned at any minute."

The woman, Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani, who is from Tabriz, was convicted of "adultery while being married" in 2006 and has already received a punishment of 99 lashes. Should the execution go forward, Ashtiani will be buried up to her chest (for men it is to the waist) and then pelted with stones that are large enough to inflict severe damage but no so large as to kill the person instantly, says Amnesty International, citing Article 104 of Iran's Penal Code.

Here's how Ashtiani's case reached this point, as reported in the Guardian:

Sakineh already endured a sentence of 99 lashes, but her case was re-opened when a court in Tabriz suspected her of murdering her husband. She was acquitted, but the adultery charge was reviewed and a death penalty handed down on the basis of "judge's knowledge" - a loophole that allows for subjective judicial rulings where no conclusive evidence is present.

Mohammad Mostafaei told CNN last week that Ashtiani may not have been fully capable of understanding the court proceedings due to the fact that she speaks Turkish and not Farsi.

Her son Sajad told the Guardian recently, "She's innocent, she's been there for five years for doing nothing."

Amnesty International, citing Ashtiani's case among others, called for Iran to halt all executions last week.

(Full article)

KEVIN GRAY

ISLAMIC CUT
Iran

 

 

A Little Off the Top? Only if Tehran Approves
By ROBERT F. WORTH
The New York Times: July 6, 2010

WASHINGTON — The photos, disseminated on Iran’s semiofficial news sites, look ordinary enough: young men with short haircuts, some with 1950s-style quiffs and a touch of gel on top.

But these haircuts are not just a summer fashion. They are being promoted by Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance as Islamically permissible models, part of an effort “to halt the spread of unconventional styles and promote Islamic culture.” More styles are set to be unveiled Sunday as part of the ministry’s Veil and Chastity Day festival.

The haircut catalog is part of the Iranian government’s long-running battle against Western cultural influence. Every summer, the country’s morality police renew their crackdown on “un-Islamic” dress and styles, including loose veils on women and long hair or ponytails on men.

IMMANUEL KANT

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

You Say God Is Dead? There’s an App for That
By PAUL VITELLO
The New York Times: July 3, 2010

An explosion of smart-phone software has placed an arsenal of trivia at the fingertips of every corner-bar debater, with talking points on sports, politics and how to kill a zombie. Now it is taking on the least trivial topic of all: God.

Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle.

“Say someone calls you narrow-minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God,” says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. “Your first answer should be: ‘What do you mean by narrow-minded?’ ”

For religious skeptics, the “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” to be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”

The war of ideas between believers and nonbelievers has been part of the Western tradition at least since Socrates. For the most part, it has been waged by intellectual giants: Augustine, Spinoza, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.

Yet for good or ill, combatants entering the lists today are mainly everyday people, drawn in part by the popularity of books like Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great.”

The fierceness of their debate reflects the fractious talk-show culture unintentionally described so aptly in the title of the Glenn Beck best seller “Arguing With Idiots.”

"We’d be better off if these people were studying Nietzsche and Kant,” said Michael Beaty, chairman of the philosophy department at Baylor University.

AFSHAN ASAD

MEL GIBSON

OKSANA GRIGORIEVA

'Cruel' Mel Gibson unleashed racist tirade against his baby mama: report
Todd Venezia
POST WIRE SERVICES: July 1, 2010

In a series of expletive-laced outbursts caught on tape, actor Mel Gibson reportedly told his baby mama that the way she was dressed would get her "raped by a pack of n------," according to a new report.

The jaw-dropping tapes, obtained by RadarOnline.com, are the latest chapter in the couple's bitter legal feud. Gibson's vile comments, caught on audio tape, are a mix of racist and misogynist statements aimed at former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, RadarOnline reported.

"You're an embarrassment to me," Mel told her at one point. "You look like a f---ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n-------, it will be your fault."

The self-styled conservative Catholic thought that she was going out in a too-revealing outfit.

He then warned her: "I am going to come and burn the f---ing house down ... but you will blow me first," according to RadarOnline.

ALABAMA

GOV. BOB RILEY

FLORIDA

LT. GOV.
JEFF KOTTKAMP

LOUISIANA

GOV. BOBBY JINDAL

MISSISSIPPI

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR

TEXAS

GOV. RICK PERRY

JEREMIAH WRIGHT

STEPHEN NAMAN

American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
The New York Times: June 26, 2010

One day nearly 20 years ago, Stephen Naman was preparing to help the rabbi of his Reform Jewish temple in South Carolina move the congregation into a new building. Mr. Naman had just one request: Could the rabbi stop placing the flag of Israel on the altar?

Stephen Naman, president of the American Council for Judaism, which was formed in 1942.
“We don’t go to synagogue to pray to a flag,” Mr. Naman, 63, recalled having said in a recent telephone interview.
That rabbi acceded to the request. So, after being transferred to North Carolina and joining a temple there six or seven years later, Mr. Naman asked its rabbi to remove the Israeli flag. This time, the reaction was more predictable.

“The rabbi said that would be terrible,” recounted Mr. Naman, a retired paper company executive who now lives outside Jacksonville, Fla., “and that he’d be embarrassed to be rabbi of such a congregation.”

The arguments that the council has consistently levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence over the last decade, with the collapse of the Oslo peace process, Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and most recently the fatal attack on a flotilla seeking to breach the naval blockade of the Hamas regime. One need not agree with any of the council’s positions to admit that, for a certain faction of American Jews, they have come back into style.

“My sense is that they believe that events are proving they were right all along,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a historian at Brandeis University and author of the seminal book “American Judaism,” said in a telephone interview. “Everything they prophesied — dual loyalty, nationalism being evil — has come to pass.”

If the 1967 and 1973 wars shoved the council toward obsolescence, then Israel’s controversial wars since 2000 have brought it back from the grave.

Pakistan: Web to Be Watched for Anti-Islamic Content
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: June 25, 2010

Pakistan will monitor seven major Web sites, including Google and Yahoo, to block anti-Islamic links and content, an official said Friday. Seventeen lesser-known sites are being blocked outright, said Khurram Mehran, a spokesman for the government’s Telecommunication Authority. In May, Pakistan placed a temporary ban on Facebook for the same reason. That ban and the move announced Friday were in response to court orders. The sites to be monitored are Yahoo, Google, MSN, Hotmail, YouTube, Amazon and Bing.

Any link to offensive content will be “blocked immediately without disturbing the main Web site,” Mr. Mehran said.

(Full article)

WOLGANG PUTZ

PAKISTAN'S
BURQA DRAMA

Pakistan Bans a Satirical Play on the Burqa
The New York Times: June 22, 2010

For some, "Burqavaganza" is a funny love story in the time of jihad. For others, it mocks Islam. The government's recent ban on the play highlights Pakistan's liberal-conservative divide.

BURQAVAGANZA: A love Story in the Time of Jihad