WASHINGTON (ABP) — The National Association of Evangelicals and Evangelical Environmental Network set aside Sunday, July 18, as a "National Day of Prayer for the Gulf."

Mitch Hescox, president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, said he realized a national day of prayer was needed after traveling to the Gulf area a few weeks ago and visiting with fisherman concerned about their future.

"Real people, everyday people, will continue to be ravaged in the aftermath of Deep Water Horizon," Hescox said. "We realize that the oil spew may be ending, but the affects will last for decades."

"Today is a beginning, a new day in prayer, thanksgiving and hope for this human caused disaster," he continued. "The beginning starts where it should start by seeking God in prayer in the National Day of Prayer for the Gulf. This day focuses on how, we the American church, came together with God’s children in the Gulf and His creation that is desperately groaning."

"The BP Oil Spill is a slow onset disaster," the National Association of Evangelicals said in a statement on its website. "As oil continues to spew into the Gulf, the ocean currents spread poisons over a larger and larger area. Oil has invaded the marshes destroying entire ecosystems of living organisms. Even attempts to clean up the mess have created new problems. Those hired for the cleanup are being subjected to health hazards. The dispersants used to break up the oil are themselves toxic and may be causing long-term damage to the ocean life — fish, shrimp, oysters, and crabs — on which coastal residents depend for food and livelihood."

"As Christians, we are compelled to respond to those hurting from the disaster, and our first response is prayer," the statement continued. "The NAE asks its churches to observe July 18, 2010 as the National Day of Prayer for the Gulf by setting aside time in their weekend services to pray for the people of the Gulf, the Lord's intervention and deliverance, and the impacts of the oil spill on God's creation."

Hescox also announced "The 100,000² Initiative," a goal to connect 100,000 churches with 100,000 hurting Gulf families. He said a game plan for matching up congregations and families would be forthcoming.

In the meantime, Hescox suggested that Christians with vacations planned for the Gulf not cancel or change their plans. "We encourage you to have a sacrificial vacation in the Gulf to support your brothers and sisters," he said. "They need you."

—Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty filed legal papers July 6 arguing that inviting religious leaders to invoke sectarian prayers a North Carolina county's board of commissioners meetings is unconstitutional.

The BJC filed a brief of amicus curiae urging the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to uphold Jan. 28 ruling by a U.S. district judge that prayers used to open or solemnize meetings of the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Amicus curiae, a Latin term meaning "friend of the court," is the name used for a brief filed with the court by someone who is not a party to the case. The BJC an organization representing 15 national and regional Baptist groups on matters related to religious liberty and the separation of church and state, reminded the court of a 1983 Supreme Court case, Marsh v. Chambers, which found "legislative prayers" constitutional only if they are non-sectarian and do not favor one religion over another.

The BJC brief said that of 33 prayers recorded between May 29, 2007, and Dec. 15, 2008, all but seven contained at least one reference to Jesus Christ and none invoked a deity associated with a faith other than Christianity.

The BJC urged the court to stick with Marsh precedent used by the Supreme Court and reject the county's suggestion to abandon Marsh and rely instead on a lower-court ruling that the First Amendment does not prohibit sectarian legislative prayers as long as speakers from a variety of faiths are offered the chance to deliver them.

Hollyn Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee, said protecting both Religion Clauses of the First Amendment — no establishment and free exercise — is the way to protect religious liberty for everyone.

"The Supreme Court has upheld legislative prayer, but that should not be misconstrued to allow someone to exploit the prayer opportunity in a way that advances a particular religion," Hollman said. "We all should pray for our government officials, but we should not ask the government to supply a platform to promote religion in a business meeting."

A similar controversy has been brewing in Waco, Texas. After weeks of discussion, McLennan County commissioners voted July 6 to begin their meetings with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.

The decision came after commissioners sought legal advice and community input about how to conduct prayers in a way that includes all faiths and protects the county from potential lawsuits.

–Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

WASHINGTON (ABP) — A closely divided Supreme Court, in a June 28 ruling that resolved few major constitutional questions, said the University of California’s law school could refuse to offer the benefits of official registration to a Christian student group because the club discriminates on the basis of religion and sexual orientation.

The justices, in a 5-4 decision, said that the university’s San Francisco-based Hastings College of Law does not have to exempt its chapter of the Christian Legal Society from a campus policy that bars officially recognized student groups from denying membership or leadership positions on the basis of religion or sexual orientation.

“In requiring CLS — in common with all other student organizations — to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who authored the court’s majority opinion “CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings’ policy.”

Ginsburg was joined in the majority opinion for Christian Legal Society v. Martinez by fellow left-leaning justices John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor as well as centrist swing justice Anthony Kennedy.

The court’s four conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts and associate justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — formed the minority. Alito, in a sharply worded dissenting opinion, said the ruling was a setback for freedom of expression.

“Our proudest boast of our free-speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate,’” Alito said, quoting a previous Supreme Court decision on free speech. “Today’s decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country’s institutions of higher learning.”

Origins of case

The case began when, in 2004, a previously registered Christian student club at Hastings decided to affiliate with the national Christian Legal Society. That meant adopting governing documents requiring chapter members to affirm an orthodox Christian statement of faith as well as barring members who engage in “unrepentant” sexual acts outside of a heterosexual marriage.

In the process of re-registering, the chapter asked for exemptions from the religion and sexual-orientation aspects of the non-discrimination rules. But the school denied the exemption, saying the non-discrimination requirement is a neutral rule that applies to all student groups and it would be unfair to treat the society differently.

The society — a national networking organization for Christian judges, attorneys and law students — sued, saying the denial was a violation of its rights of association and comprised viewpoint discrimination against its religious views.

But the majority disagreed. “CLS’s conduct — not its Christian perspective — is, from Hastings’ vantage point, what stands between the group and RSO [registered student organization] status,” Ginsburg wrote.

In his dissent, Alito countered that requiring religious groups to accept people from other religions as members in order to enjoy state benefits was itself discriminatory. “The State of California surely could not demand that all Christian groups admit members who believe that Jesus was merely human. Jewish groups could not be required to admit anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Muslim groups could not be forced to admit persons who are viewed as slandering Islam,” he wrote. “While there can be no question that the State of California could not impose such restrictions on all religious groups in the state, the court now holds that Hastings, a state institution, may impose these very same requirements on students who wish to participate in a forum that is designed to foster the expression of diverse viewpoints.”

Stevens counters dissenters

But Stevens — in his last day sitting on the court prior to retirement — wrote separately from the majority to take on the dissenters’ arguments.

“In the dissent’s view, by refusing to grant CLS an exemption from the non-discrimination policy, Hastings violated CLS’s rights, for by proscribing unlawful discrimination on the basis of religion, the policy discriminates unlawfully on the basis of religion,” he wrote. “There are numerous reasons why this counterintuitive theory is unsound. Although the First Amendment may protect CLS’s discriminatory practices off campus, it does not require a public university to validate or support them.”

Stevens admitted that “the policy may end up having greater consequence for religious groups” because “they are more likely than their secular counterparts to wish to exclude students of particular faiths.”

However, he continued, “there is likewise no evidence that the policy was intended to cause harm to religious groups, or that it has in practice caused significant harm to their operations. And it is a basic tenet of First Amendment law that disparate impact does not, in itself, constitute viewpoint discrimination.”

The decision returns the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a separate determination of whether the “all-comers” policy that Hastings created — and that the court weighed in this case — was established or applied fairly. CLS attorneys have argued that it was not.

Many conservative groups had hoped for a broader ruling clarifying the rights of religious student organizations when it comes to non-discrimination policies and state benefits. A spokesman for one Christian legal group expressed frustration with the ruling’s narrow focus on Hastings’ stated policy

“We will keep litigating these issues,” said Jordan Lawrence of the Alliance Defense Fund. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not resolve very much with this issue; there’s a lot of litigation left to do over the rights of private organizations to make sure that their leadership agrees with the common message that organizations advocate.”

The case is No. 08-1371.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Read more:

Supreme Court’s opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez

Previous ABP story:

Supreme Court to deal with rights of religious groups at state schools (12/7/2009)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (ABP) — The culture warriors who contend that the United States is a “Christian nation” gravely endanger freedoms sacred to both Christianity and the nation, Mercer University President Bill Underwood warned supporters of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty June 25.

Underwood’s warning came during the BJC’s annual Religious Liberty Council luncheon at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly meeting in Charlotte, N.C. The group — the BJC's individual-donor wing — also elected new officers and honored legendary African-American Baptist pastor Gardner Taylor.

Underwood noted that, when he was a young boy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a broad consensus in the United States about the value of church-state separation “as one of the cornerstones of liberty — as perhaps America’s greatest contribution to democratic theory,” he said.

As an example of that consensus, he quoted legendary conservative mega-pastor W.A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas in 1960 saying that the Framers wrote “into our Constitution that church and state must be, in this nation, forever separate and free.”

But the church-state consensus, he noted, broke down quickly after Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 banned government-sanctioned prayers in public schools. With the rise of the Religious Right as a national political force in the 1970s and 80s, some began to question the appropriateness of church-state separation at all.

By 1984, Underwood observed, Criswell himself had changed his tune dramatically. During the Republican National Convention that year, he said, “I believe this notion of the separation of church and state was the figment of some infidel’s imagination.”

But such stridency is unnecessary, Underwood contended — because the Supreme Court hasn’t kicked God out of schools, and because government-sponsored religion is itself an affront to both Christianity and the Constitution.

He noted that doubts about church-state separation have crept into the highest levels of government — with Supreme Court justices claiming in minority opinions that it’s perfectly fine for the government to favor religion over non-religion and prominent politicians denigrating church-state separation.

He quoted former GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin from a May appearance on Fox News in which she said that policy makers should return “to what our founders and our founding documents meant — they're quite clear — that we would create law based on the God of the bible and the Ten Commandments.”

Underwood begged to differ. “The United States Constitution is a secular document. It makes no mention of God, a Creator or a Supreme Being of any sort. It doesn’t mention the Bible,” he said. “Nor is it true that our legal system is founded on the Ten Commandments. To the contrary, our laws don’t prohibit blasphemy, coveting, lying, adultery or failing to honor our parents.”

But, he said, although adherents of the view that America is a Christian nation are “wrong about our history and wrong about our Constitution,” such “Christian nationalists are nonetheless gaining ground.” He referred to polls that majorities of Americans believe the founders wrote Christianity into the Constitution, that America is a Christian nation and that teachers in public schools should be allowed to lead their students in prayer.

“These views are the result of a relentless campaign by Christian nationalists to rewrite our nation’s history,” Underwood said. “This fight for narrative control of American history has now expanded beyond home schools and some private Christian academies to our public schools, with the Texas State Board of Education seeking to place an ideological imprint on history, social-studies and science courses — including writing separation of church and state out of the history lessons taught to future generations of Americans.”

Which God, which prayers?

Legendary preacher and civil-rights leader Gardner Taylor (left) receives the Baptist Joint Committee’s J.M. Dawson Religious Liberty Award. At right is Taylor’s friend and the BJC's longtime executive director, James Dunn. (BJC photo)

If “Christian nationalists” triumph by gaining ground on the Supreme Court and changing long-standing interpretations of the Constitution, Underwood said, what would a “Christian nation” look like? If government-sanctioned prayer returned in public schools, for instance, what would the prayers say?

“I suppose it will depend on which Christian God we are praying to,” Underwood said. “Will we pray to the God of wrath and vengeance that many Christians worship — the God who two prominent Baptist clerics credited with bringing the 9/11 attack as revenge for America supporting the agenda ‘of the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists and the gays and

lesbians,’” he said, referring to an on-air conversation between broadcaster Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell in the days after Sept. 11, 2001.

“Or will we pray to the very different God of love and grace that many other Christians worship?” Underwood added, saying those Christians are the ones who tend to take Jesus seriously when he enjoins believers from showy public prayer rituals.

“Who will write the prayers?” he asked. He said that, once elected officials become involved, political fights over which official prayers or interpretations of Bible passages are allowed would cause the current partisan acrimony to pale in comparison to elections that hinge on theological differences.

“Why would we want to trade the strength, vitality and authenticity of religious experience in America for the empty edifice of state religion?” Underwood asked. “Is our goal to change people’s hearts — or to twist their arms?”

Dawson Awards

After Underwood’s speech, BJC officials gave both Underwood and Gardner Taylor their J.M. Dawson Religious Liberty Award. Taylor is the retired pastor of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, N.Y., and has repeatedly been honored as one of the nation’s best pulpiteers and called by Time magazine the “dean of the nation’s black preachers.” A leader in the Civil Rights Movement and one of the founders of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Taylor is also a longtime supporter of the BJC.

In other business, members of the Religious Liberty Council re-elected their officers — co-chairs Mark Wiggs of Mississippi and Mary Elizabeth Hanchey of North Carolina and secretary Reba Cobb of Kentucky. They also elected and re-elected board members. Marc Heflin of Arkansas, Ashlee Ross of Texas and Gary Walker of Florida were re-elected to three year terms. Mark Edwards of North Carolina, Mandy Tyler of Texas and Joe Cutter of Kansas were elected to their first terms on the board.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—When seventh-grader Raymond Hosier was suspended for wearing rosary beads to school in May, civil rights groups rushed to his defense.

“Without question, the continuing action taken by the school district in punishing Raymond for wearing a rosary to school violates the constitutional rights of our client,” argued Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice.

After Sekulow filed a lawsuit, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order June 1, telling Oneida Middle School and the school district in Schenectady, N.Y., to allow Hosier, 13, to wear the rosary to class.

Like school principals and superintendents in other states, including Texas, California, Oregon and Virginia, Oneida officials say the no-rosary-beads rule is necessary to “protect students from violence and gangs.”

They have a point, according to gang experts. After schools began banning gang-related bandanas, clothing and hairstyles about a decade ago, students have turned to rosaries as a subtle and often First-Amendment-protected way to signal gang allegiance.

“With the introduction of strict dress codes and the use of uniforms in the school systems, these type of indicators seem to be favored by the gangsters,” the San Antonio Police Department says in a handbook about gang awareness.

Gangsters not only wear certain colors—reds for Bloods, blues for Crips, for example—they also arrange the beads to signal their rank in the gang, and they teach young members to plead religious freedom if they’re hauled into the principal’s office, said Jared Lewis, a former police officer in California who worked in public schools.

“You are often dealing with gang members who have no inkling or cares about the religious significance of the rosary beads,” said Lewis, who now runs Know Gangs, a training group for law enforcement officials. “They are just trying to skirt around school rules under the guise of a religious symbol.”

No one is sure which gang started the trend of wearing rosaries, said Robert Walker, a former head of the gang-identification unit for the South Carolina Department of Corrections. Like a lot of gang fads, he said, it likely started in California and migrated east.

“One gang started it. Who it was, nobody knows. Another gang saw it and thought it was cool, and started using it, too,” Walker said. “These things just evolve.”

In Roman Catholic parlance, the Rosary refers to a sequence of prayers and meditations on the life of Jesus, although the word often is used outside the church to refer to the circlet of beads, as well.

Each of the beads, usually 55 or 155, represents a prayer—a Hail Mary, Our Father or Glory Be—and is grouped in sets of 10 with a crucifix hanging from a pendant. The beads help mark which prayers have been recited and guide the supplicant through the life of Jesus.

Rosaries fell out of favor among Protestants because the Roman Catholic Church used them to promote indulgences—papal dispensation from time in purgatory. After the Reformation, the beads became a defiant emblem for Catholic monks and nuns to wear outside their habits and a tactile tool for missionaries to pass on the faith—particularly in Latin America.

Now, Latino gangsters are the most frequent—and creative—wearers of rosaries, said Lewis. The Latin Kings, for example, use colors to signal members’ rank in the hierarchy—five black and five gold beads for members; two gold beads for top dogs. Assassins wear all black.

The Netas, an East Coast gang founded in Puerto Rico, wear 78 red, white and blue beads to symbolize the 78 towns in Puerto Rico.

Prospective members wear all white beads until they join the gang.

Lewis noted he sympathizes with principals who are torn between respecting religious rights and preventing gang wars in their schools.

“We live in a country where, obviously, people should be able to do and say what they want,” he said. “At the same time, if something happens on school grounds, the school principal is going to be held liable for not keeping students safe.”

WASHINGTON (ABP) — President Obama has responded to more than a year of speculation and criticism among advocates for international religious freedom by naming an American Baptist pastor and motivational speaker as the nation’s top diplomat for religious freedom.

But some international-religious-freedom advocates are questioning the nomination of Suzan Johnson Cook as the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom because of her lack of professional experience in foreign policy.

On June 15, the White House announced that Obama had tapped Johnson Cook for the post, which had remained vacant since Obama’s inauguration nearly a year and a half ago.

Johnson Cook has been a teacher, pastor, motivational speaker and political adviser for three decades. Most recently, she served as the founding pastor of Bronx Christian Fellowship Baptist Church in New York.

Before founding that congregation, from 1983 to 1996, Johnson Cook was pastor of the historic Mariners’ Temple Baptist Church in New York — which meets on the oldest Baptist worship site in Manhattan, dating to 1795.

Mariners’ Temple and Bronx Christian Fellowship are both aligned with American Baptist Churches USA, and Johnson Cook’s ordination is through the denomination.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a statement praising the choice. “Dr. Johnson Cook is an experienced religious leader with a passion for human rights and an impressive record of public service,” she said. “President Obama could not have found a more fitting choice for this important position.”

Johnson Cook’s name had been floated for months as a potential choice for the long-vacant post. But the pick may not have placated activists for global religious liberty, many of whom have accused the administration of soft-pedaling the issue since Obama and Clinton took office.

Thomas Farr, who served as the first director of the office Cook will oversee if she is confirmed, praised her resume as a pastor, but told Religion News Service that the position really needs someone with a strong grasp of, and experience in, the complex field of foreign policy.

“If the Obama administration were taking this issue seriously, it would choose an expert in international religious freedom with experience in foreign affairs. It would choose a proven leader who can change things at the State Department and re-energize our flagging [religious-freedom] policy,” he said. “Perhaps Rev. Cook will surprise the skeptics and prove to be that leader. I hope so, and will certainly do everything I can to help her.”

Robert Seiple, who served as the first international-religious-freedom ambassador after the position was created by a 1998 law, said the job is a delicate one even for experts in the field.

‘‘You don’t get a lot of grace in the State Department for on-the-job training,” he said, according to RNS. “Hopefully, she will have access to the powers that be and will have a chance to learn what she doesn’t know and be supported on this issue.”

A White House spokesman said June 17 that, because she still must be confirmed to her position by the Senate, Johnson Cook was not availble for an interview.

Johnson Cook holds degrees from Emerson College, Columbia University, Union Theological Seminary and United Theological Seminary. She is the owner of Charisma Speakers and has served since 1990 as a chaplain for the New York Police Department. She advised President Bill Clinton on race relations and also advised Obama when he was a senator. The New York Times has called her one of the best preachers in New York and described her as “Billy Graham and Oprah rolled into one.”

On June 15 Obama also named another prominent Baptist pastor to an independent federal panel — created by the same law as the ambassador’s position — that monitors religious freedom worldwide. He appointed William Shaw, pastor of White Rock Baptist Church in Philadelphia and immediate past president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Previous ABP story:

Independent panel criticizes Obama, Bush, Clinton on religious freedom (4/30/2010)

WASHINGTON (ABP) — New allegations that physicians working for the United States government engaged in medical experimentation on terrorism suspects has led a group of religious leaders to, once again, demand that President Obama convene a high-profile panel to investigate the subject.

If the allegations are investigated and proven, they could constitute violations of international ethical and legal standards that were put in place in response to the horrific experiments that Nazi doctors carried out on prisoners during the Holocaust.

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture called for a formal federal inquiry into the George W. Bush administration’s practices in interrogating detainees captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The calls came in response to the release of a report by Physicians for Human Rights detailing allegations of medical experimentation on detainees submitted to what supporters call “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what opponents label torture.

“We have adamantly opposed and consistently spoken out against U.S.-sponsored torture. Torture is immoral and abhorrent, violating the teachings of all our religious traditions,” said a June 7 statement from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. “Just as adamantly, we now condemn these alleged acts of illegal and immoral experimentation. Separate and distinct from the torture, such medical experiments could themselves constitute war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.”

The Physicians for Human Rights report alleges that doctors monitored, studied and gathered information on detainees subjected to at least two interrogation techniques that government officials have acknowledged they used after 9/11: sleep deprivation and the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

“This activity on multiple levels was a violation of professional ethics,” said Scott Allen, the report’s main medical author and co-director of the Brown University Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, in a June 7 conference call with reporters. “It all goes back to the bad deal some doctors appear to have made with administration lawyers where the lawyers, in effect, said, ‘We’ll say this is not torture if you doctors keep it safe.’

“By its nature, torture can’t be kept safe.”

The report — based on information the researchers gleaned from redacted CIA and military documents — says government doctors collected data on the techniques in order to help administration lawyers craft guidelines for future interrogation sessions. The guidelines would help the interrogators avoid crossing a line into illegal torture, as defined by Bush lawyers.

For instance, the report notes, CIA officials used medical data gathered from past interrogations and advice from medical professionals to experiment in using salt water in waterboarding sessions. The experiment was an attempt to decrease the likelihood that prisoners would suffer hyperhydration (or “water poisoning”) from ingesting excessive amounts of fresh water.

Such data-gathering and experimentation itself is both unethical and illegal, the report’s authors contended.

“A core principle of medical ethics is to do no harm. When it comes to torture, medical professionals have done profound harm. This report proposes that this harm includes unethical and illegal research,” said Allen Keller, a medical professor at New York University and director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. “As a scientist and a physician that cares for torture victims, I find these acts untenable; they call for a full investigation.”

While Obama rescinded the most controversial of the Bush-era interrogation policies and his Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor to probe alleged CIA interrogation abuses, NRCAT members and other torture opponents have repeatedly said Obama hasn’t gone far enough to investigate the abuses. They renewed their calls for the president to appoint a special panel of inquiry to expose the truth about the interrogation techniques.

“These revelations are profoundly disturbing and raise for us the question of what more remains hidden,” said the NRCAT press release. “The spiritual health of our nation will continue to suffer until the full truth opens a path to the justice and healing that our nation so desperately needs.”

Physicians for Human Rights’ Allen noted that the group’s allegations are based on government documents that were “heavily redacted, heavily blocked out” before they were declassified.

“This evidence may well be the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Previous ABP stories:

Torture opponents renew calls for inquest after release of CIA report (8/25/2009)

Religious leaders call for inquiry into U.S. use of torture (6/16/2009)

Read more:

Physicians For Human Rights reports on torture/enhanced interrogation techniques

NRCAT video on medical-experimentation allegations

LAS VEGAS (ABP) — A simple metal-pipe cross in the middle of the Mojave Desert that inspired a passionate Supreme Court debate about religious freedom has reportedly been stolen.

The cross — successor to one first erected as a World War I memorial in 1934 — stood atop Sunrise Rock, next to a road in a remote part of California’s Mojave National Preserve. The location is about 70 miles south of Las Vegas and 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Several news agencies — including The Los Angeles Times, The Las Vegas Sun and the Associated Press — reported May 11 that the cross disappeared at some point late May 9 or early May 10.

Although several crosses erected by private groups have stood on the spot over the years, the most recent version was built of painted metal pipes by a local resident in 1998. Federal officials covered it with a plywood box to comply with court orders while the monument’s fate wound its way through the courts.

According to the AP report, National Park Service officials said the crime was discovered May 10 when a service employee was sent to replace the wooden box, which itself had been destroyed by vandals over the weekend prior to the theft.

The employee discovered the cross missing, with the bolts that had connected it to its concrete mount cut.

Motives for the theft, the Park Service said, could range from a protest against the April 28 Supreme Court ruling in the cross’s favor to a case of common thieves seeking scrap metal.

But a conservative religious legal group that argued in favor of the cross declared the theft vandalism and appealed for funds to erect a replacement in a website posting May 11. The Liberty Institute noted, as part of its appeal, that the legal wrangling over the cross isn’t finished.

“While the memorial was temporarily saved by the Supreme Court's ruling April 28, the case isn't over yet,” the statement said. “The court's opinion says that the lower court erred in striking down a congressional act that would transfer the land on which the memorial sits into VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] hands, and sends the case back to the lower court so they can correct their ruling.”

The Liberty Institute and the VFW, the American Legion and several other veterans’ organizations are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the capture of those responsible for the theft.

Groups that opposed the cross standing on government land denounced the crime. Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued on behalf of the retired National Park Service employee who originally sued to remove the cross from the preserve, told the AP, “We believe in the rule of law and we think the proper way to resolve to any controversy about the cross is through the courts.”

Don Byrd, who blogs for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, said the theft was “just sad.”

He continued, “Think what you will about whether it's appropriate as a national monument, or whether it is constitutional; there's no reason for this kind of vandalism, which hopefully was not driven by the Supreme Court's recent decision….”

In the case, a splintered Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a lower court should reconsider its ruling against an attempt by Congress to preserve the cross by transferring the land on which it sits to private hands. However, the justices in the majority expressed several different opinions as to why the cross should remain in its spot.

It is not immediately clear whether an effort to erect a replacement for the cross would be legal, given the court rulings on its fate.

-30-

Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Related ABP story:

Church-state separationists mixed over desert-cross decision (4/28/2010)

WASHINGTON (ABP) — President Obama’s latest Supreme Court nominee has an exceedingly thin paper trail on some of the legal questions most important to people of faith. But one thing is clear if Solicitor General Elena Kagan is confirmed to fill retiring Justice John Paul Stevens’ seat: For the first time in American history, no Protestants will sit on the nation’s highest court.

Obama formally nominated Kagan — who has served for the past year as the government’s chief advocate before the high court — May 10. “Elena is widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost legal minds,” he said, adding that his nominee is “an acclaimed legal scholar with a rich understanding of constitutional law” who has demonstrated “a lifelong commitment to public service and a firm grasp of the nexus and boundaries between our three branches of government.”

But her unusual record for a modern-day Supreme Court nominee — she would be the first nominee without any prior experience as a judge placed on the court in nearly 40 years — leaves little record to comb for her views on many legal questions.

Among them are issues particularly important to people of faith that are likely to come before the court during her term. Kagan, at age 50, would become the youngest justice, and could conceivably serve for four decades or more.

Her previous experience in academia, in the Obama and Clinton administrations and as a clerk to late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall only provides a few clues as to her views on thorny questions around church-state separation, abortion rights and gay rights.

Separation of church and state

Most recently, Kagan argued in favor of government efforts to protect a cross on federal land in California’s Mojave Desert. Lower federal courts ruled against display of the cross and Congress’ attempts to protect it, but a splintered Supreme Court recently decided in the cross’s favor.

However, the case may not offer any clue to Kagan’s personal views. Obama’s Justice Department inherited the case from the previous Bush administration. And the solicitor general’s job is to defend laws and government policies from legal attacks — even in cases in which he or she may personally disagree with the government’s legal position.

Another possible hint at Kagan’s church-state views lies in a memo she wrote in 1987, when she was clerking at the high court for Marshall. In a case regarding the Adolescent Family Life Act, Kagan suggested that providing certain funds — such as for discouraging teenage pregnancy — to religious groups under the law would violate the Establishment Clause, the part of the First Amendment that prevents government support for religion.

“It would be difficult for any religious organization to participate in such projects without injecting some kind of religious teaching,” Kagan wrote. “The government is of course right that religious organizations are different and that these differences are sometimes relevant for the purposes of government funding. The government, for example, may give educational subsidies to religious universities, but not to parochial schools. But when the government funding is to be used for projects so close to the central concerns of religion, all religious organizations should be off limits.”

However, during her Senate confirmation hearing for the solicitor general position last year, Kagan retracted the views she had articulated 22 years before.

“I first looked at that memo, thought about [that] memo for the first time in 20 years I suppose just a couple of days ago when it was quoted on a blog post. And I looked at it and I — I thought, ‘That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard,’” she said, in response to a question from Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) asked her to elaborate further on the memo in written material she provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She said she believed her original view “was deeply mistaken” and that it now appears “utterly wrong to me to say that religious organizations generally should be precluded from receiving funds for providing the kinds of services contemplated by the Adolescent Family Life Act.”

Gay rights, abortion

Kagan, who served as dean of Harvard Law School before becoming solicitor general, briefly banned military recruiters from using the school’s main student-recruitment office because of the Pentagon’s policy against allowing gay soldiers and sailors to serve openly in the armed forces.

Her colleagues at many of the nation’s other top-tier law schools took similar actions at the time. She also signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief opposing an effort by Congress to force law schools to accept the recruiters.

“I believe the military's discriminatory employment policy is deeply wrong — both unwise and unjust,” she said in a 2005 memo to Harvard Law students and staff. “And this wrong tears at the fabric of our own community by denying an opportunity to some of our students that other of our students have.

“The importance of the military to our society — and the great service that members of the military provide to all the rest of us — heightens, rather than excuses, this inequity.”

The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in favor of the military recruiters. Kagan, along with other law-school deans around the country, changed their policies in response.

Nonetheless, in answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee during her 2009 confirmation hearing, Kagan said she said she would defend the statute forcing the law schools to allow military recruiters on campus. She also said that there was no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage and that she would argue to uphold federal laws — such as the Defense of Marriage Act — gay-rights activists opposed as long as there was a rational legal basis for doing so.

On abortion, Kagan has said little that is public knowledge. In her confirmation hearing, she allowed only that she would respect court precedent when it came to abortion rights.

Religious conservatives denounce Kagan

Conservative religious groups started denouncing Kagan May 10, presuming that she will rule in favor of abortion rights and gay rights if confirmed to the court. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins issued a statement calling her “a hard-left activist” because of her actions and statements on the military’s ban on openly gay service. The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue called her another in a line of “radical liberal pro-aborts” that Obama has nominated to the federal courts.

Groups that support strong church-state separation, meanwhile, have been cautious in their assessment of the nominee, urging only that the Senate investigate her views on the First Amendment’s religion clauses closely.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty issued a statement saying they will be investigating Kagan’s record more closely and calling on her to protect both halves of the First Amendment’s religion clauses — the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise clause — equally.

Holly Hollman

“I hope the nominee incorporates Justice Stevens’ appreciation for the Establishment Clause, but with a more robust vision for the protections afforded by the Free Exercise Clause and the First Amendment doctrine that ensures the autonomy of religious organizations,” said BJC General Counsel Holly Hollman.

No more Protestants

If Kagan, who is Jewish, is confirmed to fill Stevens’ seat, it will be the first time in American history that the Supreme Court has not had a single representative from the nation’s largest religious group — Protestant Christians. She will join fellow Jewish justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and the six Catholic justices.

While the Court was overwhelmingly Protestant for most of American history, many legal scholars have argued that the lack of a Protestant on the court won’t mean it will lack views informed by Protestant theology or history.

“Americans view religion through a lens which dissenting Protestants of the English-speaking world pioneered in the 18th and 19th century,” wrote Razib Khan for a Discover magazine blog shortly after Stevens announced his retirement.

“This means that on the coarse level you can’t tell much about a person when you find out they are Protestant or Catholic,” Khan continued. “Their views range across the full arc of American public opinion and their conception of what their religious tradition entails is going to be strongly inflected by their politics. Social-justice Protestants and Catholics arguably share much more with each other than with their more conservative or traditionalist co-religionists.”

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Related ABP stories:

Church-state advocates urge strong successor for Stevens (4/9/2010)

Supreme Court gets technical in arguments on Mojave cross (10/7/2009)

MONTREAT, N.C. (RNS)—President Obama and ailing evangelist Billy Graham exchanged prayers during their first meeting recently at Graham’s home in western North Carolina.

President Obama meets with evangelist Billy Graham at his house in Montreat, N.C. (RNS/Pete Souza/The White House)

Obama had traveled to nearby Asheville, N.C., and requested the visit—the first time a sitting president has visited Graham at his residence, said Graham’s longtime spokesman, Larry Ross.

Graham, 91, issued a statement saying he was pleased with the visit and encouraging “Christians everywhere to pray for our president.”

The White House described the meeting as one of conversation and “private prayer” and said Obama “is extraordinarily gratified that he took the time to meet with him.”

During the 35-minute meeting, the men—joined by Graham’s son and fellow evangelist Franklin Graham—discussed their wives, golf and Chicago. Graham gave the president two Bibles, one for himself and another for first lady Michelle Obama.

Graham has met with 12 presidents over six decades, starting with Harry Truman in 1950.

WASHINGTON (ABP) — President Obama has followed through on his promise to declare May 6 the National Day of Prayer despite a controversial April 15 ruling by a federal judge who said the government encouraging its citizens to pray violates the First Amendment.

“We are blessed to live in a nation that counts freedom of conscience and free exercise of religion among its most fundamental principles, thereby ensuring that all people of goodwill may hold and practice their beliefs according to the dictates of their consciences,” Obama said, in an April 30 proclamation declaring the day for 2010. “Prayer has been a sustaining way for many Americans of diverse faiths to express their most cherished beliefs, and thus we have long deemed it fitting and proper to publicly recognize the importance of prayer on this day across the nation.”

Presidents since at least 1952, when Congress declared a prayer day, have issued such proclamations noting the observation, extolling the role of prayer in many Americans’ lives and encouraging prayer for the nation as well as others in the world. In 1988, Congress fixed the date of the observance as the first Thursday in May.

But on April 15, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb of Wisconsin agreed with plaintiffs who had sued to put an end to the federal government’s involvement in the event, which is marked by ceremonies both public and private around the country.

“It bears emphasizing that a conclusion that the [First Amendment’s] Establishment Clause prohibits the government from endorsing a religious exercise is not a judgment on the value of prayer or the millions of Americans who believe in its power,” Crabb wrote in a 66-page opinion. “No one can doubt the important role that prayer plays in the spiritual life of a believer. However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic.”

Crabb stayed enforcement of her ruling until all appeals of it have been exhausted, however. Obama’s Justice Department announced April 22 that it would appeal the decision.

While some religious-liberty advocates have praised Crabb's decision, others have said acknowledging the role that prayer has historically played for many Americans does not rise to the level of violating the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Interfaith Alliance both said the decision was well-reasoned and sensitive to the true nature of uncoerced faith. The Alliance Defense Fund and American Center for Law and Justice criticized the decision and said it would likely be overturned.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty did not take an official stance on the ruling, but the Washington-based religious-liberty group has criticized the National Day of Prayer before. BJC Executive Director called the event misguided last year.

"The problem with the National Day of Prayer is that it is an official act of the government urging citizens to engage in a religious exercise," Walker said. "A day of prayer is more appropriately called for by pastors, rabbis and imams among us — not civil magistrates, Congress or even an American president."

A representative of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, however, lambasted the ruling.

"[W]e are deeply offended by the fact that this judge would decide that the National Day of Prayer actually establishes religion," said Barrett Duke, the agency's vice president, according to an ERLC press release. "I think her understanding of the establishment of religion exceeds the founding fathers’ understanding of what that means."

The National Day of Prayer historically was a broadly ecumenical enterprise, but the event has become controversial in recent years. Some moderate and liberal religious leaders have criticized the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a conservative evangelical group led by the wife of Christian broadcaster James Dobson that serves as the event’s unofficial sponsor, for hosting religiously exclusive prayer events in state capitols and municipal facilities around the country.

Some conservatives, meanwhile, criticized Obama last year for his decision not to mark the day as his predecessor did, with elaborate and highly publicized prayer events at the White House. Obama instead observed the day privately.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Previous ABP stories:

Obama administration to appeal ruling against National Day of Prayer (4/22/2010)

Judge rules National Day of Prayer unconstitutional (4/16/2010)

Conservative ‘National Day of Prayer’ supporters upset over Obama snub (5/7/2009)

WASHINGTON (ABP) — A divided Supreme Court rendered a complex decision April 28 on the fate of a lonely cross in the California desert. The decision — the first major church-state case of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure — upset religious-freedom advocates but heartened religious conservatives.

By a 5-4 vote, the court’s majority agreed only that the case should be returned to a lower court to re-evaluate an injunction that required the cross be removed from public view.

The cross — successor to one first erected as a World War I memorial in 1934 — stands atop Sunrise Rock, next to a road in a remote part of California’s Mojave National Preserve. Although several crosses erected by private groups have stood on the spot over the years, the current version was built of painted metal pipes by a local resident in 1998. It has been the site of community Easter services for years, but federal officials have covered it with a plywood box to comply with court orders.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the court’s plurality opinion, but was only joined in his reasoning fully by Roberts and partially by Justice Samuel Alito. Kennedy said a lower federal court had erred by denying an attempt by Congress to transfer a small parcel of land on which the cross is located to a private owner who would maintain the monument.

The lower court called the attempted land transfer an impermissible government attempt to avoid enforcement of a previous court decision — a decision not at issue in this case.

But Kennedy disagreed. “By dismissing Congress’s motives as illicit, the [federal] district court took insufficient account of the context in which the statute was enacted and the reasons for its passage,” he wrote. “Private citizens put the cross on Sunrise Rock to commemorate American servicemen who had died in World War I. Although certainly a Christian symbol, the cross was not emplaced on Sunrise Rock to promote a Christian message.”

Case’s origins

The origins of the case date to 1999 when the National Park Service, which oversees the land, denied an application from a group that wanted to build a Buddhist shrine near the cross. The agency studied the history of the monument, said it did not qualify as a historic landmark and announced plans to remove it.

Congress intervened with a series of actions that effectively preserved the cross.

In 2001 Frank Buono, a Catholic and a retired National Park Service employee who once worked at the preserve, filed suit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. His attorneys claimed that the cross violated the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.

A series of federal-court decisions went against both the cross and the government’s attempts to preserve it. In 2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated the land transfer. President Bush's administration appealed the ruling, and President Obama’s Justice Department continued to defend the monument.

Decision leaves standing intact

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote separately to assert that, while he agreed with the judgment, he would have settled the case by determining that Buono did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place.

Many church-state separationists had feared that conservatives like Scalia and Thomas could use the case to further curtail the ability of taxpayers to bring such challenges to government endorsements of religion. However, the plurality explicitly found that Buono’s standing was not in question.

“To date, this court’s jurisprudence in this area has refrained from making sweeping pronouncements, and this case is ill suited for announcing categorical rules,” Kennedy wrote.

Acceptable congressional remedy?

Alito wrote separately to assert that there was no need to send the case back, because Congress had come up with an acceptable remedy to a difficult constitutional situation.

“The singular circumstances surrounding the monument on Sunrise Rock presented Congress with a delicate problem, and the solution that Congress devised is true to the spirit of practical accommodation that has made the United States a nation of unparalleled pluralism and religious tolerance,” he wrote.

“If Congress had done nothing, the government would have been required to take down the cross … and this removal would have been viewed by many as a sign of disrespect for the brave soldiers whom the cross was meant to honor. The demolition of this venerable, if unsophisticated, monument would also have been interpreted by some as an arresting symbol of a government that is not neutral but hostile on matters of religion and is bent on eliminating from all public places and symbols any trace of our country’s religious heritage.”

Dissenters: Cross is Christian, injunction is appropriate

But retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, joined in a fiery dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the lower court had every right to enforce its earlier decision — affirmed by an appeals court — that the government could not “permit the display” of the cross in the area of Sunrise Rock.

“A Latin cross necessarily symbolizes one of the most important tenets upon which believers in a benevolent Creator, as well as nonbelievers, are known to differ,” he wrote. “In my view, the district court was right to enforce its prior judgment by enjoining Congress’ proposed remedy — a remedy that was engineered to leave the cross intact and that did not alter its basic meaning. I certainly agree that the nation should memorialize the service of those who fought and died in World War I, but it cannot lawfully do so by continued endorsement of a starkly sectarian message.”

He also criticized a separate effort by Congress to preserve the cross by making it an official national memorial. And he expressed bafflement at Kennedy and Alito's notion that the cross is more than merely a symbol of Christianity, but also a universal symbol for the dead.

“Making a plain, unadorned Latin cross a war memorial does not make the cross secular. It makes the war memorial sectarian,” Stevens wrote. “The Mojave Desert is a remote location, far from the seat of our government. But the government’s interest in honoring all those who have rendered heroic public service regardless of creed, as well as its constitutional responsibility to avoid endorsement of a particular religious view, should control wherever national memorials speak on behalf of our entire country.”

Church-state advocates’ reaction

Some church-state separationists, while relieved that the court did not use the case to gut normal citizens’ ability to bring such lawsuits, nonetheless expressed serious disappointment with the decision.

“This decision lets Congress bypass the Constitution and devise a convoluted scheme to keep a cross on display in a federal park,” said Americans United for Separation of Church and State President Barry Lynn, in a press release. “That’s bad law and bad public policy. The court majority seems to think the cross is not always a Christian symbol. I think all Americans know better than that.”

But religious conservatives cheered the decision — while urging their comrades to fight on as the case returns to the lower court.

“It is a disgrace that this memorial to our fallen veterans has been covered in a box of plywood for ten years while the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Liberty Institute President Kelly Shackelford, who filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of the current monument’s caretakers and veterans’ groups in the case. “We applaud the Supreme Court for overruling the decisions below, but this battle is not over. This box must come off. No war memorial with religious imagery is safe until the Court rules that these memorials, which serve to remember our fallen heroes of the military, are allowed under the Constitution.”

The decision is Salazar v. Buono, No. 08-472.

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Read More

Supreme Court plurality, concurring and dissenting opinions in Salazar v. Buono

Previous ABP stories:

Supreme Court gets technical in arguments on Mojave cross (10/7/2009)

Supreme Court agrees to hear case involving cross on federal land (2/23/2009)