Moderation?

Today's resignation under a "cloud" of Scranton Bishop Joseph Martino portends change for politically aggressive, conservative bishops.

"Moderazione" is the message from the powers that be, persuasively argued Mark Silk of Trinity College's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life.

Catholic religious journalist David Gibson wrote that some bishops may be uneasy with the "more strident and even partisan tone of many church leaders":

Last week, Santa Fe Archbishop Michael Sheehan publicly broke with that minority, telling National Catholic Reporter that the anti-Obama views represented a minority of bishops, and that the majority was hesitant to speak up.
"The bishops don't want to have a battle in public with each other, but I think the majority of bishops in the country didn't join in with that, would not be in agreement with that approach. It's well intentioned, but we don't lose our dignity by being strong in the belief that we have but also talking to others that don't have our belief. We don't lose our dignity by that," he said.

Too bad for the protestant Religious Right? It relies on what Silk calls "take-no-prisoners" members of the Catholic hierarchy to echo and add credence to its campaigns - most recently the counter-factual campaign against health care reform.

Sentenced after confessing more than a decade of sexual abuse

How long before he was arrested on Aug. 24 did Benton, Arkansas, First Baptist Church leaders know about allegations of sexual abuse against David Pierce?

Music minister there for 29 years, Pierce was sentenced on Aug. 27 to 10 years in prison.

Repeating a behavior often seen when Baptist clergy are charged with and/or convicted of sexually abusing parishioners, Greg Kirksey, former president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, wrote a letter asking the court for leniency on behalf of Pierce.

For example, in Illinois a Baptist newspaper editor was forced to resign after publishing a news story about charges of sexual misconduct filed against a Baptist minister.

It was 2002 and Pastor Leslie Mason was slated to be nominated to preach the keynote sermon at the annual meeting of the Illinois State Baptist Association.

Instead, Mason, then 34, now former pastor of Olney Southern Baptist Church in southern Illinois, faced charges of sexually assaulting two teenage girls who had attended his church. In a plea bargain, Mason pleaded guilty to two class-one felonies in exchange for dismissal of eight remaining counts.

He received a seven-year sentence - one year less than the period of abuse documented in court records.

Prize-winning, 19-year-veteran editor Michael Leathers was forced to resign to ensure that reporting like the Mason sex-abuse story "doesn't happen again." Thus Leathers and professional Baptist journalism in Illinois were added to the list of Mason's victims.

As of this writing, North Carolina Biblical Recorder Editor Norman Jameson has not suffered a similar fate for publishing the story of a recent Baptist sexual abuse indictment. Whether there will be other official backlash, remains to be seen, given demonstrated Southern Baptist priorities in such matters.

Protecting church members from victimization isn't the priority it should be the Southern Baptist Convention. They argue that church autonomy makes it a matter of individual church concern, and offer general guidance to member churches.

In 2008, the SBC made Number Six on Time Magazines list of under-reported news stories by refusing to create a central SBC database of church staff and clergy convicted or indicted on charges of molesting minors.

Meanwhile, Christa Brown of the Survivors Network wrote at Stop Baptist Predators:

How tragic that so many [at Benton First Baptist Church] were so wounded over such a long period before Pierce was finally stopped. This tragedy speaks to the need for Baptists to create a place where people may safely report clergy abuse with the expectation that their reports will be responsibly assessed and acted on.

Truly.

Baptist, Buddhist, Jewish and others for health reform

Michael Mansur of the Kansas City Star writes:

There was no screaming. No shouting. Security hauled no one off. ... for more than two hours Sunday afternoon, about 250 Kansas Citians clapped and supported a panel of religious leaders — including Buddhist, Jewish and Baptist — who called for a moral response to the national health care crisis. The forum was at Community Christian Church.

The core message: With 46 million in the U.S. uninsured (35.9 million uninsured Americans) and millions more underinsured, "it is time to do something."

The Rev. Eric Williams, pastor of Calvary Baptist Temple in Kansas City "and other panel members" said it is time to end the fusillades of misinformation, fear and division: “Call it what you want, but let’s get something done.”

Needed: Straight answers, not evasion

A story in the Florida Baptist Witness begins by trumpeting that “no question was turned down” during a dialogue Aug. 26 between four members of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force and 400 people attending a luncheon. But a careful reading of the article reveals sticky issues that weren’t adequately answered.

The first issue focused on is loyalty to the Cooperative Program (CP) -- the SBC’s method of distributing money. Churches send money to state Baptist conventions, which keep a share and send the rest to the SBC.

Many Southern Baptists, especially older church-goers, regard the CP as nearly sacred.

Many younger Baptists, however, have much less denominational loyalty and question why they should support the SBC.

Complicating the issue are the amounts sent to the CP by the churches of those who serve on the task force. Several questioners, according to the Witness article, said it sent a "mixed signal" when task force members’ churches do not contribute at an average level of CP giving.

Baptist Press, the official news agency of the SBC, detailed the percentage of undesignated funds in commission member church budgets that is sent to the CP.

Three of the commissioners' churches were not reported.

Out of the remaining 20, BP reported that 14 sent less than five percent to the CP and seven sent 2.5 percent or less. Only three of the 20 sent more than 10 percent, although two others were close -- 9.9 percent and 9.8 percent respectively. Another was 9.4 percent.

The highest was 18.3 percent.

SBC president Johnny Hunt, who appointed the task force as required by a directive from messengers at the SBC annual meeting in June, and who also serves on the commission, responded to a question about CP giving. Hunt -- whose church gave 2.5 percent of its $17.45 million in undesignated receipts to CP -- said his church had given a total of $3.6 million to “Southern Baptist causes.”

"But it's not Cooperative Program missions," responded Jim Wilson, pastor of First Baptist Church of Seneca, Mo., who asked the question.

Al Gilbert, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C. and a member of the task force, appealed for local churches to exercise their autonomy in deciding how best to deliver mission dollars to the field.

“Quite frankly, our church could care less about how folks outside count our loyalty," he said, discounting attempts to quantify a church's commitment to missions by citing its gifts to the traditional Cooperative Program funding mechanism. "It's a game the next generation is sick of and they have no desire to have that kind of loyalty pin. We'd better wake up and listen to that," he said.

Hunt hinted that he might be interested in changing the formula for division of CP funds between international and national missions efforts. He said he wants to "get the dollars to the pockets of lostness, instead of the majority staying in the States or in the country we're in."

The task force is reportedly reviewing an analysis showing the denomination spends per capita 33 times more for missions in North America than it does for the rest of the world.

But the most disturbing revelation in the article lay in the way the panelists answered questions. In response to a question about some task force members’ ties to a controversial pastor who is admired by some younger pastors, a seminary president said he was glad his students didn’t hear it and called for the need to “elevate the discussion.”

Worse, Hunt showed a propensity to answer questions by asking a question in return. Two questioners called for greater representation from smaller churches.

For example, according the BP profile, 16 of the 23 members attend churches with an average worship attendance of more than 2,000. While only two have an average worship attendance of less than 200.

Hunt’s response when asked about that: "Does it matter the size church you serve or does it still matter where you've been?"

When someone asked about a rumor that the task force’s plan would "deemphasize church planting and evangelism in America," Hunt said, "An even greater question is who's addressing the poor journalism that would allow reporting that we may be attempting to disassemble NAMB,” the SBC’s North American Mission Board.

These responses, coupled with the task force’s decision to meet behind closed doors, did little to raise the confidence level among those in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

A group that could call for a major restructuring of the convention can expect skepticism in response to a pose which in effect says, "Trust us. We know what we're doing."

Beyond partisanship: Pope Benedict XVI's 'Caritas in Veritate'

In the University of Chicago Divinity School column Sightings, Rick Elgendy argues that the wedge-politics of the culture wars have no support in Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate:

Though frequently presumed to be the source of authority for those who would, say, deny communion to pro-choice politicians, Benedict here refuses to accept the ideological categories assumed in American politics: The same theological commitments that inform his convictions about the integrity of life demand a reimagining of prevailing social arrangements. Catholic and non-Catholic onlookers alike might hope that the encyclical will inspire political discourse that reexamines the standard binaries and turns to principled and civil conversation before partisan rancor (as Benedict himself did, by most reports, in his recent meeting with President Obama, in sharp contrast to how others dealt with the president’s Notre Dame commencement appearance).

Writing for Human Events, Ave Maria Law School's Rev. Michael P. Orsi says no, Catholics must still be anti-abortion/pro-life at the expense of any health care reform legislation. He does so in an argument that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops violated fundamental principles by reasserting its longstanding position that “decent health care is not a privilege, but a basic human right and a requirement to protect the life and dignity of every person.”

Mark Silk responds, and quotes with telling effect from Caritas in Veritate:

Nowadays we are witnessing a grave inconsistency. On the one hand, appeals are made to alleged rights, arbitrary and non-essential in nature, accompanied by the demand that they be recognized and promoted by public structures, while, on the other hand, elementary and basic rights remain unacknowledged and are violated in much of the world[107]. A link has often been noted between claims to a "right to excess", and even to transgression and vice, within affluent societies, and the lack of food, drinkable water, basic instruction and elementary health care in areas of the underdeveloped world and on the outskirts of large metropolitan centres. The link consists in this: individual rights, when detached from a framework of duties which grants them their full meaning, can run wild, leading to an escalation of demands which is effectively unlimited and indiscriminate. An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties. Duties set a limit on rights because they point to the anthropological and ethical framework of which rights are a part, in this way ensuring that they do not become license. Duties thereby reinforce rights and call for their defence and promotion as a task to be undertaken in the service of the common good. Otherwise, if the only basis of human rights is to be found in the deliberations of an assembly of citizens, those rights can be changed at any time, and so the duty to respect and pursue them fades from the common consciousness. Governments and international bodies can then lose sight of the objectivity and "inviolability" of rights. When this happens, the authentic development of peoples is endangered[108]. Such a way of thinking and acting compromises the authority of international bodies, especially in the eyes of those countries most in need of development. Indeed, the latter demand that the international community take up the duty of helping them to be "artisans of their own destiny"[109], that is, to take up duties of their own. The sharing of reciprocal duties is a more powerful incentive to action than the mere assertion of rights.

Catholic neoconservative George Weigel attempts to escape that passage by arguing that it should be disregarded as a compromise by Pope Benedict XVI "to maintain the peace within his curial household.”

A strange argument to make about this pope who has backed up not a step in the face of one firestorm after another.

Agree or not, to understand the meaning of Pope Benedict XVI, do better to take Silk's approach:

Read that carefully. The pope is saying that an asserted (or legislated) "right to excess" is wrongly made equivalent to those things that are objectively and inviolably "elementary and basic rights"--such as "elementary health care." His point is that the affluent have to recognize that they have a duty to take steps to guarantee that the rights of the needy are not violated.

Immaneul Kant nails talk radio and fox news

Prophetable blogversation about the Anti-Christ

John D. Pierce at Baptists Today Blogs writes:

Someone at prophecies.org has revealed the staggering news that (drum roll, please) President Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ.

Unless it was an earlier president?

For his part, Pierce goes on to say:

My professors through the years explained that biblical prophecy is more about speaking truth to a current situation that predicting future events. Less crystal ball, more course-correction warnings.

We feel the entire piece is worth your time. Read it here.

Let us talk together of hate and the end of it

The Anatomy of Hate is a film which is intended to help us better understand one another, to talk together of our differences and so turn away conflict.

CNN describes it as a "filmmaking odyssey [whose creation] took" filmmaker Mike Ramsdell on a six-year journey "to the white supremacist movement, to Christian fundamentalists with an anti-gay agenda and across the globe to the Middle East. There he spent time with Muslim extremists, Palestinians fighting the Intifada, Israeli settlers and soldiers and with American troops serving in Iraq."

Ramsdell says he wanted to know why we hate:

What I found was, for me, life changing. There was no boogieman, no devil, nor any single person or group of evil at the center of all this violence, war, and hate. Instead I found a planet full of creatures doing their best to fill the void of existence with limited psychological tools, and emotional shortcomings – myself included. And instead of embracing these shortcomings and using them as empathetic links to our fellow men, I discovered that our psyche turns them into mythological monsters that we can project onto others, declaring those ‘others’ as inferior, evil, or deserving of death.

The CNN story is here.

Clips from the film are here

Catholic Right drifts away from Papal Encyclical toward Protestant Conservatives

Today's NYT piece by David Kirkpatrick led both Grant Gallicho and Mark Silk to note how the Catholic right has put itself at odds with the church's social justice position.

Gallicho, himself Catholic, analyzed the comments of Bishop Nickless of Sioux City. Nickless told the NYT:

Preserving patient choice (through a flourishing private sector) is the only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily, as we learned from HMOs in the recent past. While a government monopoly would not be motivated by profit, it would be motivated by such bureaucratic standards as quotas and defined ‘best procedures,’ which are equally beyond the influence of most citizens. The proper role of the government is to regulate the private sector, in order to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses.

Gallicho responded:

Government monopoly?
Patient choice?
Does the bishop understand that in several states insurers operate virtual monopolies?
Or that many Americans have no choice when it comes to health insurance? That they take what they can get or else they go broke–or they can’t get it, suffer a catastrophic illness, and break the rest of us?
Are we to believe that the profit motive is better than “bureaucratic standards”?
Is that church teaching too?

Silk summarizes church teaching as recently reflected in Pope Benedict's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Silk writes:

As I've pointed out here, the pope's encyclical teaches that food, drinkable water, "basic instruction and elementary health care" are all "elementary and basic rights." Sure there's politics and prudential judgment involved in determining the best way to provide people with health care, but so is there in determining the best way to provide people with food and drinkable water and breathable air.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a Web site where it takes a stand for the broad, generous health care reform which church social policy implies. And against abortion. Which the Christian Right is attempting to use as a wedge issue by arguing there is unequivocal support for abortion in the various health reform proposals.

Carefully sorting abortion out produces equivocal results that do not support towering rhetoric from either side of the health reform debate. Consider the recent work of Beliefnet’s Steve Waldman on that issue.

As a result, Conservative Catholic bishops who are joining the Christian right on that may find themselves at odds with both church policy and reality.

Have you read the health reform bills and proposals?

Here [.pdf] is a side-by-side comparison of the leading comprehensive health care reform proposals.

It is provided by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Please read all 44 pages of it.

Then the next time someone asks whether you "have read the bill," you can correctly answer "bills," and discuss the key issues with confidence.

UK 'Tough Love' for NHS & U.S. right

The British have one message for their National Health Service, and another messaged for American conservatives in general and perhaps for the Christian Right drive to stop health reform in this country.

British journalist Claire Rayner wrote for the Guardian about National Health Service problems:

There has been an absolutely astounding response to the report the Patients Association released yesterday, detailing examples of neglect of elderly and vulnerable patients. While I was as ever hopeful that the people who so bravely volunteered to take part in this work would feel it had been worthwhile, the response has been staggering. I was shocked and touched reading the stories of patients' families who have suffered and it seems the rest of the country has been as well.

She outlined a plan of correction and then turned to the awful things being said in the U.S. about the NHS and how "they don't want a similar system of their own:"

Much as I would like to respond to their ill-informed opinions with a crisp "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn what you think," let me instead point out that any intelligent American Republican should be able to see clearly that the anger we are expressing shows just how good the NHS normally is. And exposing the fact that we have a few rotten apples (so rare in the US, according to the self-aggrandising politicians I have heard slagging off our system) and are determined to seek them out and deal with them shows how much we care about our vulnerable, frail, and helpless elders.
I have no doubt that eventually this uproar will lead to the finding and application of the necessary remedies and ensure that future care for them will be what it should be – that is, gentle, dignity-protecting and life-extending as far as possible. If the national anger we are hearing in this country, where we love and value our NHS, doesn't prove to you that we don't have so-called "death panels" nothing will.

British Journalist Frances Beckett writes:

Anton Chaitkin is just the latest rightwing American commentator to claim that Barack Obama's healthcare proposals are Nazi. The history editor of the Executive Intelligence Review called them "a revival of Hitler's euthanasia killing programme".
. . .
That's how much the extreme right and the vested interests like the pharmaceutical companies hate healthcare schemes that give security to the poor. Attlee and Bevan, fortified by a large parliamentary majority and strong public support as well as their own courage and political will, pressed on regardless. It instantly transformed the lives of millions of Britons – not just the poorest, but those on moderate fixed incomes too.

Marjorie Ellis Thompson in a column calling for conservative reform of the NHS writes:

It is sad that the scaremongers appear to be winning the war of words in the US and that they have misrepresented the NHS, using both British patients and doctors who had thought they were appearing in a documentary, not an attack-dog ad.

The British are quite clear about having been misled by American conservatives into appearing in attack ads. The London Daily Mail reports"

Furious Kate Spall and Katie Brickell claim that their views on the NHS have been misrepresented by a free market campaign group opposed to Mr Obama's reforms in a bid to discredit the UK system.
. . .
Ms Spall, whose mother died of kidney cancer while waiting for treatment in the UK, told The Times: "It has been a bit of a nightmare.
"It was a real test of my naivety. I am a very trusting person and for me it has been a big lesson. I feel like I was duped."

British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is also quite clear about his support of the NHS. He rebuked a party member "who went on US television to attack the NHS, dismissing his views as 'eccentric.' " In an email to the members of his own party, Cameron he wrote:

One of the wonderful things about living in this country is that the moment you're injured or fall ill - no matter who you are, where you are from, or how much money you've got - you know that the NHS will look after you.

Yesterday the Religion News Service summarized the Christian Right argument against health reform:

Although an estimated 45 million Americans lack health insurance, federation backers said they support the current system. “There may be problems,” said Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of Hope Christian Church in suburban Maryland and chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, “but it is working.”

As opposed to a system more like the British system which, as Conservative Party leader Cameron explained, covers everyone?

Archdiocese of Leon, Mexico, unable to pay medical bills of infirm priests

David Agren of Catholic News Service writes:

Saying that falling Sunday collections have left the Archdiocese of Leon, Mexico, unable to pay the medical bills of its infirm priests, Archbishop Jose Martin Rabago has called on Catholics to continue supporting the church financially in spite of the current economic crisis.
Archbishop Martin told reporters Aug. 23 that the archdiocese had an $18,000 deficit during the first half of 2009 as collections fell. He said financial projections show the deficit would grow to more than $85,000 by the end of the year.

Read the rest of the story here.

Bush's Glorification of Osama bin Laden and Obama's reversal

In Commonweal magazine's After the War on Terror, Jack Miles writes:

President George W. Bush first used the fateful phrase “war on terror” in an address to Congress on September 20, 2001, identifying what he later called “the defining struggle of our time.” And though initially the 9/11 attacks united the West while embarrassing and dividing the Muslim world, in time the rhetoric of a “war on terror” reversed those terms. With just three words, the president managed to transform Osama bin Laden from a criminal fugitive into a historic military commander, the head of a new, potentially world-changing army of fanatics. The subsequent invasion of Iraq, centerpiece of the Bush war on terror, only confirmed bin Laden in many Muslim eyes as a Saladin rather than a mass murderer.

Erasing that phrase from the U.S. diplomatic lexicon, the Obama administration has put Bin Laden back in his proper place and the administration "has replaced a grandiose, counterproductive fantasy with realistic attention to a set of grievous but real problems."

Read the entire piece here.

Imprecatory preaching and gun-toting

Pastor Steve Anderson of Faithful World Independent Baptist Church has attracted attention with sermons like Why I Hate Barack Obama.

There turns out to be a link between his preaching and a gun-toting parishioner, acknowledged to TPM.

Justin Elliott writes:

Chris Broughton, the man who brought an assault rifle and a handgun to the Obama event in Arizona last week, attended a fiery anti-Obama sermon the day before the event, in which Pastor Steven Anderson said he was going to "pray for Barack Obama to die and go to hell", Anderson confirmed to TPMmuckraker today.

Disturbing certainly, but no gun play thus far.

Catholic debate over church political role continues

Debate over the University of Notre Dame's awarding of an honorary degree to President Obama in May continues in conservative Catholic reaction to the announcement that Obama will deliver a eulogy at Senator Edward Kenndy's funeral mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston.

Not that the debate ever quite stopped.

Archbishop John R. Quinn argues in the Aug. 31 issue of America magazine that had Notre Dame refused to award Obama an honorary degree, it would have done harm to the church's and its mission by fostering "false messages" about itself. He argues instead for "a policy cordiality:"

It proceeds from the conviction that the integrity of Catholic teaching can never be sacrificed. It reflects a deep desire to enshrine comity at the center of public discourse and relations with public officials. It is willing to speak the truth directly to earthly power.
Yet the Holy See shows great reluctance to publicly personalize disagreements with public officials on elements of church teaching. And the approach of the Holy See consistently favors engagement over confrontation. As Pope John Paul II put it, “The goal of the Church is to make of the adversary a brother.”

Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne/South Bend, writing for the same issue, "restates his case against inviting the president to speak at commencement and awarding him an honorary doctor of laws."

Grant Gallicho of dotCommonWeal writes:

While one might disagree with Bishop D’Arcy’s version of events, it’s tough to take much issue with the way in which he has voiced his displeasure. In other words, he’s never approached the unhinged shenanigans of some of the protesters at Notre Dame. (Speaking of, I never thought Randall Terry could jump the shark. Wow, was I wrong.)

Bishop Sheehan of Sante Fe in an interview with the National Catholic Recorder this week said:

I don’t feel so badly about Obama going [to Notre Dame] because he’s our president. I said we’ve gotten more done on the pro-life issue in New Mexico by talking to people that don’t agree with us on everything. We got Governor Richardson to sign off on the abolition of the death penalty for New Mexico, which he was in favor of. ... We need to be building bridges, not burning them.

Expect more of this debate.

Ezekiel Emanuel in his own words

Ezekiel Emanuel wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1997:

The proper policy, in my view, should be to affirm the status of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia as illegal. In so doing we would affirm that as a society we condemn ending a patient's life and do not consider that to have one's life ended by a doctor is a right. This does not mean we deny that in exceptional cases interventions are appropriate, as acts of desperation when all other elements of treatment -- all medications, surgical procedures, psychotherapy, spiritual care, and so on -- have been tried. Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia should not be performed simply because a patient is depressed, tired of life, worried about being a burden, or worried about being dependent. All these may be signs that not every effort has yet been made.

An altogether different view from the one ascribed to him by Betsy McCaughey and Bill Hennessy and others who have resorted to vilification rather than taking the time to read and understand.

Medical ethics is a complex discipline, but Emanuel was at every step on the record in opposition to even voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.

His entire article is here.

Both extremes of the is-abortion-covered argument are wrong

Beliefnet's Steve Waldman digs deep into the facts of this debate and returns agreeing with us:

To understand requires us to take a journey into the legislative weeds but here's my bottom line: those who claim abortion clearly is covered and those who say it clearly isn't are both wrong.

His conclusion, fully stated, is:

We often think of abortion as a black and white issue. But when it comes to the question of whether health care reform bills "cover" or provide "taxpayer support for" abortion, there are many shades of gray. As of now, neither side is entirely telling the truth about what the bills do; on some aspects, Obama and his allies have misled, on others pro-lifers have. More important, some of this does not involve matters of "fact" or "truth" or "lies" but rather subjective judgment calls, a land where ideologues don't function well but legislators must.

The entire column deserves a careful reading here.

Early Christians created the first health-care system

Historian Gary Ferngren writes in his book Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity:

Christians of the first five centuries held views regarding the use of medicine and the healing of disease that did not differ appreciably from those that were widely taken for granted in the Graeco-Roman world.

Those views underlie Christians' development of "the world's first health-care system," writes Rob Moll in his Christianity Today review of the book. That was a reflection of the Christian belief that love of God requires love of fellow man and that is reflected in charity.

As a result of these theological beliefs, Christians developed a robust system for caring for the poor, the ill, widows and orphans, and other members of society in need of care. When the plague struck, this system provided an opportunity for churches to quickly expand and care for those outside the church.

Moll concludes:

The best way to provide care to everyone in the country may be up for debate. We may argue over whether to prefer new regulation of insurers and health care providers or a government-run plan. The need to provide care for the poor, however, was settled centuries ago.

Read the entire review here.

Lion of religious liberty passes

The nation lost a lion of religious liberty at the death of Senator Edward Kennedy. Don Byrd at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty excerpted from Kennedy's speech "at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University:"

The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government in order to impose a value which they cannot persuade others to accept. But once we succumb to that temptation, we step onto a slippery slope where everyone's freedom is at risk.Those who favor censorship should recall that one of the first books ever burned was the first English translation of the Bible.... Let us never forget: Today's Moral Majority could become tomorrow's persecuted minority.
... There must be standards for the exercise of such leadership, so that the obligations of belief will not be debased into an opportunity for mere political advantage. But to take a stand at all when a question is both properly public and truly moral is to stand in a long and honored tradition. Many of the great evangelists of the 1800s were in the forefront of the abolitionist movement. In our own time, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin challenged the morality of the war in Vietnam. Pope John XXIII renewed the Gospel's call to social justice. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was the greatest prophet of this century, awakened our nation and its conscience to the evil of racial segregation.
... President Kennedy, who said that "no religious body should seek to impose its will," also urged religious leaders to state their views and give their commitment when the public debate involved ethical issues. In drawing the line between imposed will and essential witness, we keep church and state separate, and at the same time we recognize that the City of God should speak to the civic duties of men and women.

Nor can mean-spirited efforts to demonize Kennedy detract from a legislative record which transcends partisan boundaries.

As Deborah Weinstein of the Coalition on Human Needs wrote today:

Senator Kennedy understood the blessings of practical service in his own life and expanded opportunities like AmeriCorps for millions of others. His career was marked by a decades-long commitment to help those with the least political power -- the poor, children, immigrants, and the uninsured were some of the many he championed. Looking back on his legislative achievements, his work for those least likely to command the assistance of expensive lobbyists is remarkable. In 1965, he sponsored legislation to drop immigration quotas that discriminated against non-white immigrants. In 1968, he shepherded legislation for bilingual education. In 1990, he co-sponsored the Ryan White CARE act to provide health care for HIV/AIDS patients. He was a champion of civil rights, women's rights, for legislation to assist the poor, and for increases in the minimum wage.

Certainly he was a flawed man. The Washington Post in its editorial today noted:

When Mr. Kennedy first ran for the Senate from Massachusetts, he wasn't even quite old enough to serve, and his record, which included an expulsion from Harvard University for cheating, was undistinguished. "The Cambridge intellectual establishment was aghast at his candidacy," writes a John F. Kennedy biographer, Thomas Reeves. Many felt that the Kennedy family saw him as being in line to assume the presidency by right. But in 1969, the senator drove off a bridge at a place called Chappaquiddick in Massachusetts, and a young woman in the senator's car, Mary Jo Kopechne, was drowned. The failure of the senator and others who were with him at Chappaquiddick to report the accident for hours afterward was a shocking act with long-lasting consequences for all involved. It did not end Mr. Kennedy's presidential ambitions -- he tried and failed to take the nomination from Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- but it greatly reduced his chances of fulfilling them.

Enough. As Michelle Malkin writes:

Put aside your ideological differences for an appropriate moment and mark this passing with solemnity.

The danger of keeping 'birther' company

"If Baptist Republicans walk and talk like 'birthers,' does that make them racists?" asks Baptist ethicist Robert Parham today, and answers himself: "No. But as every Southern momma knows and warns her children, one is known by the company they keep."

Parham, executive editor of EthicsDaily.com, details how Southern Baptist legislators have made themselves keystones of the 'birther' movement, most recently Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). Franks flip flopped from his position a month ago to tell a Kingman, Ariz., townhall audience that he is considering a citizenship lawsuit against President Obama.

Other Baptists Parham mentions are House Majority Leader Tom Delay, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).

Southern Baptist 'birther' enthusiasts also include Buena Vista, Calif., pastor Wiley Drake, who has engaged in imprecatory prayer against President Barack Obama and who celebrated the murder of abortion provider George Tiller on May 31, 2009. Drake was the American Independent Party's vice-presidential candidate in 2008.

The evidence says that it's a made-up issue, sustained by fantasy, prejudice and political opportunism. For example, FactCheck.org has a conclusive review of the debate with several, high-resolution photographs of the original Obama birth certificate available for download [here's one of them]. Or you can review PolitiFact.com demolitions of each birther assertion.

'Birther' discussion drifted into truly bizarre territory this week, and issues this detached from reality have a way of getting progressively worse.

Association with this matter promises to haunt and shame those who remain involved with it. Southern Baptist or not.

Randall Terry's misleading circus

"The P.T. Barnum of the pro-life movement" is on the road, theatrically promoting his "pull the plug on granny" falsehood and doing baby-killing skits.

Randall Terry is a Catholic convert whom the American Papist called "a bit persona non grata" after Terry set up Archbishop Burke.

The Most Reverend Raymond L. Burke is the Archbishop Emeritus of Saint Louis and Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.

Thus it was the chief justice of the Catholic Church court who called Terry out in March for misleading his staff and for misusing a videotaped interview.

Given that willingness to mislead, Terry is unlikely to suddenly become uncomfortable about misstating the nature and intent of proposed federal legislation.

The various blends of the legislation could potentially fund legal abortions. Abortion is, after all, a legal procedure in the United States -- one to which Terry objects as a matter of faith.

But as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, CQ Politics and others have made clear, health reform does not threaten to pull the plug on anyone. Insisting that it does cannot reasonably be confused with an act of faith.

GOP health reform rescue

Having fostered the illusion that senior citizens are under attack from health care reform, the Republican Party now hurries to a stage-managed rescue.

Offering more confusion and little of value, Chairman Michael Steele's list of bullet points does push the two-edged GOP political sword deeper into Democratic hopes of health reform without political damage.

Mark Silk at Spiritual Politics succinctly explains the Republican political strategy. It is as simple, well-tested and predictable as it is brilliant:

Economic conservatives carry the anti-government ball while social conservatives run abortion and end-of-life care (aka "pulling the plug on granny") up the flagpole. So far, there's been little hue and cry about an imagined mandate to cover same-sex couples in family plans. Maybe that's for after Labor Day.

The Bush administration laid the foundations for this strategy. It reduced most of the nonpartisan press to confused self-preoccupation and paralysis, leavened by effective self-criticism.

With mainstream media thus unable to adequantely cover the complex story of greatest interest to its audience, the field was clear for confusion.

FactCheck.org and others have done well, but confusion nonetheless is widespread and taking root.

CQ Politics has suggested that truth sometimes seems to be taking a vacation.

Whether these strategies will lead to the Republican Party's political salvation, or any other kind of salvation, we will see.

Courthouse lawn 10 Commandments monument still coming down

Haskell County, Oklahoma, commissioners lost by a vote of 2-1 their appeal to the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and is seeking U.S. Supreme Court review.

The case was decided on Establishment Clause grounds, the same Establishment Clause that Oklahoma state elected officials are working to circumvent.

Howard M. Friedman writes:

Meanwhile News OK reported on Friday that in Oklahoma City, the State Capitol Preservation Commission is debating where on the state Capitol gounds to locate a 10 Commandments monument authorized by legislation passed earlier this year.

Although the monument is to have the same text as the one on the Texas State Capitol grounds that was upheld against an Establishment Clause attack in a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision, that may not carry the day. Legislation authorizing the monument specifically recognizes the likelihood of legal conflict over the matter.

Health care uproar aims to reignite old, racist passions

Baptist writer Bruce Gourley traces the history of Southern reactionary conservatism back to Civil War opposition to the abolition of slavery, and finds those sentiments reignited in the opposition to health care reform:

The white anger over Obama's presidency and health care reform, in the words of protesters, ultimately rests in claims that the federal government is plotting to take away their freedoms and liberties. Video clips of this month's town hall meetings across the nation include angry senior citizens living on socialized medicine (Medicare) ranting against ... socialized medicine. The video clips also reveal claims that the government "outlawed prayer and legalized abortion" and now wants to take away the right to decide one's own health care, and "we're not gonna take it anymore!"

The social engineers who are exploiting those old grievances know they're trafficking in untruths.

Like Ralph Reed, who used Christian conservatives in his promotion of Indian gaming interests and other causes, these groups want to use Christian conservatives for their own purposes.

Reed was out beating the drum again last week, singing what for him is a lucrative old song.

How to think theologically about health care

At Street Prophets' pastordan writes:

It's not about "us" at all. Harry Jackson, of all people, gets it right when we calls health care reform "reverse classism." It is! It is about choosing the side of the poor, the working and the middle class over and against the rich. ... that's the side God takes. God has taken a preferential option for the poor, and God will work out the implications of that choice in due time. We are only involved to the extent that we choose to cooperate with the plan or not.

Read the entire piece here.

Progressive evangelical and conservative have a civil dialog

Amid the manufactured uproar, some do still manage to share their differences in public, and on some points, politely agree to disagree.

Health Care for '…the least of these...'

Southern Baptist pastor Wade Burleson posts a thorough, well-researched letter "from a Christian man named 'Chuck Brown.'"

He calls out to Christian Biblical heritage, writing:

Ultimately, health care reform is not about whether you are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Constitutionalist, or whatever else. It is not about whether you are conservative, liberal, independent, or apolitical. It is not about whether you despise Barack Obama or like Barack Obama. Health care reform is about “…the least of these...” among us and our ability to make some changes that will help them.

Read the entire letter here.

God's dream and the health-care debate

British Baptist journalist Jonathan Langley writes for the Associated Baptist Press that:

... in a week when Americans opposed to a large role for government in health-care reform have been attacking the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, mistaking American rights for “Christian rights” highlights a tendency in some American Christian circles to mistake the United States for the Kingdom of God.

He goes from that right to the heart of the objection some have to health reform. We Americans tend to believe one and all that God is on our side. Thus anything we feel is somehow un-American must be evil:

This, I think, helps explain why there have been such vehement denunciations of the British health-care system in America in recent days. Socialism, to those still brainwashed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy's legacy, is “un-American.” Why? Because, as an old colleague returning from a time in Chicago explained to me last week, the American dream is to work for yourself and your own betterment. And any attempt to make you pay even a little for someone else's health care is a violation of that dream.

Yet as Christians, he writes, "Our duty is to remember that the God Jesus Christ proclaims requires his children to give freely, love selflessly and sacrifice readily for the well-being of others."

Driven by that faith-based logic he concludes:

Let's pray that our American brothers and sisters can free themselves of any heresies that would see them deny the less fortunate among them health care for the sake of any false dream.

Huckabee and the fate of the Palestinians

The Jerusalem Post called Mike Huckabee's rejection of a two-state Israel/Palestine solution as a challenge to "the policies of both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama."

Harvard's Stephen M. Walt wrote in Foreign Policy:

Given that current demographic trends suggest that Arabs will be a majority in the lands currently controlled by Israel in the not-too-distant future, Huckabee is either endorsing ethnic cleansing or calling for the permanent denial of democratic rights to the Arab residents of the Occupied Territories, which is a form of apartheid. Either way, he is no friend of Israel, and the policies he's endorsing will do great damage to US interests throughout the region.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution offered demographic detail:

At current estimates, there are 2.3 million Arabs living in the occupied West Bank and 1.4 million Arabs in the Gaza Strip, in addition to 1.5 million Arabs living within Israel’s internationally recognized boundaries. In fact, there are probably more Arabs living in the “Jewish homeland” than there are Jews. To achieve the single-state, Jewish-state solution proposed by Huckabee, one of two things must happen. The Palestinians would have to either go or stay.

Go, or stay?

Huckabee's hosts have a preference, it seems. Huckabee was was the guest of the Jewish Reclamation Project of Ateret Cohanim, a Zionist group.

Bob Allen of Ethics Daily wrote in an article published today:

Former presidential candidate and possible vice presidential nominee Mike Huckabee visited Israel as a guest of a right-wing Zionist group that is buying up property to move Jews into Jerusalem's Muslim Quarter in hopes of replacing the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque with a reconstruction of Solomon's Temple and ushering in the Messianic Age.

Although Richard Silverstein goes deeper in his probing of Huckabee's hosts.

Huckabee's stance is no surprise. A Southern Baptist Minister is to be expected to base his foreign policy views on his faith.

Huckabee is quite conservative. His views brought him and his hosts together and lead him toward the kinds of solutions which concern Walt and others. Views about which simple humanity may have reasonable concerns.

With no reference to Huckabee, Tony Cartledge wrote Monday in a blog based on Alex Awad's book, Palestinian Memories: The Story of a Palestinian Mother and Her People:

I have a lot of sympathy for Israel and the Israelis -- don't get me wrong. But I also have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinians who continue to be displaced and dominated in ways that are wrong in the sight of God and man. The West has perpetrated unspeakable crimes against the Jews through the years -- but trying to balance the scales on the backs of the Palestinians just adds one great crime to another.

DC Court of Appeals sets standards protecting anonymous online speech

The arbitrary disregard of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Department for Thomas A. Rich's right to anonymity as the FBC Jax Watchdog blogger could not meet the standards set by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals last Thursday, or of other lower courts which have ruled on similar matters.

FBC Jax Watchdog's anonymity was stripped away without prior notice in a still unsatisfactorily explained criminal investigation over which no charge was filed and which produced no court action. Although the DC case involved defamation[.pdf], the standards are nonetheless clear.

A subpoena associated with a well-pleaded claim and the opportunity to contest it are required to consider breach of online anonymity:

1. Ensure that the plaintiff has adequately pleaded the elements of a defamation claim.
2. Require reasonable efforts to notify the anonymous defendant that the complaint has been filed and the subpoena has been served.
3. Delay further action for a reasonable time to allow the defendant an opportunity to file a motion to quash.
4. Require the plaintiff to proffer evidence creating a genuine issue of material fact on each element of the claim that is within its control.
5. Determine that the information sought is important to enable the plaintiff to proceed with his/her lawsuit.

The consensus of the lower courts is that disclosure of an anonymous blogger's identity requires painstaking court consideration. Lack of that is not excused by the dismissive statement[.pdf] of the Jacksonville, Fla., Sheriff John Rutherford.

Sam Bayard of the Citizen Media Law Project wrote:

The court also perceived the danger of relying on procedural labels like "prima facie" and "summary judgment" and distilled the most important common feature of the competing tests in this area — that a plaintiff must make at least a substantial legal and factual showing that his/her claim has merit before a court will unmask an anonymous or pseudonymous Internet speaker.

As The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press explained, the D.C. court "noted that states vary widely in what test a defamation plaintiff must meet before it can compel a third party to turn over the identity of an anonymous speaker. Virginia, for example, 'requires only that the court be convinced that the party seeking the subpoena has a legitimate, good faith basis' for its claims. But the D.C. court ruled that this lax test 'may needlessly strip defendants of anonymity in situations where there is no substantial evidence of wrongdoing, effectively giving little or no First Amendment protection to that anonymity.' "

When anyone's First Amendment protection is trampled, we are all harmed.

SBC Today relented from its no-reader-comments policy

We note in passing that SBC Today gave up its February decision to forego user comments on its blog entries.

We argued at the time that their decision was both self-destructive and disrespectful of their readers.

User response, which in cases like that is in general to leave and stay away until you come to your senses, had its way.