Universal Life Church

Do you enjoy writing? Do you have something to say and haven’t found a good outlet for your voice to be heard? Do you have what it takes to join our Guest Blogger roster? We are looking for a few great writers who want their voice to be heard about social justice, freedom of religion, individuals rights, religion and politics, and more. Let your voice be heard all around the world by becoming a part of our new Guest Blogger program.

Requirements:

1. You must have your own website, blog site, or other online presence that we can exchange links with (you supply a constant link to our blog site from your site, and we supply a link back to you);
2. You supply a brief biography (you can include a picture of yourself if so desired) to highlight you on our guest blogger bio pages;
3. You must be able to participate with one article a month, up to 1200 words.

That’s really all there is to it. All articles will be posted on our new ULC blog under the Guest Blogger category. We reserve the right to edit all submissions.

Please contact us with your interest and to send a sample submission. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
The Universal Life Church Monastery

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Here are some excerpts from a speech Bill Cosby gave before the NAACP in 2004.  Do you agree with him?  Do you disagree?  We welcome you to share your feelings and opinions here.

‘They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.

I can’t even talk the way these people talk:

Why you ain’t,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be…

And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.

And then I heard the father talk.

Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we’ve got these knuckleheads walking around.

The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.

These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.

$500 sneakers for what? And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.

Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn’t know that he had a pistol?

And where is the father? Or who is his father?

People putting their clothes on backward:  Isn’t that a sign of something gone wrong?

People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn’t that a sign of something?

Isn’t it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?

What part of Africa did this come from?? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don’t know a thing about Africa …..

I say this all of the time.  It would be like white people saying they are  European-American.  That is totally stupid.

I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents.  I don’t have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany, Scotland, England, Ireland, or the Netherlands .  The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa .  So stop,  already! ! !

With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap ……… And all of them are in jail.

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person’s problem.

We have got to take the neighborhood back.

People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different ‘husbands’ — or men or whatever you call them now.

We have millionaire football players who cannot read. We have million-dollar basketball players who can’t write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.

Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.

We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..

We cannot blame the white people any longer.’
Dr.. William Henry ‘Bill’ Cosby, Jr., Ed..D.

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Indian may not be the most appropriate term to assign to Minrata Nikki Randhawa Haley, or Nikki Haley, a current gubernatorial candidate in the campaign for South Carolina’s next governor.  Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, is, quite simply, American, as much so as any white American, so calling her Indian is about as relevant as referring to her white competitors as Scots-Irish or Protestant; nevertheless, it is Haley’s Sikh Indian background, and not her policy, training, or experience, that has drawn the attention of conservative evangelical white Christians, revealing the fixation many southerners continue to have on race and religion. Somehow, Haley has managed to win their hearts.

Surprisingly, Haley has won the primary election and vanquished her opponents to become the GOP nominee for governor.  So what persuaded South Carolina Republican voters? Apparently the answer is that a “foreigner” can only win the favor of her constituents if she goes to hell and back—a veritable fraternity hazing—to prove she is one of them.

Initially voters expressed suspicion over Haley. Despite the official separation of church and state in America, right-wing Christian Republicans have placed greater emphasis on Haley’s Sikh background and South Asian heritage than on her views on issues like the economy, war, poverty, crime, and education. Never mind the fact that Haley’s family have converted from Sikhism to Protestantism and “embraced bad old conservative Republican values”, reports Tommi Avicolli-Mecca of the San Francisco alternative daily BeyondChron—she is still “different”, or “foreign”, in some nebulous sense, probably because of her long name and dark skin color.  In fact, as Avicolli-Mecca observes, “South Carolina GOP voters have been obsessing about her religion so much that her campaign even posted a webpage: “Question: Is Nikki a Christian?” The impertinence of a debate on the religious background of political candidates, as if their religion should inform their political policy, is truly frustrating for those who view religion and politics as necessarily separate.

The next question is, what did Haley’s obstacle course consist of, and what topics of “southern culture” did they grill her on? Topping the list was the U.S. Civil War. Not the violent crime, social stratification, economic disparities, or epidemic obesity plaguing the South. The Civil War. According to Avicolli-Mecca, the question came from Palmetto Patriots, an organization whose aim is to “‘fight attacks against Southern Culture [sic]” and ensure the “compliance” of candidates “with conservative values” (like Jim Crow laws?). Haley shrewdly avoided giving the commonly accepted answer that the war was waged over the “‘freeing of the slaves’”, a notion they despised, Avicolli-Mecca notes.  Apparently the group wanted to make sure that Haley, with her dark skin, was willing to downplay the role of slavery in the cause of the war and avoid placing any blame on southerners who fought for their “right” to own black people. (Visit our “Hate is Hate” Facebook campaign page to join the discussion on Confederate propaganda.)

Of course, it might be argued that South Carolina’s new Republican gubernatorial nominee had to pull a few strings to get nominated, and that this betrays a certain degree of sycophancy. After all, as mentioned above, she has sought to embrace many “southern” values, and it is hard to extricate such values from the deep-seated tradition of bigotry and intolerance for which the South has an infamous reputation. In sociological terms, we might call this passing—the attempt to gain favor with the dominant group by abandoning unfavorable personal traits and adopting dominant-group features. But, to be fair, maybe Haley simply feels a strong affinity for the principles and tenets of the Christian faith, as well as southern warmth and hospitality.

The ultimate question is, would South Carolina’s Republican constituency demand the same explanations from a white candidate? Probably not. And it is this double-standard which is most distressing. Maybe South Carolina Republicans have shown an increasingly progressive attitude by electing a gubernatorial nominee of Sikh Indian descent, but, given the suspicion over Haley’s background, they still have a long way to go in catching up with the rest of the United States and placing priority on social problems that really matter.

Learn more about Sikhism by reading our Guide to Divinity.

Source:

BeyondChron

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The boundary between freedom of and from religion has found an increasing presence in the U.S. public school system in recent weeks. Recently a judge in Connecticut issued a ruling preventing two local public high schools from holding graduation ceremonies in a church, and now a class president has been barred from reciting a “prayer” poem during a speech at a public high school graduation ceremony. While the local community has voiced misapprehensions over the decision, school administrators, as well as the ACLU Pennsylvania, have cited constitutional protections against religion as a basis for the decision. It may not seem so at first glance, but the case ultimately shows how important it is to defend personal, individual, constitutional freedoms against arbitrary majority rule.

The issue arose when Aaron Mackley, 2010 class president of Eastern High School, proposed a speech which including the poem “A Graduation Prayer”, by Helen Steiner Rice. According to a school board official and a community leader, reports Angie Mason of Pennsylvania’s York Daily Record, Mackley was asked to remove the passage containing the “prayer” poem because of its association with prayer and meditation; however, Doug Caldwell, Eastern York School Board president, points out that the decision was made not by the school board, but by the school district administration on the advice of legal counsel. The administration, he says, based their decision on several court rulings which suggested that allowing Mackley to recite the poem would be an unconstitutional endorsement of religion on the district’s part. Meanwhile, Mackley spoke about the issue with Don Pullen, pastor of Valley View Alliance Church, at a recent school board meeting, presumably with the goal of challenging the decision, while Sara Rose, a lawyer with ACLU Pennsylvania, supported it as lawful.

The matter perfectly illustrates the debate over the right to freedom of speech and religion on one hand, and the right to freedom from religion (and freedom of education) on the other. So, who is right—the school district and the ACLU, or Mackley and Pullen? Pullen’s argument, Mason reports, is that “the issue is not cut and dried and clear”, that there is no particular law banning prayers at public school graduation ceremonies, and that the school should have a policy on prayer in public schools which reflects the beliefs of the community. But there is a general law covering particular cases such as public school prayer—it is called the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which proscribes state endorsement of religion—thus, when a state-run school allows a student to give a religious-themed speech, it subjects its students to a particular religious view, in contravention to its lawfully neutral position on the matter. Furthermore, majority rule on minority-only concerns is tyrannical; this is why we have constitutions. Democracy might be seen as a system in which the individual rules on issues which affect themselves, and not on issues which do not affect themselves. Community enforcement of school prayer is an example of individuals ruling on issues which do not affect themselves. Thus, community enforcement of school prayer is undemocratic. One might argue, “but it does affect them, because if Mackley does not get to give his ‘prayer’ speech, they are deprived of that religious experience. After all, they’re attending the ceremony and listening to the speech as well.” But they are not deprived of religious experience; people of diverse faith groups are allowed to pray at home, in church, and even on park benches, just not in speeches at state-run schools—a good example of designated free-speech zones. Meanwhile, the non-religious retain the right to experience a once-in-a-lifetime state-operated ceremony free of religious themes and dogma. Doesn’t everybody win?

At any rate, it remains to be seen whether Mackley and Pullen take the issue to court. The dicey thing about such cases is that the school district can be sued either for repressing religious views, or for imposing them, and it is easy to sympathize with school administrators trying to navigate such precarious predicaments. At ULC Monastery, where we have tried to organize an interfaith effort to protect both freedom of and from religion and to preserve the separation of church and state, we believe the wisest course of action would be to bar any religious-inspired content from public school graduation ceremonies, because the faithful have the opportunity to exercise their beliefs elsewhere, while the non-religious have no other opportunity to celebrate their academic achievement in a secular environment. (Read our Ecclesiastical Proclamation of Canon Law for a more detailed overview.) As always, we wish to hear what counsel our legally ordained priests and ministers can give on the matter, so feel free to express your thoughts.

Source:
York Daily Record

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Soccer and the Sublime in the Shadow of Apartheid | Religion Dispatches
The World Cup in its pure state is not much different from the theologizing of Christmas; it is artistry embodied in flesh—a kind of divine incarnation. When one watches a highlight reel of Brazilian soccer hero Ronaldinho, words fall short but grace permeates. I think to myself, “now that’s what it means to operate out of freedom.” It’s like watching every divine superlative that describes the ineffable embodied. Yes, it’s grace incarnate on a soccer pitch. Top-tier athletes make too easy the writing of hagiography.

What Have You Done Today to Make You Feel Proud?| The Bilerico Project
By having conversations with friends, family, and co-workers about marriage we’ll put a human face on the issue outside of heated ballot campaigns and give our straight friends the opportunity to support us.

Parazzi’s Poker Face for Lady Gaga | GetReligion
The video, which came out Tuesday and already has at least 10 million hits, features Lady Gaga in a latex/leather nun’s habit, wearing a cross-shaped patch on her crotch, suggestively swallowing rosary beads. If you’d rather skip the 8-minute video, MTV has conveniently compiled a list of the most shocking images. Warning: Not safe for work.

This isn’t just about religious imagery, though. In May, the singer told the Times, “[The video is] a celebration and an admiration of gay love—it confesses my envy of the courage and bravery they require to be together.”

Brain Scans Show How Meditation Calms Pain | Wildmind
People who routinely practice meditation may be better able to deal with pain because their brains are less focused on anticipating pain, a new British study suggests.

The finding is a potential boon to the estimated 40 percent of people who are unable to adequately manage their chronic pain. It is based on an analysis involving people who practice a variety of meditation formats, and experience with meditation as a whole ranged from just a few months to several decades.

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U.S. fundamentalist Christian evangelist Ted Haggard is in the spotlight once again three and a half years after a scandalous encounter with a male prostitute caused his ministry to take a nosedive, driving him out of the Colorado Springs megachurch where he served as senior pastor. Now he plans to start a new modern church in the same town. Haggard, who objects morally to homosexuality on biblical grounds, allegedly paid a male prostitute for sex and drugs. It was a crushing blow to the pastor, who had built his church with his wife from a diminutive start-up into a congregation of 14,000. While the resilient minister claims his resurrected ministry will emphasize love and compassion, as well as the importance of civil equality, he still takes personal exception to same-sex love, leaving a feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction.

Haggard’s response to the allegations has been unexpectedly patient and forbearing, showing signs of self-reflection and accountability. In typical preacher’s fashion, he uses bright-eyed rhetoric and religious metaphor to describe his fresh aspirations. He compares his announcement to start a new church with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, referring to it as his own “resurrection day”. “I feel so alive,” he said to NPR’s Michel Martin. “Forgiveness is a wonderful thing. Redemption is a wonderful thing. The opportunity to have a second chance is a wonderful thing.” He also shows hope that the forgiveness his friends and lay members have shown him will continue: “The difficult part is difficult from people [sic], from society, because of course there’s a lot of hurt and betrayal and broken hearts,” Martin reports him as saying. “And what I did disappointed people 3 1/2 years ago. But I’ve just been amazed at the kindness and gentleness in people.” Such open and honest admission of guilt and imperfection certainly seems genuine, and one almost gets the feeling that Haggard could become your most trusted, down-to-earth friend and confidant—an “average Joe” with a heart of gold who gets along with everybody.

But exactly what is Haggard’s new mission, and how have his values changed to serve humanity better? On the surface, he seems to stress going back to basics, to the core teachings of love, tolerance, and non-judgement which reflect the purported teachings of Jesus Christ rather than the doctrine of the atonement or the violent bloodlust of the jealous war-god Yahweh. Martin quotes Haggard as saying, “I wanted people to respond to my failure in a helpful way instead of a punitive, hateful, cruel way. So now I want to spend the rest of my life being kind[,] compassionate[,] helpful and constructive in my response to people that are going through their darkest area.” The new, church, Martin reports, will be open to everybody. With his catchy phraseology, Haggard explains he wants to “launch a love reformation” to combat the media’s spitefulness, practice more love and kindness, and inspire people to help one another. He even goes on to say,

I believe in civil law there should be total equality under the law. So if heterosexuals get certain benefits for heterosexual relationships, then homosexuals should get those same benefits in their homosexual committed relationships. And that’s what I’m going to teach our people.

Haggard’s new commitment to legal equality seems like a surprisingly heartfelt change from the norm; indeed, it is a novel development in his evangelical worldview to argue that personal religious beliefs about sexual morality should not interfere with civil protections for loving same-sex relationships. But there is a caveat which lies in an important exception the preacher makes to his new, tolerant attitude: “I believe the Bible teaches we should have heterosexual, monogamous relationships, and that can be inculcated into law and form families, etc.” So while we hope eagerly for Haggard to turn a new leaf, as it were, and reconsider his moral qualms about forms of sex that do not result in procreation, he still clings to the belief that government should be influenced organically by grass-roots religious conservatism.

Now, of course, the man is entitled to his personal beliefs, yet these beliefs may still negatively affect his treatment of others. For Haggard, support for legal equality is a begrudging compromise that must be made in a changing society, but the wayward pink sheep of his flock can still expect to experience plenty of shame and condescension at church. His new paradigm—admittedly better than the previous one, but still wanting—opens church doors to inveterate “sinners” and teaches them that they deserve what everybody else has, but only outside church walls, reminding them that, ultimately, the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible does not approve, since he designed sex for making babies.

Haggard’s new “love reformation” is certainly an improvement on the widespread political opposition to legal equality for gays and lesbians which typifies religious organizations, but it still upholds an age-old social stigma against non-procreative sex and nontraditional families, based firmly in traditional doctrine and a literal interpretation of a “divinely inspired” holy book. Since Haggard and his church have every right to preach that homosexuality is a sin, there is little one can do to challenge such beliefs other than work diligently to persuade congregation members to employ their reasoning faculties and re-evaluate their own attitudes. In the meantime, perhaps we can put up with differing social attitudes and satisfy ourselves with the knowledge that, at least, progress is being made on the much trickier societal front.

Source:
National Public Radio

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Despite official separation of church and state at the federal level, religion seems to be constantly weaseling its way into local government in the United States. Recently, a federal judge ruled that two public high schools in the U.S. state of Connecticut cannot hold their graduation ceremonies at a local megachurch. The ruling has sparked debate over how far religious organizations can facilitate government-sponsored events, and whether states can defy federal constitutional guarantees. If anything seems clear, it is that the rights guaranteed by the federal constitution are in place to protect against the arbitrary and discriminatory legislation of local jurisdictions.

The megachurch in question, First Cathedral, is a non-denominational Christian organization which holds its worship services and other church activities inside a gigantic suburban-style structure surrounded by a vast parking lot. After several complaints over the decision to hold 2010 graduation ceremonies inside the church, three out of five schools elected to move their events to secular facilities, while the two remaining Enfield District schools decided to go ahead with plans to host the ceremonies inside the church. The conservative Christian legal group American Center for Law and Justice vowed to defend the church against further legal challenge, and this is exactly what happened when two students and three parents brought a challenge to court with the help of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union. According to USA Today‘s Cathy Lynn Grossman, the Associated Press report that an agnostic student and their parent complained of being deprived of a “once in a lifetime” chance to celebrate graduation  if the student skipped the ceremony or being “forced to submit to a religious  environment that … will make me feel extremely uncomfortable and offended” if the  student attended.

After visiting the church and examining it for overt religious symbolism, U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall found the facility “overwrought with religious symbols” and stated it could be seen as “coercing students to enter a church and ‘support or participate in religion’ but can also be viewed as coercing the violation of one’s own religious beliefs“, finally ruling that public school ceremonies held at the church would violate the U.S. constitution since “[a] reasonable observer attending the 2010 Enfield graduations would perceive the message that Enfield endorsed the readily perceptible religious views of First Cathedral based upon the character of that forum which Enfield schools selected.” A lawyer with American Center for Law and Justice said he will appeal Judge Hall’s decision at New York’s 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But were students, parents, and Judge Hall blowing a possible constitutional violation out of proportion? As Grossman points out, the schools said the church’s religious symbolism will be covered, but this will prove to be a daunting task—not only does a giant Latin cross rise from the roof, but similar crosses adorn its windows, while the main entry features a fountain modeled after the purported tomb of Jesus Christ. Even the building itself is shaped like a dove. Moreover, Grossman adds, the church itself has explained that the very reason why it hosts secular events is to reach out in evangelism to non-believers. So it turns out not only that concealing religious symbolism will prove impractical, but that the church has a not-so-hidden proselytizing agenda. And, as Grossman suggests, it seems absurd to expect the church to cover up its symbols when its very purpose is to display its faith for others.

This conflict between religious agendas and constitutional freedoms has raised many questions about how far the separation of church and state applies. One reader comment on Grossman’s article argued that the federal constitution’s First Amendment establishment clause cannot stop local state governments from establishing an official religion; yet another comment pointed out that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which was conceived with the original goal of preventing individual states from re-instating slavery, does in fact protect federal constitutional freedoms from the vagaries of local state legislation:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or  immunities of  citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of  life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its  jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It seems clear, then, that local governments have no authority to circumvent the federal constitution with respect to the natural rights and freedoms guaranteed therein. These include freedom from state-sponsored religion. But when a public, government-run school district forces all of its students to attend a graduation ceremony at a religious facility, especially when religious symbols are explicit and the church’s evangelical agenda is made known, it unfairly imposes religious views on non-believing students and suggests, as Judge Hall argued, that it endorses such views. According to the 14th Amendment, Enfield School District has no authority to override the rights protected in the First Amendment.

Does this mean young, start-up churches should be barred from using public school facilities on Sunday mornings? Not necessarily. In such situations, public school students are not forced to attend religious services—these services take place when students are absent from school, hence religious themes are not being imposed on students. However, a close eye should be kept on such arrangements to ensure that such services do not bleed into daily school activities.

Whether Enfield School District succeeds in holding its 2010 graduation ceremonies at First Cathedral remains uncertain, but we at ULC Monastery blog will be sure to update our ministers on this important issue.

Source:
USA Today

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Universal Life Church ministers have faced an uphill struggle in getting their legal online ordinations recognized locally in places such as Washington, DC and Virginia, but the struggle does not end there; many ministers have also experienced difficulty setting up their own churches, due largely to legal church status, constitutional law, and local zoning regulations. One of these ULC ministers is Robert Seals, who operates the Goddess Temple sanctuary in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Chico, Butte County, California. After neighbors started complaining about how Seals was using his property, county officials cited Seals for building and land-use violations. The conflict between Seals and his neighbors perfectly illustrates the limitations on religious freedoms, and how these must accommodate the freedoms of others.

The complaints started soon after Seals held his Earth Dance Festival last year at the temple, drawing over five hundred revelers and stirring up enough noise and dust to cause neighbors in the Santos Ranch area to contact county officials. Neighbors questioned whether Seals had the proper permits to host such a large assembly on his property, and some even argued that they were unable to sell their houses because of the goings-on at the sanctuary. It was not long until the Code Enforcement Division of the Butte County Department of Development Services issued Seals a violation notice. Since that time, he has agreed to postpone future Earth Dance Festival celebrations, and is now using his facilities—which include giant sculptures of a lizard and an imposing goddess figure, which he crafted himself, as well as numerous large buildings and landscaped gardens—to officiate modern wedding ceremonies and to host seminars, workshops, and funerals. The grounds, which are open to the public, have also been the site of environmental and spiritual activism workshops.

Seals was initially discouraged by the complaints and averred that his religious freedoms were being unfairly restricted, citing the Religious Freedom and Land Use Act. “I didn’t think government could place restrictions on a religious organization, preventing them from assembly”, Shannon Rooney of the Chico News Review reports him as saying when he completed the paperwork to turn his property into a modern interfaith church. According to Rooney, he has shown effort in appeasing his neighbors’ interests while defending his right to exercise freedom of religion. In order to do so, he has hired an agent, Michael Evans, who has over thirty years’ experience in land-use regulation. The complicated legal process will involve a draft environmental assessment for Seals and his neighbors to review, which in turn will be subject to a thirty-day public review, followed by a final decision by the county planning commission.

How far may a church go to exercise religious freedom? In Seals’s words, Rooney reports, “At first, I was kind of angry about it . . . . I thought they [neighbors and government officials] might be invading our rights”. But freedoms are limited, and they must accommodate other freedoms. Consequently, a church does not have the freedom to exercise its religion insofar as this imposes on the rights of others. This is why rowdy church picnics and popular exurban megachurches pose a problem, since they either disturb the peace of neighbors or threaten the preservation of rural land meant to be enjoyed by all. (Read our entry on zoning laws, church rights, and places of worship.) Moreover, why should the law favor one freedom over another? Most likely Seals realized this when he found out the Religious Freedom and Land Use Act does not allow religious organizations free rein without considering noise ordinances and environmental implications.

But Seals himself already seems to recognize this important compromise, stating, “People say they feel good here—they feel centered,” acknowledging that he moved to the area for the peace it offered. “I have to respect that the neighbors want to enjoy that peace, too.”

Satisfying both religious rights and the right to peace and a healthy environment is indeed a delicate balancing act, just as is any other conflict between rights. Rural religious retreats run by well-meaning nondenominational clergy members can affect the surrounding community in the most unexpected ways. Ideally, we would be able to arrive at an easy resolution each time, but this proves to be a daunting task. What is most important is to recognize when one group’s rights prevail tyrannically over those of another, and how this imbalance can be avoided.

Let us know your thoughts: should Reverend Seals’s Goddess Temple be a no-holds-barred religious refuge, or should it accommodate the rights and interests of the surrounding community, at least insofar as the activities affect others?

Source:

Chico News Review

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Episcopal Head Lashes Out at Anglican ‘Colonial’ Uniformity | Crosswalk
Anglicans should be led by local communities rather than powerful clerics, Jefferts Schori argued in a Wednesday (June 2) letter to her church’s 2 million members. And, after 50 years of debate, the Episcopal Church is convinced that gays and lesbians are “God’s good creation” and “good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones.”

GENDA Gets 32nd NY Senate Vote Commitment | TransGriot
If passed, GENDA would add the category of ‘gender identity and expression’ to existing New York State human rights laws that protect residents against discrimination in the areas of employment, housing, public accommodations, education and credit.
New York would become the 14th state to have those protections if GENDA becomes law in the state. Gov. David Paterson has stated he will sign it if passed.

How Hard Are Opponents of Marriage Equality Losing? | Shakesville
So hard. So very hard. So hard that progressive John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, and libertarian Robert Levy, chair of the Cato Institute, have signed on as co-chairs of the advisory board to the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which will be appealing the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, currently before a federal district court in California, all the way to the Supreme Court in pursuit of marriage equality.

Court orders Jehovah’s Witness boy be given blood transfusion | Adelaide Now
In his ruling, Justice Richard White said the boy’s parents were “loving and caring” and had their son’s “best interests at heart”.
He said it was important to consider the boy’s religious beliefs and attitude toward transfusions.

“Whilst I respect the religious beliefs of the boy and his family, and the strength of their faith and convictions, I am satisfied it is in his best interests to receive transfusions,” he said.

Nun Excommunicated After Supporting Abortion To Protect Life of Mother | Jonathan Turley
Sister Margaret McBride has been excommunicated for the offense of approving an abortion to protect the life of a mother as a senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. There does not even appear to be any room for mitigating circumstances in such a case.

Jesuit journal praises US health reform law as needed, long-awaited | Catholic News
The health care reform law passed in the United States marked “a needed and long awaited beginning” of bringing greater justice to all citizens, especially the most vulnerable, said an influential Jesuit journal.
“Limited access to health care compromised in many ways the health of citizens and the country,” said the journal, La Civilta Cattolica.

Tattoos and Tibetan Ex-Political Prisoners | The Worst Horse
“While there are numerous sites and TV shows dedicated to the meanings of tattoos, the tattoos of Tibet’s ex-political prisoners have not been well documented. Their experiences are crucial to understand the human rights violations China commits on a daily basis.”

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Drawing the line between restricting and preserving religious freedom often proves a daunting task for modern democracies, which tend to rely on constitutional law in order to protect the cherished rights and freedoms of the people. The aim of democratic lawmakers is usually to accommodate the freedoms of an individual insofar as these do not impinge on the freedoms of other individuals. It is under just such a proviso that the higher administrative court of Berlin ruled that a Muslim high school student did not have the freedom to pray in a special room on school property, since this would unfairly accommodate one religion over another. The case shows just how nuanced the issue of religious freedom can be, and how an ostensible freedom can, ironically, turn out to be a form of discrimination, thus demanding a totally neutral environment.

The problem arose when the principal of a Berlin high school forbade a Muslim student from praying in the hallway between classes. The student argued it was his religious freedom to pray five times daily—morning, midday, afternoon, evening, and night—as prescribed by the Koran. When the principal, Brigitte Burchhardt, held her position, the student took the matter to court. A lower Berlin court ruled in favour of the student in 2008, forcing the school to accommodate the student temporarily with a special prayer room during which he could pray between classes, and at the end of September, 2009, the city’s lower administrative court ordered that the arrangement be made permanent in order to protect the student’s religious freedom. The municipal education authority appealed this ruling, however, citing state religious neutrality and school peace. A higher administrative court supported these objections and overturned the previous ruling, stating that “a restriction of religious freedom at school was justified in this case in order to protect other constitutional freedoms” such as religious freedom for other students as well as an educational experience devoid of religious tension. This verdict, in turn, will likely be appealed in Germany’s Federal Administrative Court.

Should schools allow students private prayer rooms in order to protect their religious freedom, or should students be denied such arrangements in order to protect the religious freedom of others? On one hand, one might argue that Burchhardt made a big deal out of nothing when she confronted her pupil over praying in school hallways—apparently, the student was observing his religious rite without bothering others. If he were kneeling down, making a display, and obstructing the hallway, this would arguably interfere with other students’ right to a peaceful education, but if he were praying silently with his head inside his locker door, it is hard to see how this is foisting one’s beliefs on others. On the other hand, attempting to resolve this dilemma by setting aside an entire, separate room for one student’s religious observances actually seems to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the problem by creating a special space which shows unfair preference. After all, if a Muslim student deserves a special prayer room, why should Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Lutheran students, or students of some other Christian denomination, not be allowed a special prayer chapel, and why should pagans, Wiccans, and others who follow earth-centered religions, not be accommodated with a special sacred grove on the school playfield? Accommodating one religion ultimately opens up a Pandora’s Box, as it were.

It is for this reason that complete secularism is perhaps the wisest route to take in order to achieve religious neutrality in public, government-sponsored education. A discreet prayer inside a locker door does not seem to interfere with anybody else’s rights, but if even this little act is unacceptable, it does not seem any more neutral to set aside an entire facility for one student’s religion. The problem with school accommodating religion has become apparent in the United States, where conflicts have arisen over universities accommodating evangelical student groups which violate school policy by excluding gays and lesbians. Such problems would be avoided, however, if schools simply told students that they have the freedom to exercise their religion off school property, at church, mosque, or synagogue. Every freedom has a designated zone in order to accommodate the freedoms of others—protesters have designated free-speech zones which allow presidents and prime ministers access through the crowd in their cavalcades; similarly, religious organizations have the freedom to exercise their religious rights on their own property, whether church or private home, and on public property such as parks, where they can even give sermons—as long as they are not interfering with the activities of others.

This compromise should be breezily straightforward and easy, but proves too often to be obscured by selfish personal motives which lack a wider, diplomatic perspective. Hopefully, though, it will serve increasingly as the standard against which opposing interests are weighed and balanced. The interfaith and ecumenical Universal Life Church Monastery has always supported both freedom of and from religion—we take it for granted that every individual has the right to exercise their faith freely unless it interferes with another’s freedom from religion. As mentioned, the fate of the higher municipal court’s verdict may still lie in the hands of an even higher federal court, but, as always, we invite our ordained priests and ministers to offer their input on the matter: in order to maintain religious neutrality, should Berlin enforce the accommodation of all religions in school, or none at all?

Source:
Spiegel

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