Anti-evolutions’ loss confirmed in ‘formal’ Texas Board of Education vote

Terrence Stutz of the Dallas Morning News reported at 11:09 AM CST on Friday, January 23, 2009:

AUSTIN – Without debate, the State Board of Education today tentatively approved new science curriculum standards that scrap a longstanding requirement that students be taught the “weaknesses” in the theory of evolution.

The action followed a meeting Thursday in which members who are aligned with social conservatives failed to muster enough votes on the 15-member board to retain the rule. Only seven Republican members backed the requirement.

The rest of the story here.

Full explanation of the debate here.

bWe: Baptist Women for Equality

Shirley Taylor, a former employee of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, has founded a group called bWe – Baptist Women for Equality, whose goal is to open Southern Baptist leadership roles to women.

Specifically, they “advocate for women deacons and women pastors in Baptist churches.”

Their Web site offers An Open Letter to Baptists (.pdf) which introduces the group and includes brief discussions of scripture and the Southern Baptist Convention’s 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.

It begins:

Even if you think everything is all right in your church, please consider those other churches where women can be Ministers to Children, Ministers to Youth, Ministers to Women, can be on all committees which make church policy and pertain to theology, and financial matters, but who cannot serve a piece of bread and cup of juice.

Do you know why your church does not have women deacons? It can be found in “the cold heart of the church” which is your church’s By-laws. Church By-laws can be changed. When women decide that enough is enough, the cold heart of the church will be changed to include women as Deacons and accept women as Pastors.

Closing the site home page is:

How often do you tell your daughter that she is scripturally inferior to your son?

You tell her every time you take her to church.

How often do you tell your son that he is scripturally superior to his sister?

You tell them every time you take them to church.

Unless your church recognizes women deacons and women pastors.

The site has been frequently updated with new materials, thus far all in .pdf format.

Southern Baptist policies appear to us to be the focus of the site and its literature, since there are other Baptist organizations whose policies with regard to women are far more inclusive.

We look forward to learning more about the group and following their progress.

More about bWe

Goals, rationale, hope for success [here].

Mexico City policy reversed

Reuters reports that President Barack Obama will reverse reversed the Mexico City Policy today.

Called the Mexico City Policy because it was unveiled at a United Nations conference there in 1984 by former President Ronald Reagan, it forbidsforbade U.S. funding abroad to organizations which offer abortion services or counseling to provide legal abortion, counsel or refer for abortion, or lobby for the legalization of abortion in their country.

Catholic Culture protests:

Cardinal Francis George noted in a recent letter to the president, “The Mexico City Policy, first established in 1984, has wrongly been attacked as a restriction on foreign aid for family planning. In fact, it has not reduced such aid at all, but has ensured that family planning funds are not diverted to organizations dedicated to performing and promoting abortions instead of reducing them. Once the clear line between family planning and abortion is erased, the idea of using family planning to reduce abortions becomes meaningless, and abortion tends to replace contraception as the means for reducing family size. A shift toward promoting abortion in developing nations would also increase distrust of the United States in these nations, whose values and culture often reject abortion, at a time when we need their trust and respect.”

Whereas Marty Meehan and Gloria Feldt explained in the Boston Globe:

The “Mexico City” policy prohibits US dollars and contraceptive supplies from going to any international family planning program that provides abortions or counsels women about their reproductive health options. The policy isn’t about money going to pay for abortions. Even those groups that use only private funds for abortion services — where abortion is legal — are barred from assistance. This is money going to family planning programs.

…

[N]ot only are organizations that provide or counsel about abortion services affected; those that dare to take part in a public discussion about legalizing abortion are also affected (hence the name “global gag rule”). … This policy has nothing to do with government-sponsored abortions overseas. Ten years before the gag rule was in place the law strictly prohibited that. This policy is about disqualifying prochoice organizations from receiving US international family planning funding.

Under Bush’s policy, organizations that play a vital role in women’s health are forced to make an impossible choice. If they refuse to be “gagged,” they lose the funding that enables them to help women and families who are cut off from basic health care and family planning. But if they accept funding, they must accept restrictions that jeopardize the health of the women they serve.

The most tragic ramifications have been felt in the developing world. In Kenya, for example, two of the leading family planning organizations have been forced to shut down five clinics dispensing aid from prenatal care and vaccinations to malaria screening and AIDS prevention. Kenya’s experience is common, according to “Access Denied,” a report on the impact of the global gag rule on developing nations. Researchers found that programs for rural communities and urban slums have been scaled back by as much as 50 percent. As a result more women are turning to unsafe abortion — a leading cause of death for young women in much of Africa — because they lack access to family planning information and essential contraceptive supplies.

Legally, the eliminated order would be unconstitutional in the United States and restricts foreign organizations from engaging activities that are legal in their own countries and here.

Whether you agree with its goals or not, the rule was and always has been a use of presidential fiat to legislate action which the actual legislative process would not support. It is well discarded.

More prayer on the right, and less politicking?

Pulpits which thundered on the right, now turning away from the culture wars?

Sandhya Bathija, writing at the Americans United for Separation of Church and State blog, says::

William Graham Tullian Tchividjian, the grandson of famous evangelist Billy Graham and the new pastor of Ft. Lauderdale’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, surprisingly says he has no interest talking politics. It’s quite a change from his grandfather, and even more so from his predecessor, TV preacher D. James Kennedy.

Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church’s former pastor was a religious right leader who pursued the culture wars from his pulpit and on his radio and television broadcasts, books, pamphlets, tapes and DVDs.

That left an impression. One Tchividjian is correcting.

On Tuesday he told the Miami Herald:

”Dr. Kennedy came from a completely different generation, and my leadership by that fact alone will be different,” Tchividjian said.

While the late Kennedy kept a hand in all aspects of the church organization, including its radio, television and print media arm, and Westminster Academy and Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Tchividjian will oversee only the main church.

”Those ministries have gone their own separate ways. They have their own presidents,” said Coral Ridge executive minister Ronald Siegenthaler. “The church will be more focused on the local community, as opposed to more national and international outreach.”

We feel Bathija is right when she argues that Tchividjian is in step with the Pew Forum’s August 2008, survey which found that 52 percent of Americans agreed that houses of worship should keep out of politics.

If a harbinger, Tchividjian is certainly a notable one. He will, however, not be lonely. The demographics are, for many, irresistible.

Still a faith-based nation

Faith-Based Organizations, as a result of Bush regulatory changes, now successfully “retain their religious identity while providing publicly funded services.”

Reviewing Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in well-stated detail, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan concludes:

Understanding Americans to be fundamentally religious is now deeply embedded in government and in our public culture. That is the default position. Not secularism. Chaplaincies are proliferating across the U.S. to serve Americans in the military, in hospitals, in colleges, in the workplace—and in crisis situations. While President Obama is careful to speak always with respect for people who are not religious, all the evidence suggests that we are still a faith-based nation.

It is at The Immanent Frame blog, here.

Obama clearly pro-choice

President Barack Obama was politic but uncompromising. He did not on Thursday end to the “Mexico City policy” requiring any non-governmental organization to agree before receiving U.S. funds that it will “neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.” Although he will later. Nor did he give way on previously expressed values.

The core of Obama’s Roe v. Wade anniversary statement:

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose. While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

Is this not unequivocally pro-choice?

Texas school board anti-evolutionists lose

A 20-year-old requirement that high school science classes discuss the so-called weaknesses in the theory of evolution, was dropped in a preliminary vote Thursday by the Texas State Board of Education.

The formal vote is scheduled today.

The Board was swayed, according to both the Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle, by the advice of a panel of science educators.

“We’re not talking about faith. We’re not talking about religion,” said board member Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi. “We’re talking about science. We need to stay with our experts and respect what they have requested us to do.”

Kathy Miller, president of the watchdog group Texas Freedom Network (which live-blogs the debate here), has argued that the word weaknesses “has become a code word in the culture wars to attack evolution and promote creationism.”

Or as Howard M. Friedman at Religion Clause explains:

The new language calls on students to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence.” Proponents of the new language say that the “strengths and weaknesses” formulation is used to justify exposing students to religious theories masquerading as science.

The key issues are explored at Teach them Science, a Web site devoted to the issue. It is maintained by the Center for Inquiry and the Clergy Letter Project. Or, alternatively, the New York Times offers a balanced but ultimately less detailed overview. And if you wish more, current detail, Tony’s curricublog has audio files of the hearings.

Other curriculum votes are scheduled for March, so the heated, two-decade debate is by no means over.

The final decision is of overarching importance because the size of the Texas textbook market gives it sweeping, national impact on the way school science textbooks in general are written.

Update

Terrence Stutz of the Dallas Morning News reported at 11:09 AM CST on Friday, January 23, 2009:

AUSTIN – Without debate, the State Board of Education today tentatively approved new science curriculum standards that scrap a longstanding requirement that students be taught the “weaknesses” in the theory of evolution.

The rest of the story here.

Faithful applaud the torture ban

For many who celebrate President Barack Obama’s order requiring adherence to the U.S. Army Field for interrogation, the labor toward restoration of that standard was a matter of religious faith.

Faith in Public Life says it well:

For three years, religious leaders and organizations from across the faith and ideological spectrum have worked tirelessly to end America’s torture of detainees in its custody. Today, the faith community applauds President Obama’s executive orders banning torture, closing the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and secret locations, ensuring Red Cross access to all detainees, and ending extraordinary rendition. Together, we call for continuing diligence in the effort to ensure the US government never tortures again

Four religious organizations which had led the struggle against torture are listed in today’s blog:

• Evangelicals for Human Rights, the leading Evangelical voice against U.S.-sponsored torture.
• National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a multi-faith coalition of more than 200 religious organizations and which includes diverse Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders.
• Rabbis for Human Rights North America, the leading voice of the Jewish community against U.S.-sponsored torture.
• Faithful America, an 80,000-member online community of people of faith.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also pushed for and applauds the ban.

There are others.

That order and the attendant move to close the Guantanamo Bay facility are prayers answered, promises kept, justice and honor restored.

We are more secure as a consequence of this good thing, not less.

Ursuline Sisters combat human trafficking

Human trafficking victims are often too intimidated to coopreate, Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.

Kentucky lawmakers passed tough new penalties in 2007, but so much is required of the victim that there have apparently been no prosecutions.

Attorney Cori Hash, director of the Maxwell Street Legal Clinic in Lexington, said she has dealt with four cases of human trafficking in recent years, but none have gone to trial. “We have some great laws on the books,” she said. But there are “realistic limitations on using those laws when working with a victim.”

Most victims are threatened with violence against themselves or their families, Hash said. Many come from foreign countries and may not trust the American justice system — or fear that their relatives back home could suffer retribution. Others simply have to move away to find work and can’t cooperate with prosecutors.

“Human trafficking laws ask a lot of the victims,” she said. “They require pretty intensive cooperation and lots of evidence.”

The Ursuline Sisters held a seminar on the problem recently:

Learn more about the issue worldwide from the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking.

The first ‘March for Life’ was in 1974

Tony Spence of Catholic News Service wrote:

Today marks 36 years that pro-life groups have assembled in Washington to mark the 1973 Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Roe v. Wade. At CNS we thought it would be interesting to see what we said about that first march on Jan. 22, 1974.

Fredrick A. Green covered the first march for CNS (then NC News). He reported that 15,000 people showed up, many on buses from around the country.

“The right-to-life advocates spent the morning lobbying the offices of senators and members of the House of Representatives and then gathered in the afternoon at the west steps of the Capitol to hear speeches by congressional sponsors of human life amendments and leaders of the right-to-life movement.

“Later, they marched in a ‘circle of life’ around the Capitol,” he wrote.

The rest is here.