SBC’s Richard Land is distraught about health reform

His Nazi libels and “death panels” prevarications failed to stop health reform, so Richard Land is sad.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) chief is so sad and so busy (like Mike Huckabee) lamenting legislator support for health reform that he still doesn’t have time to say a word or two against Uganda’s gay genocide legislation.

Five conservative Republican House members understand the importance of taking a stand on that. Where is the ethics in Land’s silence?

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni urged by Republicans to stop anti-gay bill

Five House Republicans, all “men of faith,” have igned letter urging the president of Uganda to oppose the gay death penalty legislation:

The letter was signed by Reps. Frank Wolf of Virginia, Chris Smith of New Jersey, Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, Trent Franks of Arizona and Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana.

They call the gay genocide legislation antithetical to the Christian belief in the “inherent dignity and worth” of all human beings, and there are reports that he agrees and has assured U.S. officials that he will block the bill.

Many top U.S. and British religious leaders have also taken clear stands against the legislation and the Vatican has stepped forward against anti-gay violence.

Thou shalt steal (sometimes)?

Rembrandt: Moses with the Ten Commandments

Not quite. Anglican Priest Tim Jones of St. Lawrence and St Hilda Church in York, England, told his congregation on Sunday that vulnerable people who are in extraordinary difficulty should shoplift in preference to robbery or prostitution.

The now widely quoted passage from his Sunday sermon was, however:

My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift. I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither.

Read the entire sermon here. You will see that he frames a living dilemma of the sort people around us are actually facing, now:

What advice should one give, for example, to an ex prisoner who was released in mid-November with a release grant of less than £50 and a crisis loan, also of less than £50, who applies immediately for benefits but is, with less than a week to go before Christmas, still to receive any financial support? This is just the situation that presents itself at the vicarage door. What would you advise? One might tell them to see their social worker, but they are on a waiting list for a social worker. Tell them to see their probation officer, perhaps, but the probation officer can only enquire of the benefits agency, and be told that benefits will eventually be forthcoming. One might tell them to get a job, but it is at the very best of times extremely difficult for an ex prisoner to find work, and these are not the best of times for anyone trying to find a job.

One might wish that they could be supported and cared for by their family, but many people’s family life is altogether dysfunctional, and may be part of the story of how they came to be in prison in the first place. One might give them some money oneself, but when week after week after week goes by, and benefits still do not arrive, the hard reality is that a vicar’s salary is not designed to meet the needs of everyone – or indeed anyone – whom the benefits agency has failed. What else might one advise? They cannot take out a loan, except from the kind of loan shark – and there are enough of them around – whose repayment schedule is so harsh that it constitutes indentured slavery to the criminal underworld. They could beg. But how many of us, good Christian people that we are, give constantly and generously to ex prisoners waiting for benefits? And the likelihood is that, found begging, they will quickly be in trouble with the police, and therefore in breach of their parole.

They could perhaps get cereal and toast every morning from a local charity. Then could perhaps apply, and see if they are eligible for some limited help from the Salvation Army or other such body. But in the meantime, having had only £100 in six weeks, what would you do, every legal avenue having been exhausted?

Or as Jones explained to BBC:

“When we, as a society, let our most vulnerable people down so terribly badly, I would rather that people take an 80p can of ravioli rather than turn to some of the most appalling things.

“Burglary causes untold harm and damage to people in a way that taking a can of spaghetti rings from a supermarket doesn’t.

“That’s not to say that shoplifting is good. Shoplifting is a dreadful thing but sometimes that’s all we leave people with.”

Your alternative to those in truly extreme circumstances is what, exactly? Starve? What of those with children, who have somehow fallen through the public assistance cracks? Let the children go hungry while teaching them the Ten Commandments?

Today’s Graph: Religious Oppression by Country

From the Pew Forum’s study, Global Restrictions on Religion:

This chart shows how the world’s 25 most populous countries score in terms of both government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. Countries in the upper right have the most restrictions and hostilities. Countries in the lower left have the least.

. . .
64 nations – about one-third of the countries in the world – have high or very high restrictions on religion. But because some of the most restrictive countries are very populous, nearly 70 percent of the world’s 6.8 billion people live in countries with high restrictions on religion, the brunt of which often falls on religious minorities.

You can [Download the report .pdf] or read it online.

Lie of the year award recipients (Sarah Palin, Richard Land, … )

Many are owed honorable mention below Sarah Palin on the PolitiFact Lie of the Year award trophy for elevating fictitious “death panels” to a topic of frenzied national debate.

Prominent among them is Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty chief Richard Land, who urged the self-destructive selection by the McCain presidential campaign of Ms. Palin as the vice presidential running mate.

Having helped give Ms. Palin prominence, Land promoted both the falsehood that health reform involves eugenics programs like those instituted in Nazi Germany and the “death panels” myth which is part of those claims.

After a Sept. 26 gathering of the Christian Coalition of Florida, at which he applied Nazi/Holocaust characterizations to Democratic leaders’ health care reform efforts, Land issued a pseudoapology. In an Oct. 14 letter to Anti-Defamation League (ADL) President Abraham H. Foxman, Land wrote:

It was never my intention to equate the Obama administration’s healthcare reform proposals with anything related to the Holocaust.

. . .

I deeply regret the reference to Dr. Josef Mengele. I was using hyperbole for effect and never intended to actually equate anyone in the Obama administration with Dr. Mengele. I will certainly refrain from making such references in the future. I apologize to everyone who found such references hurtful. Given the pain and suffering of so many Jewish and other victims of the Nazi regime, I will certainly seek to exercise far more care in my use of language in future discussions of the issues at stake in the healthcare debate.

Yet Land subsequently claimed in a broadly counterfactual Oct. 6 speech that the “Senate bill authored by Max Baucus, D.-Mont., reinstates the so-called ‘death panels,’”

Thus Land promoted “death panels” as a fact when a simple reference or two to PolitiFact.com would have permitted him to consign “death panels” to oblivion and with them his parade of other libels attributing to Democrats a move toward implementation of Nazi-like eugenics theories.

Straightforward self-correction appears to have escaped him and could be redemptive, without removing his name from any historian’s list of award recipients.

SBC: “among the most tightly-knit, hierarchically functioning denominations”

Explore the myth of Southern Baptist local church autonomy.

A Baptist woman in the pulpit

Put a Baptist woman in a pulpit this February for Martha Stearns Marshall Day of Preaching.

From the martyrdom Madelyn Wens to Lottie Moon censured [.pdf] by the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board and the disfellowshipping of First Baptist Church, Decatur, Ga., for calling Julie Pennington-Russell as senior pastor, Baptist women have been mistreated.

Southern Baptist “conservatives” throttled a growing and effective ministry by Southern Baptist women:

In 1964 Addie Davis became the first Southern Baptist woman ordained to the ministry. By the 1970′s hundreds of women were enrolled in ministerial degree programs at SBC seminaries. By the early 1990′s more than 1000 women had been ordained, more than 50 served as pastors in SBC churches, and others served as professors at Southern Baptist universities and seminaries.

Baptist Women In Ministry asks that Baptist churches devote one day with a women in the pulpit to correcting the accumulated damage and errors.

Update

Middle East Evangelical Churches gemeral assembly unanimously calls for the ordination of women.

The N.C. silly season on office-holding atheists goes pandemic

When atheistic Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell took office without legal challenge or other untoward event, we thought the silly season had ended and with it talk of applying Article 6, section 8 of the North Carolina constitution (a bootless anachronism). It says:

The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.

Vain hope. The sensationalistic atheist-bashing virus which greeted Bothwell’s election went national and then international.

Now apparently pandemic, the infection has boomeranged back to North Carolina, afflicting N.C. Christian Action League chief Mark Creech.

As Tony Cartledge explains:

Relying heavily on David Barton’s The Myth of Separation, which argues against church-state separation, Creech holds that “the founders” intended only that there should be no denominational test (Anglican, Presbyterian, etc.), assuming that all potential office holders would be Christian. In addition, he suggests (with the late D. James Kennedy) that those who don’t believe in God have no basis for life-affirming values.

Threatened with legal action, radio-interviewed and written about hither and yon, Bothwell is not unaware of the arguments being deployed. Bothwell answers them calmly via his own blog. For example, he writes:

Blind belief in the righteousness of our current wars is bankrupting this country while our economy has gone into a tailspin. And while our leaders often cloak their actions with prayer and religious posturing, it is the oil companies and defense contractors who reap profits while our young women and men sacrifice their lives.

And, in regard to death, it is my conclusion that those of us who believe that this is our one and only life are much more likely to value and protect the lives of our brave soldiers and our citizens than those who believe that they will live again in heaven.

Yet the nature atheists, who from here appear to be a varied lot indeed, isn’t the issue here. Religious freedom is. One need not be a Bothwell supporter to note, as we did earlier, that the U.S. Constitution supersedes any and every state constitution where there are conflicts. Then there is both the First Amendment to consider and Article VI, which says: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Religious belief and/or the lack thereof have no bearing on the right to exercise the privileges of citizenship in this country. That’s our way of keeping the state out of our religion (or lack thereof), and it works.

Top-ranked 2009 religion stories/topics/typo

The Religion | Newswriters Association offers Top Religion Stories of 2009 – the result of a survey of more than 100 religion journalists. They emphasize the top 10 but actually offer the top 23 stories, beginning with Obama’s June speech “pledging a new beginning in Muslim-U.S. relations.” Of that, the Springfield News-Leader wrote:

Obama extended a hand to the Islamic world in a speech in Cairo while quoting from the Quran, the Gospel of Matthew and the Talmud, the collection of Jewish law.

“So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity,” Obama said in the speech. “And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Time Magazine has its Top 10 Religion Stories for 2009, although they are more topics than stories.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty offers the top 10 religious liberty stories of 2009 (in reverse order). Some are stores in the journalistic sense. But as with Time, most are topics attended by brief essays. Number one, for example, is “New President brings change, but delays some tough decisions.”

Catholic News Service tells us 2009 was a busy year for the pope, reviewing those top stories, albeit without enumeration. Not critical reviews, BTW.

The London Telegraph’s Martin Beckford (religion and social affairs correspondent) has his own Top religion stories of 2009. In his view, “Following a year of turmoil in the worldwide Anglican Communion over women bishops and homosexuality, over the past 12 months most of the newsworthy events seem to have involved the Roman Catholic Church and Britain.”

Regret The Error’s Typo of the Year (amid its top corrected journalistic errors of 2009) is about religion:

The Daily Universe, a student paper at BYU, recalled and trashed 18,000 copies of an edition after discovering a typo. Notably, it was a typo that could have offended the Mormon church. The paper issued a brief apology and also published a lengthy article to explain the error.

That can happen when one substitutes “apostate” for “apostle” thus referring in a photo cutline to a nonexistent Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints group called, “Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates,” when Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is intended.

Ugandan gay death legislation dance continues

Mark Silk covers the Ugandan anti-homosexuality act.

We’re still looking for Richard Land on Uganda. ERLC has a link to the Baptist Press Warren story, but thus far, that’s all she wrote.