Frank Page’s vote against accountability

Under the Bush administraion, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was a political program. Rather than abolish the entire experiment, the Obama administration took office bent on constructive civil reform. Which, when dealing with slush funds, must include establishing fiscal accountability. Something former Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page voted against.

Bruce Prescott got the goods on Page from the a report on the White House Web site. The report shows Page voted against requiring “houses of worship that wish to receive direct federal social service funds to establish separate corporations as a necessary means for achieving church-state separation and protecting religious autonomy, while also urging states to reduce any unnecessary administrative costs and burdens associated with attaining this status.”

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote of this matter:

One year after Obama announced his version of the faith-based office, civil rights and civil liberties groups such as mine are still fighting Bush-era battles over tax funding to religious groups that proselytize, job discrimination on religious grounds in public programs and lack of accountability. It’s disheartening.

I am not a member of the president’s 25-member Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the body Obama formed one year ago to examine these issues. But I did serve on a task force offering the Council advice on a range of questions.

During our deliberations, I often found myself on the other side from conservative religious activists who resisted even the most benign and reasonable rules that would safeguard the rights of taxpayers and the disadvantaged as well as help preserve the constitutional separation of church and state.

. . .

Conservative religious representatives on the Council disagreed. They want sectarian groups to have access to plenty of government money with very little (if any) meaningful accountability. That’s the status quo; they like it.

Resistance to accountability by Page and others like him could provoke a consensus around the view that the entire program is, if not flatly unconstitutional, then unwise.

Baptist missionaries’ legal adviser has trafficking issues

Update

A man offering legal advice to most of the 10 Baptists, Jorge Puello, “may have a string of legal charges against him in the United States as well as a warrant for his arrest in El Salvador for sex trafficking, records show.” The New York Times reported Saturday:

The man, Jorge Puello, was brought into the case from the Dominican Republic as a lawyer to help the 10 Americans arrested last month for trying to remove 33 children from the country after the earthquake without government permission.

A Web site that was abruptly taken down on Friday described Mr. Puello and his cousin, Alejandro Puello, as law partners.

. . .

Salvadoran police say they want to question Mr. Puello in connection with a sex trafficking ring that was broken up last year in which women and girls from Central America and the Caribbean were lured into prostitution through offers of modeling jobs. The suspect police are seeking is named Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, which Mr. Puello said was not his full name.

. . .

Public records and court documents in the United States also indicate that a person with the same name and birth date is considered a fugitive and is wanted by the Miami police, the United States Customs and the United States Marshals Service. The name and birth date are also the same as the man being pursued by the police in El Salvador and for whom Interpol has transmitted an arrest warrant.

An order is listed in the United States national crime database for a man with that name and birth date to be arrested on sight and reported to United States immigration officials. Those records say he is wanted in connection with crimes including bank fraud in the United States and Canada, and theft of American government property. Police records say he has violated parole.

The Miami Herald reported Saturday:

Salvadoran police say photos that surfaced Friday show the legal advisor to American missionaries jailed in Haiti may be the lead suspect in a human trafficking ring involving child prostitution in El Salvador.

Police say they are waiting for fingerprints to determine if Jorge Anibal Torres Puello is also wanted in El Salvador on charges of promoting prostitution among children in what has been one of the nation’s most vexing social problems

The Idaho Statesman reported:

While investigators in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Florida look into Jorge Puello’s past, the families and representatives of several of the 10 jailed Americans he has been working for say they don’t know how he became their advocate in the ordeal.

Puello, is suspected of leading a trafficking ring involving Central American and Caribbean women and girls, and says it is a case of mistaken identity. The New York Times reported Friday:

When the judge presiding over the Haitian case learned on Thursday of the investigation in El Salvador, he said he would begin his own inquiry of the adviser, a Dominican man who was in the judge’s chambers days before.

The judge in the case has recommended release of the 10 Americans, but that does not settle the issue. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The judge’s opinion still will be reviewed by prosecutors in the case. The prosecutors’ decision could take up to five days to be issued, Haitian judicial officials said.

Whuddya know: The Obama administration didn’t abandon anyone

The unabandoned “Southern Baptist Ten“ in Haiti apparently owe some thanks to the Obama administration, especially often-maligned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

Reg Brown, a Washington,D.C., attorney for detainee Jim Allen of Texas, said Allen’s team of lawyers is “cautiously optimistic” that their client would soon be released. “We believe the secretary of state has played a constructive role in that Secretary (Hillary) Clinton wants to bring the Americans home,” said Brown, who this week wrote to Clinton asking for her assistance.

Self-protective outcry from Southern Baptist Convention bigwigs, despite their role in causing the problem, may have been irrelevant to the proceedings themselves and, given the SBC’s longtime role as a Republican Party auxiliary, off the Obama administration’s radar.

Haitian judge may release the 10 Baptists: Update

Finding no malevolent intentions, a Haitian judge has apparently decided to release the 10 Baptists who have been at the center of so much furor, Reuters reported Wednesday afternoon. The report was based upon disclosures by an unnamed “judicial source:”

“One thing an investigating judge seeks in a criminal investigation is criminal intentions on the part of the people involved, and there is nothing that shows that criminal intention here,” the source said.

That seems fair, and will give us all time to wonder why top Southern Baptist Convention officials seemed to be more concerned about the denomination’s image than about either the missionaries themselves or about the Haitian children whose protection is and was the objective of Haiti’s legal system in this case.

Bear in mind that the 10 Southern Baptists were arrested out of a legitimate Haitian concern with child trafficking. Specifically, the U.S. State Department issued a cautionary statement on Jan. 26 which said:

In the aftermath of a crisis such as the Haiti earthquake, children are especially vulnerable; and there is increased potential for abuse of, and trafficking in, children. The United States remains committed to working with the Government of Haiti to implement safeguards to protect children and their families in Haiti.

Update: Thursday afternoon

Release may be “provisional:”

Later, Saint-Vil said he would recommend provisional freedom for the detainees while the investigation continues. But it wasn’t clear whether their possible release means they would be allowed to leave Haiti, or what implications the judge’s decision could have on whether the charges may be dropped.

Winter storms bury Cheyenne River Sioux in misery

South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation is besieged by winter storms, “leaving about 30,000 residents in two communities without water, electricity or heat for at least a week,” and Bishop John Tarrant of the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota has appealed for emergency relief funds.

Cathy Lynn Grossman writes:

No photos or video of sweet suffering faces. No popular vacation landscape for a backdrop. No personal connective ties. Are those the reasons the natural disaster in the Great Plains has gone below our philanthropy radar?

Keith Olbermann appeals for help:

Attacks on faith-based program reveal its flaws

No one should be surprised that President Obama’s faith-based initiatives are drawing fire from liberals and conservatives.

After all, it is known that the program failed to increase churches’ social services and some have advocated doing away with the program completely. Also, a broad coalition of organizations jointly said the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was meant to protect religious liberty not lead to discrimination.

So folks like Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and former Southern Baptist Convention president Frank Page, still take issue with the program.

David Waters, who edits an online discussion about faith for the Post and Newsweek and blogs about religion, concludes that the faith-based initiative remains a “fundamentally flawed concept.”

“The federal government and U.S. religious groups serve two different masters. The government serves taxpayers, religious groups serve God. When it comes to distributing and overseeing the use of federal tax dollars, government overrules God.”

Churches and other faith-based groups that take government funding, should follow the rules, Waters said.

“If not, they can decide to help people the old-fashioned way — because God calls them to, not because government pays them to.”

Well said.

Abusing Native American Religious Rites to Deadly Effect

James Arthur Ray ran high-end “Spiritual Warrior” retreats which desecreated Sioux sweat-lodge rituals. Until an Oct. 8, 2009, incident in Sedona, Arizona, which resulted in three deaths and 20 other hospitalizations. On Feb. 3, 2010, the Yavapai County Arizona Sheriff’s Dept. arrested Ray, charging him with three counts of manslaughter

Those three were simply the most recent deaths resulting from the “commodification” of American Indian cultural and religious practices, observed Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University professor of religion and associate faculty in the Center for African American Studies.

Native Americans have not responded passively to the desecration of their traditions. The Lakota Nation has filed a lawsuit under the Sioux treaty of 1868.

Wikipedia says, in summary:

The Lakota Nation holds that James Arthur Ray and the Angel Valley Retreat Center have “violated the peace between the United States and the Lakota Nation” and have caused the “desecration of our Sacred Oinikiga (purification ceremony) by causing the death of Liz Neuman, Kirby Brown and James Shore”. As well, the Lakota claim that James Arthur Ray and the Angel Valley Retreat Center fraudulently impersonated Indians and must be held responsible for causing the deaths and injuries, and for evidence destruction through dismantling of the sweat lodge. The lawsuit seeks to have the treaty enforced and does not seek monetary compensation.

The Lakota have also published a “Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality,” which does a great deal to clarify the cultural/religious issues involved.

The tony, $9,000 a head retreats are regarded by Native Americans as altogether corrupt. There is, explains Chief Arvol Looking Horse, “19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle,” no for-pay Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Oyate spiritual rite [.pdf]:

When you do ceremony, you can not have money on your mind. We deal with the pure sincere energy to create healing that comes from everyone in that circle of ceremony. The heart and mind must be connected. When you involve money, it changes the energy of healing. The person wants to get what they paid for; the Spirit Grandfather will not be there, our way of life is now being exploited! You do more damage than good. No mention of monetary energy should exist in healing, not even with a can of love donations. When that energy exists, they will not even come.

The issues here are clearly more complex than “buyer beware,” although a visit to New Age Frauds & Plastic Shamans is a good place to begin is you are considering the purchase of such services.

Bottom line? That path is not for sale, either.

[H/T Judith Weisenfeld]

Using the attacker’s words to blame the victim

Abused by Baylor University when she had to courage to report being assaulted by “murdering minister” Matt Baker when he was a student there, Lora Wilson is still a target of reflexive abuse.

Blame the victim is a hideous American practice, not exclusively a Southern Baptist sin — one at which Christa Brown fired back when Lora Wilson was maligned with Baker’s words in a recent blog comment.

The smear continues in part because the Southern Baptist institutions which are at fault have failed to acknowledge their responsibility. Christa writes:

To this day, no Baylor official has made any public expression of remorse. No one at First Baptist of Waco, a church that had two reports of Baker’s abuse, has expressed any sorrow about letting the man move on without consequence. No one at the Baptist General Convention of Texas has offered any explanation for how someone with so many abuse and assault reports could move so easily through its affiliated churches and organizations. And no one in Baptistland has made even the feeblest of effort to reach out to the many more who were likely wounded by “murdering minister” Matt Baker — the many who are probably still silent.

Beyond hype, hope for spirit-minded sports

Nothing demonstrates the outrageous devotion of sports fans like the overwhelming hype of Super Bowl week.

This year’s version has a particularly religious flavor with Focus on Family buying some of the famously expensive commercial time with an anti-abortion ad featuring University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. And just a little more than a week before the big game, Phoenix Cardinal quarterback Kurt Warner announced his retirement by thanking God for the opportunity to play.

But amid the hoopla, Shirl James Hoffman, emeritus professor of kinesiology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, encourages a different approach to sports. His article in Christianity Today, is called “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture — and what might be done about it.”

Hoffman has spent 40 years in sports as an athlete, an official, a coach, a professor and an administrator. He sees an evangelistic fascination with sports like the call, “Onward Christian Athletes,” and the seemingly omnipresent “skin-deep evangelism.”

Christian evangelicals, he says, “have been quick to harness sports to personal and institutional agendas,” but also points out that organized sports too often bring out the worst in people. He believes that Christians have a “duty to seek the redemption of sports, and to point society toward a better way of playing.”

Hoffman cites numerous difficulties, including that the “big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel.” Nonetheless he calls for a Christian view “that sports are derivatives of the God-given play impulse—intended less to test our spiritual limits than as times and places to recover our spiritual centers of gravity and to rehearse spiritual truths, dim images of the real game that will begin when we leave this world behind.”

The piece is well worth the read for sports-minded Christians and spirit-minded sports fans.

Farewell NAMB/IMB merger

Merger of the big, troubled North American Mission Board (NAMB) with the big, troubled International Mission Board (IMB) is apparently off the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) drawing boards.

Thus spake the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force (GCRTF) Chairman Ronnie Floyd in a speech Monday at a Florida pastor’s conference. Although SBC President Johnny Hunt once called stories reporting the possibility of such a merger “ludicrous,” Floyd confessed:

There was great, great, great discussion studying, planning and even to the point of having strategic formation of the possibility of the other. But we just really sensed in our heart that wasn’t right at this time.

“Sensed” presumably means heard the uproar set off by the GCRTF’s fog-enshrouded considerations of merger and objection by SBC elder statesman Duke K. McCall and others to the further concentration of SBC executive authority such a merger would entail.