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.

Interrogation at Guantanamo

Three of four prisoners died at Guantanamo Bay detention camp during or after interrogation on the night of June 9, 2006. Although they were officially declared “suicides.” And this was generally accepted until Joe Hickman, who was a sergeant and on duty at the time, stepped forward.

This we learn from Scott Horton’s Harper’s Magazine Jan. 18 account of events leading to the death of the three.

A fourth survived. He was, Horton wrote, “a forty-two-year-old Saudi Arabian named Shaker Aamer” who “is married to a British woman and was in the process of becoming a British subject when he was captured in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2001:

United States authorities insist that he carried a gun and served Osama bin Laden as an interpreter. Aamer denies this. At Guantánamo, Aamer’s fluency in English soon allowed him to play an important role in camp politics. According to both Aamer’s attorney and press accounts furnished by Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the Camp America commander, Aamer cooperated closely with Bumgarner in efforts to bring a 2005 hunger strike to an end. He persuaded several prisoners to break their strike for a while, but the settlement collapsed and soon afterward Aamer was sent to solitary confinement. Then, on the night of June 9, 2006, Aamer says he was the victim of an act of striking brutality.

Amer described it all to his lawyer, Zachary Katznelson, some weeks later. Katznelson “filed an affidavit with the federal district court in Washington, setting it out:”

On June 9th, 2006, [Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

Horton goes on to explain:

The treatment Aamer describes is noteworthy because it produces excruciating pain without leaving lasting marks. Still, the fact that Aamer had his airway cut off and a mask put over his face “so he could not cry out” is an alarming fact. This is the same technique that appears to have been used on the three deceased prisoners.

The possibility of this kind of action is part of what Evangelicals for Human Rights and other people of faith called out against during the Bush administration. And have since asked to have thoroughly investigated. With good cause, it seems.

[H/T: The Daily Dish]

Recommended: Google News’ Baptist Timeline

Henry IV’s burning of Walliam Sawtre as a heretic starts the Google News Timeline for Baptist.

Their graph is interactive. What do you think of it?

Fact-checking Rick Warren [Update: Got $2.4 million]

“The Miracle“ is pastor Rick Warren’s characterization of a week that included an appeal for $900,000. There are unsubtle hints on the Saddleback Community Church Web site that the appeal was successful, as Warren’s staff told the Orange County (Calif.) Register (OCR) it would be.

Blog reaction ran from supportive to excoriating (1, 2, 3) and press coverage, beyond painstaking work by the OCR, was in general competent (1, 2, 3) if disinterested. Although parts of some reports were just wrong. All to be expected in reaction to public plea for funds by an internationally controversial figure.

It didn’t suit Warren, as he made clear in a twitter comment that was as silly as the worst of the blogs and news stories:

Ann,again media got it 100% wrong.Fact-checking is dead.I’ll share the miracle this wkend.09-our best yr yet-11records set!

Because Saddleback Community Church doesn’t and isn’t required to publish financial reports, though Warren is usually uncritically admired for his personal generosity, fact-checking Warren’s financial claims was problematic.

Given his self-contradiction in the Proposition 8 controversy and other dubious claims (1, 2) revealed when he could be fact-checked, Warren has every right now to expect skeptical reactions from journalists. With the help of Mark Silk, we have argued for the creation of a science of Warrenology to handle the big guy’s penchant for having things both ways.

Under the circumstances, Warren’s suggestion that “Fact-checking is dead,” sounds like wishful thinking.

Asked $900,000 -> Got $2.4 million

Success! The OCR reported:

In what Pastor Rick Warren called radical giving, Saddleback Church members not only heeded his call to quickly raise $900,000 but exceeded it by at least $1.5 million.

A packed church erupted today in applause and cheers when Warren made the announcement at the 4:30 p.m. service. By New Year’s Eve, church members brought $2.4 million to the church, a tally that does not include mailed donations, Warren said.

“This is pretty amazing,’ Warren exulted. “That’s a record. I don’t think any church has gotten a cash offering like that off a letter.”

“We’re starting the new decade with a surplus,” he said. “It came from thousands of thousands of ordinary people. There was not one big fat cat.”

Read the entire story here.

Dad, Aunt Lisa, Mommy Ruth, Peapoppy, Ma Ma, …

There is something about which we agree with PZ Myers. As he writes in a blog about the loss of his father (fill in, however, your own loss), “We tell ourselves that time heals all wounds, and it’s not true.”

No it isn’t. This is the season of my grief, too.

How we give and where it goes (or pretends to go)

There are a few contradictions woven into the American way of giving and assisting.

Republicanism, religion and the ‘nones’

We need the nones to see the probable meaning of the most recent Gallup analysis of tracking data for the relationship between intensity of religious faith and political party identification.

First, the Gallup analysis concludes:

The percentage of Americans who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party drops from 49% among the highly religious to 26% among those who are not religious. The percentage who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party rises from 37% among the highly religious to 56% among those who are not religious. For comparison, the party figures for November among all adults in these data are 40% Republicans/Republican leaners and 45% Democrats/Democratic leaners.

Thus, Republicans are in the plurality among highly religious Americans. For each of the other three groups, Democrats are equal with or higher in number than Republicans. The Democratic edge expands as religiosity decreases. Among the not-religious group, Democrats have a 30-point edge over Republicans.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found that the “percentage of Christians in America” on the decline and nones are on the rise. Specifically:

The non-theist and No Religion groups collectively known as “Nones” have gained almost 20 million adults since 1990 and risen from 8.2 to 15.0 percent of the total population. If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse to answer our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble “Nones” in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.

Thus, as long as Republicanism’s principal appeal is to the most fervent Christians, as Gallup found, Republican political influence is likely to continue to wane.

U.S. Christian leaders against Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009″

U.S. Christian leaders — who may not agree on same-sex lifestyle issues — have spoken out in a statement issued today against a law under consideration in Uganda that would make some homosexual behavior punishable by death. While diverse in political philosophy, they came together over “Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

Their statement [.pdf] says:

Our Christian faith recognizes violence, harassment and unjust treatment of any human being as a betrayal of Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. As followers of the teachings of Christ, we must express profound dismay at a bill currently before the Parliament in Uganda. The “Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009″ would enforce lifetime prison sentences and in some cases the death penalty for homosexual behavior, as well as punish citizens for not reporting their gay and lesbian neighbors to the authorities.

As Americans, some may wonder why we are raising our voices to oppose a measure proposed in a nation so far away from home. We do so to bear witness to our Christian values, and to express our condemnation of an injustice in which groups and leaders within the American Christian community are being implicated. We appeal to all Christian leaders in our own country to speak out against this unjust legislation.

In our efforts to imitate the Good Samaritan, we stand in solidarity with those Ugandans beaten and left abandoned by the side of the road because of hatred, bigotry and fear. Especially during this holy season of Advent, when the global Christian community prepares in hope for the light of Christ to break through the darkness, we pray that they are comforted by God’s love.

Regardless of the diverse theological views of our religious traditions regarding the morality of homosexuality, in our churches, communities and families, we seek to embrace our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as God’s children worthy of respect and love. Yet we are painfully aware that in our country gays and lesbians still face hostility and violence. We recognize that such treatment degrades the human family, threatens the common good and defies the teachings of our Lord — wherever it occurs.

Signatories include such centrist evangelical activists as David Gushee of Mercer University,and those from a range of other faith traditions such as Adam Tice, the Associate Pastor of Hyattsville Mennonite Church. They range from Jim Wallis of Sojourners (on the left) to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguezof the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (on the right) and include Melissa Rogers of Wake Forest University Divinity School’s Center for Religion and Public Affairs, and others [.pdf] .

The joint statement was organized by Faith in Public Life and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. It follows the Dec. 4 statement by Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori which said in part that “efforts to criminalize homosexual behavior are incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

[H/T: Divine Diva]

Once in Royal David’s City

Once in Royal David’s City performed at St Paul’s Cathedral in London:

[H/T: Guardian]

Michelle Malkin imagines an interesting, leftist war on cops

Counterpunching at critics of conservative Mike Huckabee’s pardons, she imagines a an anti-cop war, not so much by the left as by people of color. She concludes:

President Obama — Chicago pal of police-targeting Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and the convener of the national beer summit to indulge his race-baiting, police-bashing Harvard professor friend Henry Louis Gates — did not attend the service.

Get it?