Secularism/Culture war

Feminist group to re-think major faiths

A group of progressive female theologians of various faiths in Germany formed a religious group to reflect on their traditions from a feminist perspective.
The Inter-religious Conference of European Women Theologians is a conglomeration of Muslim, Christian and Jewish women who want to take religious interpretation into their own hands, Deutsche Welle reported Tuesday.
“Until now, dialogue among women in the church was kept at the level of exchanging recipes or pouring each other tea,” said Rabeya Muller[German convert to Islam], one of the group’s founders.
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Navy Chaplain Goes on Hunger Strike Outside White House Over Uniformed Prayer Rules

Thursday, December 22, 2005

WHITE HOUSE — It’s almost Christmas, and U.S. Navy chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt is on a hunger strike that includes nightly prayers outside the White House.

Lieutenant Klingenschmitt, an Evangelical Episcopal priest, says he won’t eat until President Bush signs an executive order allowing military chaplains to pray according to their beliefs.

Klingenschmitt, who began his fast on Tuesday, says Navy admirals have told him that he can’t pray publicly in Jesus’ name unless he’s wearing civilian clothes. He’s continuing to pray as the Bible says Jesus instructed, but not in uniform.
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1st Amendment ‘doesn’t create church-state wall of separation’

WorldNetDaily.com December 20, 2005

Court whacks civil-liberties group, OKs Ten Commandments display

A U.S. appeals court today upheld the decision of a lower court in allowing the inclusion of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse display, hammering the American Civil Liberties Union and declaring, “The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state.”

Attorneys from the American Center for Law and Justice successfully argued the case on behalf of Mercer County, Ky., and a display of historical documents placed in the county courthouse. The panel voted 3-0 to reject the ACLU’s contention the display violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

The county display the ACLU sued over included the Ten Commandments, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Star Spangled Banner, the national motto, the preamble to the Kentucky Constitution, the Bill of Rights to the U. S. Constitution and a picture of Lady Justice.

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Ex-minister wins right to sue Kirk for sex discrimination

This has wrong written all over it in every aspect.

SUSAN MANSFIELD

FOR a woman who has just made legal history by successfully challenging a ruling that she was employed by God, Helen Percy cuts an unlikely figure.

With a woolly hat pulled down tightly over her fair hair and an apologetic gait, she explains she has just returned from tending her sheep. For her, there are no photo opportunities or PR people guiding her through the media scrum.

Instead, just hours after a landmark ruling in the House of Lords against the Church of Scotland, The Scotsman found Ms Percy, 39, alone on the windswept hills of Perthshire. But, despite her apparent isolation, she is determined to make sure what happened to her doesn’t befall others in the Church.

It is eight years since Ms Percy claimed she was forced out of her job after being accused of having an affair with a married church elder in her rural parish. She launched a sex discrimination claim but lost after being told she was an office holder – in effect employed by God – rather than an employee of the Church.

But the Law Lords yesterday overturned two previous rulings by an employment tribunal and the Court of Session in Edinburgh and decided Ms Percy should be allowed to take her sex discrimination claim against the Church to another employment tribunal.

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U.S. Methodist panel orders gay minister defrocked

By Michael Conlon
Mon Oct 31,11:26 AM ET

The United Methodist Church’s top court has ordered a lesbian minister defrocked, overturning a lower panel’s ruling that had reversed the penalty, the church announced on Monday.

Elizabeth Stroud “was accorded all fair and due process rights” and an appeals committee that reversed her removal from the ministry in April erred in saying church officials had failed to define what a “practicing homosexual” was in terms of church law, the ruling said.

The decision by the nine-member Judicial Council is final. A church spokeswoman said Stroud could ask the panel to reconsider, but the quest would be heard by the same panel, and only two members dissented.
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Seeing Red

Terry Mattingly’s religion column for 8/24/05.
tmatt.net GetReligion.org

Political strategist James Carville said it, candidate Bill Clinton believed it and loyal Democrats have chanted this mantra ever since.

And all the people said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

But what if an elite team of Democrats ventured outside the Beltway to talk to rural and red-zone voters in Arkansas, Wisconsin, Colorado and Kentucky and learned that the economic bottom line was no longer the political bottom line?

Focus-group researchers from the Democracy Corp in Washington, D.C., found that voters in Middle America are worried about Iraq and they are mad about rising health costs. That’s good for Democrats. Many of them fiercely oppose abortion on demand and gay marriage. That’s good news for Republicans. But the researchers also mapped a political fault line that cuts into the soul of Middle America.
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