Pastor who helped get “under God” in Pledge dies
…Docherty, then pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, just blocks from the White House, gave a sermon in 1952 saying the pledge should acknowledge God.
He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was unfamiliar with the pledge until he heard it recited by his 7-year-old son, Garth.
“I didn’t know that the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,’” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. “I came from Scotland, where we said ‘God save our gracious queen,”God save our gracious king.’ Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn’t in it at all.”
OPINION: Obama vs. Pope Benedict (Washington Times)
The Washington Times
Sunday, November 30, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to pass the Freedom of Choice Act is setting up a showdown with the Vatican.
“The first thing I will do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act,” he said at an address before Planned Parenthood on July 17, 2007. And if he does, it will trigger a harsh response from Pope Benedict XVI, as well as a political revolt among practicing American Catholics.
Mr. Obama signing the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) “would be the equivalent of a war,” a senior Vatican official told Time magazine last week. “It would be like saying, ‘We’ve heard the Catholic Church and we have no interest in their concerns.’ ” At a recent Baltimore meeting, the U.S. Catholic bishops pledged to challenge Mr. Obama on his defense of abortion rights.
FOCA seeks to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law. It would remove all restrictions on abortion in state statutes – including restraints on late-term abortions and parental notification laws. It would also entrench taxpayer funding of abortion. Moreover, it would compel Catholic health-care facilities to provide the heinous procedure. In short, it constitutes a fundamental assault on basic Catholic doctrine.
Mr. Obama is a radical on abortion. He is vehemently pro-choice, even opposing the ban on partial-birth abortion. While in the Illinois state legislature, Mr. Obama voted against legislation protecting babies born in botched abortions.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com …
An idea lost on fanatics: Those behind the Mumbai attacks will never fathom religious liberty (LA Times)
The Los Angeles Times | November 29, 2008 | Tim Rutten
There are many facts remaining to be discovered about the atrocities in Mumbai this week, but we already know what we really need to know.
The physical institutions targeted and the individuals singled out for particular attention by the killers — Americans, Britons and Jews — are signatures of the fanatic Islamists we’ve come to know as jihadis. The sites of their attacks may vary — New York, London, Madrid, Nairobi, Mumbai — but the object of their quarrel with history remains the same: modernity.
Mumbai was selected not simply because it was a so-called soft target but because it is a symbol of modernity in the world’s most populous democracy. The city the West first knew as Bombay is today the symbol of India’s place in the modern world, as the center not only of banking, commerce and a burgeoning high-tech sector but one of the world’s great film industries. (It’s worth recalling that when the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan, one of the first things it did was to close the cinemas and ban DVDs from Mumbai’s Bollywood.)
The places the killers struck — luxury hotels, a railway station, a hospital for women and children, the Chabad Jewish center — are all powerfully linked in the popular mind with the modern world. As the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has argued, the jihadis have linked anti-Americanism, anti-British sentiment (the assumption is that London is Washington’s lap dog) and anti-Semitic antagonism toward Zionism into a potent new ideology. To the extent it seems to find an increasingly sympathetic hearing in some fashionable sectors of the intellectual West, including the U.S., Levy correctly labels it “the socialism of imbeciles.”
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com …
Bishops insist on work-free Sunday protection by European Parliament (DI-VE)
The EP is currently deliberating a revision of the Working Time Directive of 2003. On October 22, 7 MEPs from different political groupings tabled amendments under which the directive would include a statement saying that the minimum weekly rest period “shall in principle include Sunday”.
They also tabled a new clause underlining the importance of a work-free Sunday for the protection of workers’ health.
“The likelihood of sickness in companies that require staff to work on Sundays is greater than in companies that do not require staff to work on Sundays,” it states. “The health of workers depends, among other factors, on their opportunities to reconcile work and family life, to establish and maintain social ties and to pursue their spiritual needs. Sunday, as the traditional weekly rest day, contributes to these objectives more than any other day of the week.”
The clause also points out that “absenteeism and sick-leave increase significantly in companies working on Sunday”, adding that this negative impact on workers’ health “is mainly due to the consequences for social, especially family life”.
Sunday “is the natural choice for family related activities, as childcare facilities and schools are closed”, it concludes.
The secretariat of COMECE encouraged MEPs to make full use of the EP’s procedural flexibility in order to enable a debate and vote on the issue to take place in the parliament’s plenary session of December 16, maintaining that the protection of Sunday is an issue of central importance for workers and their families, and a cornerstone of the European Social Model.
Source: http://www.di-ve.com/Default.aspx?ID=72&Action=1&NewsId=55743&newscategory=31
European Church leaders call for protection of ‘Sunday rest’ (SofiaEcho)
Representatives of Churches in Europe (Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community – COMECE, and Conference of European Churches – CEC) had talks in Paris on November 21 2008 with French state secretary for European affairs Jean-Pierre Jouyet. CEC is a group of about 120 Orthodox Christian, Protestant, Anglican and Old Catholic Churches from all countries of Europe, plus 40 associated organisations.
In a media statement, the two church groupings called on the EU member states and the EU institutions to make respect for religious freedom, which is a fundamental right, a major plank of their foreign policy.
. . .
The church representatives expressed their wish to see the Sunday rest day being better protected in national legislations as well as in the future EU working time directive which currently is being revised.
“In our societies and in our economies, where efficiency has become the ultimate criterion of valuation, Sunday rest allows the individual to be placed at the centre of society and calls attention to the fact that he is free and not the slave of work,” the church groupings said.
. . .
Read the full article at http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/churches-tell-french-eu-presidency-of-concerns-about-persecution-of-christians-in-iraq/id_33132/catid_66
Pilgrims among first to recognize that socialism doesn’t work (Salem News)
This year, we are facing economic concerns and Thanksgiving may seem a way off. Rather than a typical Thanksgiving message, I would refer you to Barbara Anderson’s well-written piece at Salem News. Editor.
America’s first experiment with socialism was an abject failure that cost the lives of more than half of the foundering settlers by 1627. After living the liberal philosophy for half a decade of want, Gov. Bradford and the other founders of the Plymouth Plantation came to recognize that, despite their struggles, perseverance and faith, something was very wrong; something needed to change if they were to survive.
The concept of communitarianism was quickly rejected in favor of capitalism, and the colony subsequently thrived. Bradford and his council established property rights and free enterprise, self-reliance and self-motivation, truly a new concept in this new frontier. Immediately, the result of private industry was quantifiable:
“This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content,” Bradford wrote.
(Read more at: http://www.salemnews.com/puopinion/local_story_331001415.html?keyword=secondarystory
São Paulo passes religious freedom charter (ANN)
Measure expected to keep religious liberty at forefront in Brazil
Seventh-day Adventist Church leaders and religious freedom proponents in Brazil say the passage this month of the Brazilian Charter of Religious Liberty helps galvanize freedoms of belief already established by the country’s constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Meant to draw attention to the legal defense of civil liberties and human rights in Sao Paulo, the document was introduced November 10 by the Brazilian Association of Religious Freedom and Citizenship (ABLIRC) — a partner of the International Religious Liberty Association (IRLA).
Sao Paulo, with nearly 18 million inhabitants, is Brazil’s largest and one of its most influential cities, said John Graz, IRLA secretary-general. Graz said religious liberty proponents expect other cities to follow in accepting the charter.
“Brazilians are privileged to live in freedom,” Graz, who attended the launch of the charter, told those gathered. With that privilege, he added, comes a responsibility to keep issues of religious liberty at the forefront internationally. “If a nation forgets its freedoms, it can easily lose them.”
Aldir Soriano, a lawyer specializing in religious freedom who in 2006 began drafting the charter, said because some formerly free countries are now tightening religious liberties, nations that maintain strong protections of belief must be wary of slackening their support.
Brazil is listed under Category 1 by the Religious Freedom World Report, a ranking that recognizes the wide freedoms enjoyed by all religious communities in the largely Roman Catholic country.
Brazil is home to nearly 1.4 million Adventists.
Source: Adventist News Network
VIDEO – Sign company removes pro-atheist billboard at request of California city
The city of Rancho Cucamonga, CA asked the General Outdoor sign company to remove an atheist billboard after several complaints from religious groups. Yet, religious groups would be up in arms if they were asked to remove a religious sign. A double standard is certainly beginning to emerge, and there might be a basis for arguing that the city violated the free exercise rights of the advertisers and the establishment clause by requesting that the sign company remove the billboard because of the content of the message.
One does not have to agree with a group to have reason to be concerned when the government interferes with their right to freedom of speech when the speech is not obscene.
The billboard was funded by the Freedom from Religious Foundation, which is a group that advocates for separation of church and state.
Here is a video developed by a pastor featuring a set of “person on the street” interviews.
The Coming “War” Between the Obama Administration and the Catholic Church (LifeSiteNews.com)
This is from a very conservative, pro-life web site and has some deep implications with regard to a religious organization that seeks political power.
By John-Henry Westen
WASHINGTON, November 19, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The possible signing of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) by President-Elect Barack Obama would be “the equivalent of a war” an unnamed senior Vatican official recently told TIME magazine.
The startling comments make the second time this week that a Vatican official has forthrightly and in the strongest language condemned Obama’s extreme policies on abortion. Speaking at the Catholic University of America a few days ago, Vatican Cardinal James Stafford labeled Obama’s anti-life policies as “aggressive, disruptive, and apocalyptic,” also noting that, “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake” (see coverage: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/nov/08111703.html ).
With Catholic, but outspokenly pro-abortion individuals occupying two prominent positions (Joseph Biden as vice president and Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services Secretary) the specter of public excommunication or denial of communion for prominent members of the Obama Administration has arisen.
The focus of the Vatican’s concern, FOCA, is a bill that would do away with state laws on abortion, including laws mandating parental involvement, or banning partial birth abortion. FOCA would also compel taxpayer funding of abortions, and, of greatest concern to Bishops, would force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.
Obama has in the past said that he would make signing FOCA one of the highest priorities of his presidency.
Last week at the meeting of US Bishops in Baltimore, Cybercast News Service asked Chicago Cardinal Francis George, the current president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, if voting for FOCA would bring a penalty of automatic excommunication for Catholic politicians. The Cardinal did not rule it out.
“The excommunication is automatic if that act is in fact formal cooperation, and that is precisely what would have to be discussed once you would see the terms of the act itself,” responded Cardinal George. When asked for more, he added: “The categories in moral theology about cooperating in evil, which make you complicit in the evil even though you don’t do it yourself, are material cooperation, which is usually remote and therefore doesn’t involve you in the moral action except in a very auxiliary and minor way, and formal cooperation, which would involve you even though you are not doing it, in the way that makes you culpable.
(Read the full article: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/printerfriendly.html?articleid=08111908 )
VIDEO – BREAKING NEWS: Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, on the Rule of Law
Eric Holder
Today, former Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton, Eric Holder accepted President-elect Barack Obama’s invitation to become the next Attorney General.
Holder, who is on the board of the American Constitution Society (ACS) has a fundamental understanding of the role of the law in society, and recognizes the concept that nobody is above or below the law.
Earlier this year, he gave a lecture for the ACS convention regarding the importance of restoring the rule of law. He called upon the United States to reverse “the disastrous course” set by the current administration in the struggle against terrorism, arguing “the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”
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