RLTV PODCAST: Jason Hines on The Church, Same-Sex Marriage, and Public Policy
Michael Peabody interviews Jason Hines, attorney and Andrews University seminary student, about the topic of same-sex marriage and why religious groups need to be careful to protect liberty of conscience in their advocacy on this issue.
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UN condemns Gaddafi jihad call
EXCERPT from Al Jazeera English (link below):
The United Nations and European Union have condemned a call from Libya’s leader for Muslims to carry out jihad against Switzerland over a recent vote to ban the construction of minarets in the European country.
Gaddafi said: “Any Muslim around the world who has dealings with Switzerland is an infidel [and is] against Islam, against Mohammed, against God, against the Quran.”
“Let us fight against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression,” he said in a speech broadcast live on television.
Sergei Ordzhonikidze, the UN director-general in Geneva, said the call by Muammar Gaddafi on Friday was “inadmissible”.
Read the full article at http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2010/02/2010226124744420153.html
Oregon Legislature Ends Ban on Teachers Wearing Religious Dress – Goes to Governor for Signature
EXCERPT from OregonLive.com (link below):
Oregon’s longstanding ban on teachers wearing head scarves or other religious dress is near its demise after the Senate and House gave final approval Tuesday to lift the ban.
Champions in the Senate called ending the ban a historic step toward religious freedom and non-discrimination in a state that has performed poorly in those arenas in the past. Christian teachers have long been allowed to wear crosses in Oregon public schools, but head scarves and turbans are not permitted.
Read the full article at http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/02/oregon_legislature_repeals_ban.html
Washington House of Representatives Attempts to Facilitate Union Take-Over of Religious Child Care Centers
By Michael D. Peabody, Esq.
So what’s the biggest threat to religious liberty? According to J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the answer is found in the strings attached to government funding of religious activity. Earlier this month, during a speech for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, Walker said, “What the government funds, it always regulates. Government-sponsored religion is always bad for religion. How can we raise a prophetic fist with one hand and take government money with the other?”
The truth of Walker’s statement was underscored just last week when the Washington State House of Representatives passed HB 1329, now working its way through the state Senate, that cleared the way for unionization of private and most non-profit child care centers if they take government subsidies for as little as one child, and even declares the centers’ employees “government employees” for the purposes of unionization.
In fact, HB 1329 openly declares that “child care center directors” and “workers” are “public employees” for the purposes of collective bargaining, if at least one child attending the center received government subsidies. It further declared that “solely for the purposes of collective bargaining, the Governor is the ‘public employer.’”
There is an exemption for large non-profits with more than 200 regional affiliates or that send more than $3,000,000 in “membership dues” to a national organization. The term “regional affiliates” is not defined although it is believed to primarily be aimed at large organizations such as the YWCA. Large churches might be able to escape through this loophole if they can claim that the local congregations count toward the total of “regional affiliates” and that money sent to the national organization counts toward membership dues, but that will not be an easy argument for most churches that happen to run child care centers to win.
The House analysis claims that the bill would allow private child care centers to continue to have the right to “chose, direct, and terminate” child care workers. However this is boilerplate language for most contracts between employers and employees and it is easy to foresee scenarios in which religious child care organizations would be required to work their way through the union grievance process and defend their religiously-based decisions to a non-religious entity. How can a religious child care center fulfill its faith-based mission when it has to answer to a secular labor union?
At a time when child care is expensive and parents are having to work longer hours to make ends meet, religious child care centers that have accepted subsidized children are in a particularly precarious position. Local child care centers are generally small, mission-focused organizations with little money to defend themselves at the legislature. Sponsors of HB 1329, including the labor unions, are banking on this government dependence to generate pressure to dive into the non-profit sector and take over religious employers. In this case, the labor unions are on the verge of taking over an entire industry.
There are Federal laws which might pre-empt this legislation, or as an alternative, a basis for non-profit exclusion, as well as U.S. Constitutional considerations, but it could be years before these issues could be sorted out by the courts. In the meantime, if HB 1329 passes in its current form, and barring any court orders stopping it from going into effect, religious child care centers might either have to accept unionization or close their doors.
While there are many good reasons why government funding is necessary, and it is not at all certain that HB 1329 will become law, I would not be surprised to see similar legislation cropping up in more states as labor unions take advantage of government strings to try to control the elusive non-profit sector.
More on government funding to come in a future newsletter.
For more information about HB 1329:
- Read the House Bill Analysis at:http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2009-10/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/House/1329%20HBA%20CL%2009.pdf
- You can track HB 1329 and read legislative summaries and materials athttp://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/Summary.aspx?bill=1329&year=2009
- Also, be sure to read NRLA President Greg Hamilton’s testimony, in opposition to HB 1329, that he presented before the Washington Senate’s Labor, Commerce, and Consumer Protection Committee on February 18, 2010 athttp://www.npuc.org/site/1/docs/HB_1329_Senate_Testimony_2-18-10.pdf
HISTORY: Nine Children Face an Angry Town (Adventist Review)
EXCERPT:
I’M DRIVING HOME ONE DAY LAST SEPTEMBER with a major assignment on my mind—a formal presentation at an October conference in observance of the fiftieth anniversary of what some have called the most controversial book in Adventism: Questions on Doctrine. My radio is tuned to CSPAN, and on comes a live report of the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of one of the United States’ most significant civil rights events—the integration of an Arkansas high school in 1957 by a group that’s come to be known as the “Little Rock Nine.”
Suddenly, the stark irony in the coincidence of the two events as they unfolded 50 years ago struck me. On the one hand, an entire nation grappling with fundamental issues of human rights—innocent little children in danger of being killed simply for attempting to attend the school of their choice. On the other, a church preoccupied with fixing its own theology, seemingly oblivious that the very rights being agonized over in the larger community were being denied children within its own communion.
Obama speaks up for Tibetans, but in a hushed voice (India Times)
EXCERPT:
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama to express his “strong support” for human rights and religious freedom for the people
of Tibet while encouraging a direct dialogue with China.
Mr Obama “commended the Dalai Lama’s ‘Middle Way’ approach, his commitment to non-violence and his pursuit of dialogue with the Chinesegovernment during an hour-long meeting in the Map Room in the residential wing of the White House,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
God’s Counterterrorism in a ’24′ World
God’s Counterterrorism in a ’24′ World from Ryan Bell on Vimeo.
Ryan Bell, the pastor Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church, gave this presentation at La Sierra University on January 28, 2010.
RLTV PODCAST: Monte Sahlin on How to Help Haiti
Monte Sahlin is the director of Research and Development of the Ohio Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and is an expert international humanitarian aid. In this podcast he discusses the Haiti Earthquake and the response of a church group from Idaho that tried to help but got in trouble. He discussed Haiti and other current issues on his blog at http://www.MonteSahlin.com.
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BUMPER MUSIC: “Haitian Vacation” – from The Alan Craig Project. Podsafe music from MusicAlley.com.
Oregon House Votes to Repeal Ban on Teachers Wearing Religious Dress
By an overwhelming majority, the Oregon House of Representatives has voted 51-8 to repeal a Klan-era ban on teachers wearing religious dress in the classroom. The law, originally an anti-Catholic measure, was implemented with the support of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. It bans Muslim public school teachers from wearing headscarves, Sikh men from wearing Turbans, and Jewish men from wearing yarmulkes. Oregon is one of only three states to prohibit religious dress in the classroom.
The bill is now headed to the Oregon Senate.
For a second year in a row, House Speaker Dave Hunt has led the charge in favor of workplace religious freedom. In July 2009, the Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act was passed but left in place the ban on teachers who wear religious garb. This ban, found in , which had been used to effectively exclude Sikhs from teaching in the public schools, has been the subject of intense debate between advocates who feel that the law unjustly prohbitied people of faith whose religious garb from teaching in public schools and others who were concerned that this might lead to proselytism of students.
Greg Hamilton, the President of the Northwest Religious Liberty Association, lobbied for this bill as well as last year’s successful Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act.
More on this to come soon, but for now here are some more stories on this bill:
The European Attack on Religious Liberty
By Martin Surridge -
As the nation of Haiti continues to suffer through one of the worst natural disasters in recent years, and the chaos and desperation that followed the earthquake, an incredible amount of material and financial relief has flooded into the former French colony. While Haiti may seem like another world for many people, what many do not realize is that Haiti lies only 681 miles off the coast of Miami, and that many American cities have substantial populations of Haitian-Americans. In addition, the United States government estimated that several thousand Americans were likely killed in the earthquake. Haiti, it turns out, is not as far away as we had previously thought. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that concerned citizens and other individuals tend to pay a little closer to attention to a global problem when the effects can be keenly felt in their own homes.
While they have been easy to miss, the news has been peppered recently with stories of serious threats to religious liberty not in the developing world, war-torn regions in the Middle East, or third-world countries struck by natural disasters, but in Europe, our own geopolitical backyard. In the modern era, Europe has been a beacon for personal liberty and religious tolerance, with religion playing a seemingly minor role in most of the continent’s wars and conflicts. However, one does not need an advanced degree in history to know that Europe has also been a bastion of religious persecution, a trait that has reared its ugly head in recent weeks, mostly as the continent struggles to define itself against growing waves of Muslim immigrants.
Radical, or at least conservative, Islam was seen as the enemy in the legislative decision made in Switzerland recently, when the Alpine nation banned the construction of minarets on Muslim places of worship. Not only is Switzerland a famously tolerant nation, it is also a nation with a grand total of four such minarets. The campaign that advocated for the ban preyed on people’s fears of Islamic terrorism and resorted to despicable tactics, including a poster that featured minarets rising skyward like nuclear missiles.
Perhaps less surprising that the minaret ban in Switzerland, but just as concerning, was a recent incident on the Greek isle of Crete when the only synagogue on the island was attacked by arsonists twice last month, which destroyed thousands of books, two offices and part of the historic building’s roof. Anti-Semitism is hardly new in Greece, but neither is the peaceful coexistence of Jewish and Christian communities in a country where some Jewish congregations can trace back their roots hundreds of years.
Religious liberty is also under threat in France, where parliament is expected to enact a law that will require dozens of conservative Muslim women to cease wearing the controversial burqa, the face-covering full length veils. Arguments abound on both sides of the debate. Those opposed to the veil argue that it degrades women, is an affront to gender equality, insinuates that men are incapable of controlling their lust, and is a threat to public security. Those who contend that such a law would infringe upon freedom of speech and religion claim that it unfairly targets Islam and have pointed to the fact that conservative nuns expose little more than their hands and face in their own full length dresses with similar head scarves. Regardless of political affiliation or personal opinions on the burqa, it is hard to deny that if such a law were passed it would amount to government interference in religion.
If this pattern of religious liberty infringements were anything to go by, the United States may not be far behind. Connections between North America and Europe run deep and while there may be several key differences between the two continents, religious intolerance seems to be an emerging, unifying theme. These incidents display a disturbing trend that scholars of religion and sufferers of anti-Semitism have known for a long time: laws prohibiting the free practice of religion are just the first in a series of slippery steps toward widespread intolerance and institutionalized discrimination. It is time that the Europe, and the other nations of the west, show the developing world that religious liberty is not optional, but rather a fundamental and guaranteed principle of our society.
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