Rep. Henry Waxman

The investigation is being led by our hero, Rep. Henry Waxman, who in the past exposed the misinformation in abstinence programs. Now he's taking on the White House' misinformation campaign on global warming, a topic that most evangelicals have chosen to ignore. You know, since the rapture is near. From the AP:

Federal scientists have been pressured to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats' first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations that the White House for years has micromanaged the government's climate programs and has closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.

"It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change," said Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. Waxman is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies, including its views on climate.

Climate change also was a leading topic in the Senate, where presidential contenders for 2008 lined up at a hearing called by Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record). They expounded -- and at times tried to outdo each other -- on why they believed Congress must act to reduce heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases.

"This is a problem whose time has come," Sen.Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., proclaimed.

"This is an issue over the years whose time has come," echoed Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz.

Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record), D-Ill., said "for decades far too many have ignored the warning" about climate change. "Will we look back at today and say this was the moment we took a stand?"

At the House hearing, two private advocacy groups produced a survey of 279 government climate scientists showing that many of them say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the climate threat. Their complaints ranged from a challenge to using the phrase "global warming" to raising uncertainty on issues on which most scientists basically agree, to keeping scientists from talking to the media.

The survey and separate interviews with scientists "has brought to light numerous ways in which U.S. federal climate science has been filtered, suppressed and manipulated in the last five years," Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the committee.

Grifo's group, along with the Government Accountability Project, which helps whistle-blowers, produced the report.

Drew Shindell, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that climate scientists frequently have been dissuaded from talking to the media about their research, though NASA's restrictions have been eased.

Prior to the change, interview requests of climate scientists frequently were "routed through the White House" and then turned away or delayed, said Shindell. He described how a news release on his study forecasting a significant warming in Antarctica was "repeatedly delayed, altered and watered down" at the insistence of the White House.

Some Republican members of the committee questioned whether science and politics ever can be kept separate.

"I am no climate-change denier," said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the top Republican on the committee, but he questioned whether "the issue of politicizing science has itself become politicized."

"The mere convergence of politics and science does not itself denote interference," said Davis.

Administration officials were not called to testify. In the past the White House has said it has only sought to inject balance into reports on climate change.

President Bush has acknowledged concerns about global warming, but he strongly opposes mandatory caps of greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that approach would be too costly.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado who was invited by GOP lawmakers, said "the reality is that science and politics are intermixed."

Pielke maintained that "scientific cherry picking" can be found on both sides of the climate debate. He took a swipe at the background memorandum Waxman had distributed and maintained that it exaggerated the scientific consensus over the impact of climate change on hurricanes.

Waxman and Davis agreed the administration had not been forthcoming in providing documents to the committee that would shed additional light on allegations of political interference in climate science.

"We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger," said Waxman, adding that he is "not trying to obtain state secrets."

At Boxer's Senate hearing, her predecessor as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. James Inhofe (news, bio, voting record), R-Okla., had his own view of the science.

There is "no convincing scientific evidence" that human activity is causing global warming, declared Inhofe, who once called global warming a hoax. "We all know the Weather Channel would like to have people afraid all the time."

"I'll put you down as skeptical," replied Boxer.

Posted at 09:51 AM | Permalink

From the Chicago Tribune

When he took over Trinity United Church of Christ in 1972, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. was a maverick pastor with a wardrobe of dashikis and a militant message. Six years later, he planted a "Free South Africa" sign on the lawn of his church and asked other local religious leaders to follow his lead.

None took him up on the invitation.

The sign stayed until the end of apartheid, long enough to catch the eye of a young Barack Obama, who visited the church in 1985 as a community activist. Obama, not a churchgoer at the time, found himself returning to the sanctuary of Trinity United. In Wright he found both a spiritual mentor and a role model.

Wright, 65, is a straight-talking pragmatist who arrived in Chicago as an outsider and became an institution. He has built a congregation of 8,500, including the likes of Oprah Winfrey and hip-hop artist Common, by offering an alternative to socially conservative black churches that are, Wright believes, too closely tied to Chicago's political dynasties. READ IT ALL

Posted at 10:09 AM | Permalink

From KRDO.com

Mike Jones, the man responsible for Pastor Ted Haggard's resignation was the newest visitor at New Life Church Sunday morning. "I can't tell you how many people came up to me and shook my hand and welcomed me and said thank you," says Jones. In his exclusive talk with NEWSCHANNEL 13, Jones says he wanted to see the church that Haggard built. His visit was nearly three months after accusing Haggard of a gay relationship and drug use.

"I was well received I will say," Jones says. "They were very gracious to me."

"Certainly his face has become recognizable and his name has become something of a household name around these parts," says New Life Church Associate Pastor Rob Brendle.

Despite the scandal that resulted in Haggard's resignation, both Jones and Brendle say the visit was appreciated.

"Based on the comments made to me by the parishioners, they are grateful that what they classify as a deceiver is now gone," says Jones.

"Even though this has been a very difficult time for me and for our church, actually I'm grateful for (Jones) and for what he did," says Brendle. "Because even though we feel worse now, we are actually better."

Jones says the main reason for his visit was research for a book he plans to get published this summer. The working title for the book: I Had To Say Something.

"Yes, (readers) will see some explicit parts between me and Ted Haggard, but I also want people to see a human side of Ted Haggard," says Jones.

"It's his prerogative to write his story and his story intersected Ted's life," says Brendle. "How he chooses to represent that will be a matter of his conscious."

NEWSCHANNEL 13 called Haggard at his Colorado Springs home for response to the possible book deal, but the voicemail went unreturned.

Posted at 10:27 AM | Permalink

From NPR

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Chris Hedges warns against a radical minority within the Christian right. Hedges talks about why he believes the right is eroding Democracy in his new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. LISTEN HERE

Posted at 10:39 AM | Permalink

probably gay

We know penguins are sodomites, but sheep? From NY Times

Charles Roselli set out to discover what makes some sheep gay. Then the news media and the blogosphere got hold of the story.

Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on his findings to seek ways to determine which rams are likeliest to breed, he said.

But since last fall, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals started a campaign against the research, it has drawn a torrent of outrage from animal rights activists, gay advocates and ordinary citizens around the world -- all of it based, Dr. Roselli and colleagues say, on a bizarre misinterpretation of what the work is about.

The story of the gay sheep became a textbook example of the distortion and vituperation that can result when science meets the global news cycle.

The news media storm reached its zenith last month, when The Sunday Times in London published an article under the headline “Science Told: Hands Off Gay Sheep.” It asserted, incorrectly, that Dr. Roselli had worked successfully to “cure” homosexual rams with hormone treatments, and added that “critics fear” that the research “could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.”

Martina Navratilova, the tennis star who is both openly gay and a PETA ally, wrote in an open letter that the research “can only be surmised as an attempt to develop a prenatal treatment” for sexual conditions.

The controversy spilled into the blog world, with attacks on Dr. Roselli, his university and Oregon State University, which is also involved in the research. PETA began an e-mail campaign that the universities say resulted in 20,000 protests, some with language like “you are a worthless animal killer and you should be shot,” “I hope you burn in hell” and “please, die.”

The news coverage, which has been heaviest in England and Australia, focused on smirk and titillation — and, of course, puns. Headlines included “Ewe Turn for Gay Rams on Hormones” and “He’s Just Not That Into Ewe.”

In recent weeks, the tide has begun to turn, with Dr. Roselli and Jim Newman, an Oregon Health and Science publicist, saying they have been working to correct the record in print and online. The university has sent responses to senders of each PETA-generated e-mail message.

Dr. Roselli, whose research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and is published in leading scientific journals, insists that he is as repulsed as his critics by the thought of sexual eugenics in humans. He said human sexuality was a complex phenomenon that could not be reduced to interactions of brain structure and hormones.

On blogs where attacks have appeared, the researchers point out that many of the accusations, like The Sunday Times’s assertion that the scientists implant devices in the brains of the sheep, are simply false.

The researchers acknowledge that the sheep are killed in the course of the research so their brain structure can be analyzed, but they say they follow animal welfare guidelines to prevent suffering.

The authors of the Sunday Times article, Chris Gourlay and Isabel Oakeshott, referred questions to a managing editor, who they said was traveling and could not be reached.

Dr. Roselli and Mr. Newman persuaded some prominent bloggers, including Andrew Sullivan, who writes an online column for Time, to correct postings that had uncritically quoted The Sunday Times’s article. They also found an ally in the blog world: a scientist who writes under the pseudonym emptypockets and has taken up Dr. Roselli’s cause. The blogger, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he said a public stand could hurt his career, said he had been cheered by the number of bloggers who dropped their opposition when presented with the facts.

Ms. Navratilova, who also received a response from the university, said she remained unconvinced.

“The more we play God or try to improve on Mother Nature, the more damage we are doing with all kinds of experiments that either have already turned or will turn into nightmares,” she wrote in an e-mail reply to a reporter’s query. “How in the world could straight or gay sheep help humanity?”

In an interview, Shalin Gala, a PETA representative working on the sheep campaign, said controlling or altering sexual orientation was a “natural implication” of the work of Dr. Roselli and his colleagues.

Mr. Gala, who asked that he be identified as openly gay, cited the news release for a 2004 paper in the journal Endocrinology that showed differences in brain structure between homosexual and heterosexual sheep.

The release quoted Dr. Roselli as saying that the research “also has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mate selection across mammalian species, including humans.”

Mr. Newman, who wrote the release, said the word “control” was used in the scientific sense of understanding the body’s internal controls, not in the sense of trying to control sexual orientation.

“It’s discouraging that PETA can pick one word, try to add weight to it or shift its meaning to suggest that you are doing something that you clearly are not,” he said.

Dr. Roselli said that merely mentioning possible human implications of basic research was wildly different from intending to carry the work over to humans.

Mentioning human implications, he said, is “in the nature of the way we write our grants” and talk to reporters. Scientists who do basic research find themselves in a bind, he said, adding, “We have been forced to draw connections in a way that we can justify our research.”

As for whether the deaths of the sheep are justified, he said, “why would you pick on a guy who’s killing maybe 18 sheep a year, when there’s maybe four million killed for food and clothing in this country?”

Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the university’s Center for Bioethics, said that although he supported Dr. Roselli’s research, “I’m not sure I would let him off the hook quite as easily as he wants to be let off the hook.”

By discussing the human implications of the research, even in a somewhat careful way, Dr. Roselli “opened the door” to the reaction, Dr. Wolpe said, and “he has to take responsibility for the public response.”

If the mechanisms underlying sexual orientation can be discovered and manipulated, Dr. Wolpe continued, then the argument that sexual orientation is based in biology and is immutable “evaporates.”

The prospect of parents’ eventually being able to choose not to have children who would become gay is a real concern for the future, Dr. Wolpe said. But he added, “This concern is best addressed by trying to change public perceptions of homosexuality rather than stop basic science on sexuality.”

Posted at 12:15 PM | Permalink

James Dobson's puppet at the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, responds to the State of the Union. Thanks DefCon.

Posted at 09:50 AM | Permalink

Read all about it here.

Posted at 04:22 PM | Permalink

From the AP

Even before the first screening of "Hounddog" at the Sundance Film Festival this week, a Christian film critic, citing Fanning's age, decried the movie as child abuse, and Roman Catholic activist Bill Donohue called for a boycott.

Fanning is defending her work as well as the movie, and so is the head of Sundance, who said it was courageous for director Deborah Kampmeier to tackle "challenging material." "Hounddog" is entered in the festival's dramatic category.

"It's not a rape movie," Fanning said Tuesday. "That's not even the point of the film."

The disturbing scene lasts a few minutes but is not graphic. There is no nudity, the scene is very darkly lit and only Fanning's face and hand are shown.

Kampmeier said it took her a decade to get the film made, largely because of the rape scene, but cutting it was a compromise she was unwilling to make.

"This issue is so silenced in our society. There are a lot of women who are alone with this story," she said.

"When you're shooting a film, it's the images you line up next to each other that create a story," Kampmeier said. "If you have a hand hitting the ground, Dakota screaming 'stop' and you see a zipper unzip _ that creates a rape."

Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and publisher of the Web site movieguide.org, claims "Hounddog" breaks federal child-pornography law. He said the law covers material that "appears" to show minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

"Even if they're not actually performing the explicit act, we are dealing with a legal issue here," he said.

Baehr said Fanning is being exploited in the film, and that it should be considered an outrage.

Posted at 10:01 AM | Permalink

There's no way this is real, but it's hilarious nonetheless: [Via Gawker]

Posted at 01:32 PM | Permalink

From ThinkProgress

Last week, Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch outlets amplified a right-wing report alleging that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) attended an Islamic “madrassa” school as a 6-year-old child. One Fox News caller questioned whether Obama’s schooling means that “maybe he doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy.” Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade responded, “Well, we’ll see about that.”

Commenting on this report today, Wolf Blitzer said that CNN had done “what any serious news organization is supposed to do in this kind of a situation”: actually investigate and learn the facts. CNN’s Senior International Correspondent John Vause filed a report from Indonesia. Watch it:

Posted at 10:19 AM | Permalink

From the Salt Lake Tribune

Opening Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival is Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So," a documentary in the independent film competition. The production, which took more than three years to complete, was funded in large part by Orem-resident Bruce Bastian, co-creator of the word-processing software that became WordPerfect. The film shows how the Bible's verses have been used to justify, over centuries, various forms of discrimination, and how today religious conservatives use the Good Book to back anti-gay rhetoric....

Peppered throughout "For the Bible Tells Me So" are snippets, including a cartoon, outlining statistics and research findings. Mixed in is the annual revenue of Bible-thumping moneymakers. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, brings in $138 million a year, the film reports. Robertson: $459 million....

The problem, too, the film points out, is the masses blindly accept biblical interpretations offered by these popular personalities rather than read and study for themselves. As a result, historical context is ignored, as are broader and supplementary materials, said the Rev. Laurence Keene, a soon-to-retire sociology professor at Pepperdine University.

"I have a soft spot in my heart for literalists because I used to be one," he said in the film. "There's nothing wrong with a fifth-grade understanding of God [or the Bible], as long as you're in the fifth grade."

Take, for instance, the word "abomination," which is used over and over by fundamentalists to describe what the Bible says about same-sex relations. Keene reiterated in a phone call this week that the word "abomination" refers to actions that were deemed "ritually impure." Other abominations include eating pork or shrimp, wearing linen and wool at the same time, and commingling crops.

Abominations, Keene explained, are not "intrinsically evil or immoral"; they are the actions that were considered "unclean" or "un-Jewish" at the time when the Hebrew people were trying to build a nation and procreation - requiring sex between a man and a woman - was paramount.

Posted at 10:04 AM | Permalink

a shrine to the aborted

From NY Times

Early on a a windy Saturday morning in November, Rhonda Arias drove her Dodge Caravan past a Wal-Mart at the end of her block and onto the Interstate. She was beginning the 50-mile drive from her house in southwest Houston to Plane State Jail, where she is, as she puts it, an “abortion-recovery counselor.” To Arias, that means helping women at the prison who have had abortions to understand how that procedure has stained them, and how it explains what has gone wrong in their lives. The prisoners’ abortions, she told me, “have a great deal to do with their pain.”

Arias, who is 53, often wears silver hoop earrings and low black boots, and she has a weakness for edgy zingers. She started doing post-abortion counseling 15 years ago. After what she describes as a revelation from God, she decided that her own pain and unhappiness were rooted in the abortion she had in 1973, when she was 19. “It was the year Roe v. Wade was decided, and I remember saying, ‘No guy in Washington is going to tell me what to do with my body!’ ” Arias said with a sharp laugh as we were driving. But after the procedure, she says, strange feelings washed over her. “I remember having evil thoughts, about hurting children,” she said. “It was like I’d done the worst thing I could possibly do. A piece of evil had entered me.”

In 1983, Arias became pregnant again and planned to keep the baby. But in the fourth month, she says, she became scared about raising a child alone. She called her obstetrician. He scheduled her for a second-trimester saline abortion the following morning. Arias said she woke up from the anesthesia to the certain knowledge that she had killed her child.

Because of this knowledge, she is now equally certain, she slipped into years of depression, drinking and freebasing cocaine. One night when she was in her early 30s, she got as high as she could, lay down in the dark in a bathtub filled with water and slit her wrists. In her mind, all of her troubles — the drugs, the suicide attempt, the third and fourth abortions she went on to have, the wrestling match of a marriage she eventually entered — are the aftermath of her own original sin, the 1973 abortion. It’s a pattern she sees reflected everywhere: “In America we have a big drug problem, and we don’t realize it’s because of abortion.”

In the ’90s, Arias volunteered and then was on staff at the Women’s Pregnancy Center, a Houston group that tries to persuade women to keep their pregnancies. In 2001, after being ordained as an evangelical preacher, she founded her own abortion-recovery ministry, Oil of Joy for Mourning, named after a verse from the Book of Isaiah. She now operates 10-week counseling programs at seven penitentiaries in the state, including Plane State Jail.

When Arias talks about the effects of abortion, she’s so fervent that it’s hard to maintain her gaze. But the idea that abortion is at the root of women’s psychological ills is not supported by the bulk of the research. Instead, the scientific evidence strongly shows that abortion does not increase the risk of depression, drug abuse or any other psychological problem any more than having an unwanted pregnancy or giving birth. For Arias, however, abortion is an act she can atone for. And this makes it different from the many other sources of anguish in her past. As a child, she was sexually abused by her stepbrother, she told me. An older boy forced her to have sex when she was 14; seven months later, she says, she woke in the middle of the night to wrenching cramps and gave birth to a baby girl who was placed for adoption. A year later, Arias’s father, a bricklayer to whom she was close, plummeted from several stories of scaffolding to his death. She left home and fell out of touch with her mother and two brothers.

By concentrating on the babies she feels she has lost (she has named the first two Adam and Jason), Arias has drained other aching memories of some of their power. “I think about the baby girl I gave up for adoption, and I think I made a good parenting choice. I know she had a good life,” she said. “I think about my sons, Adam and Jason, my sons who I never held in my arms, and I know I’m forgiven. But” -- her voice cracked. “I didn’t give them life. And I am so very sorry.”

Thirty-four years ago this week, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, and since then the American abortion wars have pitted the rights of “unborn babies” against those of living women. Rhonda Arias and a growing number of abortion-recovery activists want to dismantle that framework and replace it with this: Abortion doesn’t help women. It hurts them. With that conviction, these activists hope to accomplish what the anti-abortion movement has failed to do for more than three decades: persuade the “mushy middle” of the American electorate — the perhaps 40 to 50 percent who are uncomfortable with abortion but unwilling to ban it — to see that, for women’s sake, abortion should not be legal. Spread across the country are anti-abortion groups that offer post-abortion counseling. The Catholic Church runs abortion-recovery ministries in at least 165 dioceses in the United States. The federal government finances at least 50 nonsectarian “crisis pregnancy centers,” like the one where Arias worked in Houston. Many of the centers affiliate with two national groups, Heartbeat International and Care Net, which train abortion-recovery counselors. Then there are small, private counseling and Bible-study groups, both Catholic and evangelical, which raise their own money. Some abortion-recovery counselors just minister to other women. But many also feel called to join the fight to end abortion.

If the activists have a Moses, it is David Reardon, whose 1996 book, “Making Abortion Rare,” laid out the argument that abortion harms women and that this should be a weapon in the anti-abortion arsenal. “We must change the abortion debate so that we are arguing with our opponents on their own turf, on the issue of defending the interests of women,” he wrote. The anti-abortion movement will never win over a majority, he argued, by asserting the sanctity of fetal life. Those in the ambivalent middle “have hardened their hearts to the unborn ‘fetus’ ” and are “focused totally on the woman.” And so the anti-abortion movement must do the same.

For anti-abortion activists, this strategy offers distinct advantages. It challenges the connection between access to abortion and women’s rights — if women are suffering because of their abortions, then how could making the procedure readily available leave women better off? It replaces mute pictures of dead fetuses with the voices of women who narrate their stories in raw detail and who claim they can move legislators to tears. And it trades condemnation for pity and forgiveness. “Pro-lifers who say, ‘I don’t understand how anyone could have an abortion,’ are blind to how hurtful this statement can be,” Reardon writes on his Web site. “A more humble pro-life attitude would be to say, ‘Who am I to throw stones at others?’ ”

This way of thinking was first articulated in the early 1980s. Vincent Rue, a family therapist and ally of Reardon’s, testified before Congress in 1981 about a variant of post-traumatic stress disorder that he claimed was afflicting women — “post-abortion syndrome.” Six years later, Ronald Reagan asked his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, to issue a report on the health effects of abortion. Koop was against abortion, but he refused to issue the report and called the psychological harm caused by abortion “minuscule from a public-health perspective.” Nor did Koop believe that the anti-abortion cause would be served by shifting its focus to the suffering of women. “As soon as you contaminate the morality of your stand by getting worried about the health effects of abortion on women, you have weakened the whole thing,” he said at the time in an interview with the Rutherford Institute, a conservative law center.

Mainstream anti-abortion groups didn’t shout Koop down, and the issue seemed dead. But the Catholic Church, which began financing abortion-recovery counseling in the early 1980s, continued to do so, and in 1986, Theresa Burke began developing a model of weekly support groups and later weekend retreats for women suffering from what she called post-abortion trauma. In 1993, Burke founded Rachel’s Vineyard, an independent religious group, to broaden her reach. The gatherings multiplied across the country — more than 500 retreats are planned internationally in 2007 — as well as an annual training conference. “It just grew and grew,” Burke says.

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion movement was in need of fresh ideas. Bill Clinton, in 1993, came into office as the first president to favor abortion rights in more than a decade; the Supreme Court had recently reaffirmed the right to abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Reardon’s book, published during this time of dimmed hopes for the anti-abortion movement, imagined a future in which millions of women and men with experience of abortion would express outrage, demand reform and file lawsuits that would bankrupt abortion clinics.

These millions have not materialized. The number of women who seek out groups like Rachel’s Vineyard is a small fraction of the number of American women who have abortions. Almost 3 million of the 6 million pregnancies that occur each year in the United States are unplanned; about 1.3 million end in abortion. At the current rate, about one-third of women nationally will undergo the procedure by age 45. The number of women who go to abortion-recovery counseling is probably in the tens of thousands, and the number who become dedicated activists is at most a few hundred. And yet they and their cause are emerging as a political force. “These women were minority voices for a long time, and now they are gaining traction within the anti-abortion movement,” says Reva Siegel, a Yale law professor who favors abortion rights and has been tracing this grass-roots movement from its origins.

Abortion-recovery counselors like Arias could focus on why women don’t have the material or social support they need to continue pregnancies they might not want to end. They could call for improving the circumstances of women’s lives in order to reduce the number of abortions. Instead they are working to change laws to restrict and ban abortion. In 2000, a conservative law center in Texas, the Justice Foundation, began representing Norma McCorvey — Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade. McCorvey had come to regret her role in legalizing abortion, and the Justice Foundation filed suit to reopen her case. Her lawyers argued that when the Supreme Court initially ruled in Roe, it could not have known that legalizing abortion would cause harm to women. To prove such harm exists, the Justice Foundation began collecting affidavits from women about their abortion experiences, a project it called Operation Outcry, which now has chapters in 22 states. Arias heads up Operation Outcry in Texas.

Arias raises her own money for the prison counseling and to speak at rallies and to legislatures in her state and around the country, telling her story and urging women to send in affidavits. The Justice Foundation has also collected affidavits through counseling programs like Rachel’s Vineyard, along with a hot line for post-abortive women and a television program, “Faces of Abortion,” which features interviews with women who regret their abortions and which appears on satellite networks that reach 10 million homes. To date, 1,940 women have submitted Operation Outcry affidavits.

Last year, the Supreme Court refused to hear McCorvey’s case. But the affidavits continue to be used as evidence in other litigation, including the so-called partial-birth-abortion case that is currently before the Supreme Court. Similar testimony has also been submitted in two cases that involve efforts to raise the standard for informed consent, which abortion providers must obtain from their patients. “There will be a great deal of litigation in this area,” says Roger Evans, Planned Parenthood’s senior director for public policy, law and litigation. “This is where they are headed.”

Abortion-recovery activists may well have the greatest impact in statehouses. When the South Dakota Legislature banned abortion in 2005, it relied on a state task-force report, which said that women cannot end their pregnancies without “suffering significant psychological trauma and distress,” because “to do so is beyond the normal, natural and healthy capability of a woman whose natural instincts are to protect and nurture her child.” This “woman-protective anti-abortion argument,” Siegel points out in a coming article in The University of Illinois Law Review, “mixes new ideas about women’s rights with some very old ideas about women’s roles.”

In 1985, Reardon started a social-science fight over the effects of abortion. He surveyed members of a group called Women Exploited by Abortion (since disbanded), which defined itself as a “refuge” for “post-abortive women.” Reardon distributed a survey to about 250 WEBA members and found high rates of nervous breakdowns, substance abuse and suicide attempts. He presented this as proof of a national link between abortion and these conditions.

Soon after Koop’s refusal in 1987 to report on the health effects of abortion, the American Psychological Association appointed a panel to review the relevant medical literature. It dismissed research like Reardon’s, instead concluding that “well-designed studies” showed 76 percent of women reporting feelings of relief after abortion and 17 percent reporting guilt. “The weight of the evidence,” the panel wrote in a 1990 article in Science, indicates that a first-trimester abortion of an unwanted pregnancy “does not pose a psychological hazard for most women.” Two years later, Nada Stotland, a psychiatry professor at Rush Medical College in Chicago and now vice-president of the American Psychiatric Association, was even more emphatic. “There is no evidence of an abortion-trauma syndrome,” she concluded in an article for The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Academic experts continue to stress that the psychological risks posed by abortion are no greater than the risks of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. A study of 13,000 women, conducted in Britain over 11 years, compared those who chose to end an unwanted pregnancy with those who chose to give birth, controlling for psychological history, age, marital status and education level. In 1995, the researchers reported their results: equivalent rates of psychological disorders among the two groups.

Brenda Major, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed 440 women for two years in the 1990s from the day each had her abortion. One percent of them met the criteria for post-traumatic stress and attributed that stress to their abortions. The rate of clinical depression among post-abortive women was 20 percent, the same as the national rate for all women ages 15 to 35, Major says. Another researcher, Nancy Adler, found that up to 10 percent of women have symptoms of depression or other psychological distress after an abortion — the same rates experienced by women after childbirth.

Researchers say that when women who have abortions experience lasting grief, or more rarely, depression, it is often because they were emotionally fragile beforehand, or were responding to the circumstances surrounding the abortion — a disappointing relationship, precarious finances, the stress of an unwanted pregnancy.

But David Reardon continues to research the psychological effects of abortion, and he no longer makes beginner’s mistakes. He is said to have a doctorate in biomedical ethics from Pacific Western University, an unaccredited correspondence school, according to Chris Mooney, the author of “The Republican War on Science.” (Reardon did not respond to several requests to be interviewed.) According to his Web site, in 1988, Reardon founded the Elliot Institute, a research center in Springfield, Ill., which in 2005 had a $120,000 budget. He has recently teamed up with Priscilla Coleman, a professor of family and consumer studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and published more than a dozen papers in peer-reviewed journals. Reardon and Coleman cull data from national surveys and state records in which unplanned pregnancy is not the focus of the data collection. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Reardon found a higher risk of clinical depression in a group of married women who had abortions, and published the results in a 2002 article in The British Medical Journal; using California Medicaid records, he and Coleman found a higher risk of psychiatric hospital and clinic admissions among poor post-abortive women, which they reported in 2003 in The Canadian Medical Association Journal; two years later, using the National Survey of Family Growth, they found a higher risk of generalized anxiety disorder post-abortion and published their results in The Journal of Anxiety Disorders.

Nancy Russo, a psychology professor at Arizona State University and a veteran abortion researcher, spends much of her professional time refuting Reardon and Coleman’s results by retracing their steps through the vast data sets. Russo examined the analysis in the 2002 and 2005 articles and turned up methodological flaws in both. When she corrected for the errors, the higher rates of mental illness among women who had abortions disappeared. Russo published her findings on depression in The British Medical Journal last year; her article on anxiety disorders is under review. “Science eventually corrects itself, but it takes a while,” she says. “And you can feel people’s eyes glaze over when you talk about coding errors and omitted data sets.” Priscilla Coleman, for her part, says that research that concludes that abortion has negative effects is more scrutinized because it’s “so politically incorrect.” When researchers attack his findings, Reardon writes to the journals’ letters pages. “Even if pro-abortionists got five paragraphs explaining that abortion is safe and we got only one line saying it’s dangerous, the seed of doubt is planted,” he wrote in his book.

The A.P.A. has convened a new task force to review the more recent scientific literature about the effects of abortion; the panel will issue findings in 2008. Assuming the A.P.A. affirms the prevailing social-science research, the belief that abortion harms women may be hard to dislodge. Even if no solid evidence provides a causal link to increased rates of depression or other emotional problems, abortion is often a grim event. And for a minority of women, it is linked to lasting pain. You don’t have to be an anti-abortion advocate to feel sorrow over an abortion, or to be haunted about whether you did the right thing.

Rhonda Arias, however, heeds a simpler call: repent, and save other women from doing what you did. That is the gospel she preaches in the Texas prisons. On the drive to Plane State Jail, Arias talked about her daughters. Jessica, 20, is an art student in Florida. Jacqui, 17, and Joanna, 13, live at home. Arias was married to the girls’ father for 18 years before the two divorced last year.

Arias told Jessica and Jacqui about her abortions when they were 9 and 6. She wanted to ask for their forgiveness. A few years ago, Jacqui taped a segment of the TV program “Faces of Abortion,” in which she said that as a child, she tried to behave so her mother wouldn’t wish she’d aborted her, too. That made Arias wonder whether she’d been unwise to talk to the girls when they were so young. “I wished I’d asked myself if they were developmentally ready,” she told me.

Last March, Arias took Jessica on a monthlong ministry to Israel. They are both interested in Messianic Judaism — a mezuza is nailed to the doorpost of the family’s home. For Arias, the trip was glorious. She ministered on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. (On a previous trip she threw her wedding ring into a valley, pledging to live as a new virgin.) She returned home to the news that Jacqui was pregnant. “I was the last person they told,” she said of Jacqui and her boyfriend, whom Jacqui met in church. Arias taught her daughters about saving themselves for marriage but not about contraception. “Abstinence works better than birth control, really,” she said. “It’s just that people don’t do it.” Jacqui’s father pressured her to have an abortion; Jacqui warded him off. And then she and Arias started planning for the baby, who was born in December.

In the parking lot of Plane State, Arias paused to finish a cup of coffee and to pray. “Oh, Lord, I go from prison to prison, hundreds of women and thousands of babies, and sometimes I feel like I’m carrying a lot of grief,” she said in a whisper. Outside, the wind blew through a row of spindly trees. Arias closed her eyes and gripped the steering wheel. “Lord Jesus, carry this grief. It’s too heavy for me. I ask you to take it from me and from these women. I implore you. Lift it from their shoulders. Deliver us, Lord.”

At the entrance to the jail, Arias met three Oil of Joy volunteers: Nikki Heitzeberg and Debbie Harper, whom she knows through abortion-recovery counseling, and Shawna Kimbrough, who joined the group after fleeing New Orleans for Houston during Hurricane Katrina. Unlike the other volunteers, Kimbrough is black, and Arias says she values the connection Kimbrough makes to African-American prisoners.

Over 10 weeks in Oil of Joy, participants talk about their views of God and of the men in their lives. They fill out an “emotion time line” to chart their lives. They explore the circumstances of their abortions. They’re encouraged to think about whether they were pressured into ending their pregnancies and to connect this with other experiences of feeling powerless. Often, Arias says, they are victims of physical or sexual abuse. They fill “bitterness bags” with rocks, one for each offense they want to forgive, often including those they committed themselves. They pick out a pair of baby shoes — choices include satin christening slippers, work boots, sneakers and Dora the Explorer flip-flops — attach a card with the name they have chosen for the baby they didn’t have and give them to Arias for a traveling memorial that she has taken to Washington, D.C. During the ninth session, which was taking place the day I was there, Arias held a memorial service for the prisoners’ aborted and miscarried babies.

Inside the Tom Baker Chapel of Hope at the jail, Harper and Kimbrough arranged long pieces of gauzy white cloth over the altar and onto the floor, so that the material lined a short aisle. Into the cloth they tucked white teddy bears with red hearts around their necks that read “Happy Mother’s Day” and “No. 1 Mommy.” Kimbrough sprinkled silk rose petals over the altar and floor. On a side table, Arias placed baskets of cloth “heritage dolls.” Their heads and hands were tied with thin ribbons. Their faces were blank. Heitzeberg erected a curved metal frame over the altar and draped it with more white cloth. Kimbrough climbed on a chair to hang a string of Christmas lights over the top. Arias surveyed the altar. “It looks like a bassinet,” she said approvingly. The volunteers arranged a semicircle of 25 chairs up front, with sheets of pink Kleenex on each seat.

A guard came in. “Last time, I was in here crying myself,” the guard said, and then dimmed the lights and cued soft gospel music over a sound system. About two dozen inmates filed into the chapel, wearing white V-neck prison uniforms, canvas sneakers and orange plastic wrist bands. They’d been instructed to enter quietly. Some oohed at the lights over the altar. Others walked in sniffling. The volunteers greeted them with hugs.

The group sat, and Arias took the microphone. “Today we mourn for your children,” she said. The sniffling grew louder. “Many of you never got a chance to mourn the loss of your sons and daughters. Today you have permission to cry, to feel the feelings you’ve pressed down for so long.” Kimbrough passed out more Kleenex.

Arias wove a sermon from Biblical stories: Jesus meeting the woman at the well in Samaria, Hannah praying to God to give her a child, Eve celebrating the birth of her sons. It was time, Arias told the inmates, to release their babies to the Lord. Kimbrough and Harper passed around the baskets of heritage dolls, telling the women to take one for each baby they’d aborted or miscarried. The women rocked the blank-faced dolls, many holding three or four. Their faces dampened with tears. The music reached a crescendo as a singer crooned: “Holy child from God’s great hands/is a holy word from God to man/How long will we push our children away?/Is there room in our world for a new word today?” One prisoner took her Bible from under her chair. Inside was a photograph of two elementary-school-age girls with ponytails — her daughters. She kissed their images.

For a few minutes, Arias let the women cry. Then she put out a hand to quiet the sobbing around her. “Is my Jason a 25-year-old-man now, or is he still a little baby?” she asked, her voice high and trembling. “We are very limited in our understanding. But Corinthians tells us that what has died will be resurrected. You might think about your D and C”— the abortion method dilation and curettage — “and wonder how does your baby’s body look, since it went through that little tube. The Bible tells us, ‘The body is sown into corruption.’ I can’t think of anything more corrupt than going through a tube or being ripped apart by an abortionist. But surely in heaven the body is made whole.”

Arias moved forward, closer to the women. “And in heaven, our children will know us when they see us. They will call, ‘Mommy!’ and they will reach out their arms” — she extended hers — “and they will embrace us! They’re not going to ask, ‘What did you do that for?’ They already know. They know more than you do. I have a 17-year-old who thinks she knows more than me. She is wrong.” A few wry laughs broke through the crying. “But I have four children in heaven who really do know more than I do. To get to heaven, you have to be forgiven, and you must forgive others.”

She instructed the women to stand up, speak in memory of their lost babies and take their heritage dolls to the altar. The women stood one by one. They clutched their dolls and said they were sorry. They imagined a baby with his father’s dimple or curly hair or green eyes. One woman mentioned a child who had been born and taken into state custody, and the woman who kissed the pictures of her daughters sent them her love. For the most part, though, the messy mothering of living children — and the reality of their lives outside the prison — did not intrude on the ceremony. The women focused on mourning the elusive, innocent loss represented by the dolls. They gave them fairy-tale names: Sarah Jewell, Angel Pillow, Xavier Dante. At a side table, Kimbrough and Harper wrote the names on certificates for children “expected to be born.” The documents promised, “By virtue of being conceived, the spirit of this child lives eternally with Jesus and in the heart and the mind of the mother, now and forevermore.”

After the certificates were filled out and the women returned to their seats, Kimbrough gave a closing prayer. “I thank you for Sister Rhonda, who has laid down years of her life that we may have healing and closure,” she said. Women shouted, “Yes, Lord!” and beamed at Arias. She smiled back, and then her face got stern. “I want to ask you a question,” she said. “If you found yourself in the situation of another crisis pregnancy, would you consider abortion?”

“No!” a chorus shouted.

“Can you see yourself living a life of chastity when you leave this place?”

This time, the response was muted. Arias talked about her vow of chastity and then nodded to the guard working the sound system. The music changed to an upbeat song. The women danced, crying and hugging. An older inmate with long hair began calling to Jesus, her screams shrill and shaky. She lapsed into loud sobbing. Heitzeberg patted her on the back. “Hallelujah!” Arias cried. “I don’t know what God did here, but I know it’s good.”

It was nearly 2:30 p.m. The women had been in the chapel for three hours. Arias called them back to their seats. One prisoner raised her hand to ask how she could help in the fight against abortion. “I’m so glad you brought that up,” Arias said, and described Operation Outcry. She asked the women their release dates and told them how to send in an affidavit and sign up on her Web site once they’d left the jail. “Ladies, thank you for your courage,” Arias concluded. The women went up shyly to say goodbye. Then they shuffled out of the chapel.

While it seems that some anti-abortion advocates exaggerate the mental-health risks of abortion, some abortion advocates play down the emotional aftereffects. Materials distributed at abortion clinics and on abortion-rights Web sites stress that most women feel relief after an abortion, and that the minority who don’t tend to have pre-existing problems. Both claims are supported by research. But the idea that “abortion is a distraction from underlying dynamics,” as Nancy Russo put it to me, can discourage the airing of sadness and grief. “The last thing pro-choice people, myself included, want to do is to give people who want to make abortions harder to get or illegal one iota of help,” says Ava Torre-Bueno, a social worker who was the head of counseling for 10 years at Planned Parenthood in San Diego. “But then what you hear in the movement is ‘Let’s not make noise about this’ and ‘Most women are fine, I’m sure you will be too.’ And that is unfair.”

Initially, Torre-Bueno’s encounters with grieving patients surprised her, because sadness wasn’t an issue in the first years after Roe. “In 1975, I’d say, ‘I wonder how you’re feeling,’ and women would answer, ‘Thank God it’s legal!’ ” she says. But by the early 1980s, Torre-Bueno and a handful of other counselors who favor abortion rights say, the emotional tide began to turn along with the political one. Congress cut off Medicaid money for abortion. The Supreme Court retrenched. Protesters picketed clinics and made bomb threats. Some clinic directors decided it was not enough to treat abortion as a straightforward medical procedure. Charlotte Taft, who founded an abortion clinic in Dallas in 1978, later began practicing what she calls “emotional triage” to identify women at risk of adverse reactions. She would ask prospective patients: Are you against abortion but feel you have no choice? Do you believe that abortion is murder? Do you think God will never forgive you? Is someone pressuring you? Do you have a history of depression? “Some women are clearly fine,” Taft told me. “Others are torn apart, and they need more process.” When women answered Taft’s questions by saying things like “I’m going to hell, but I have to do this,” Taft sent them home with exercises to help them work through their emotions.

In 1989, two dozen like-minded abortion providers started a group they called the November Gang. In hopes of improving pre-abortion counseling, Peg Johnston, founder of Southern Tier Women’s Services in Binghamton, N.Y., wrote a 90-page pregnancy-options workbook, which she says she gives to women who are ambivalent and to those who are grieving after their abortions, about 10 percent of her clients; it asks them if they feel fear and shame and tries to help them with these feelings. While abortion-rights advocates frame abortion as a woman’s legal right, the November Gang providers tend to think in terms of a woman’s responsibility to decide when and whether to bring life into the world. And instead of telling women who grieve over their abortions to look elsewhere for the source of their distress, they try to use the moment as a catalyst. Sometimes an abortion “pops open the box where old anxieties have been kept,” Torre-Bueno says. “It’s an opportunity to revisit past traumas like child abuse, or to face them for the first time.” This doesn’t mean that the abortion was a mistake, or that other circumstances — the unresolved past, a loutish boyfriend, money problems — aren’t the real trouble, Torre-Bueno reasons. But women sometimes need help sorting this out.

In her 1994 book, “Peace After Abortion,” Torre-Bueno talks about the pain some women feel on the anniversary dates of their abortions, the spiritual conflict to which abortion can give rise and the hurt caused by keeping it secret — all topics in abortion-recovery counseling. She describes grieving rituals: writing a letter to whomever the woman feels she has harmed (the baby, herself, God, her partner), lighting a candle, filling and then burning a “letting go” box. Adapting the Jewish ritual of placing stones on the tombstones of departed loved ones, Peg Johnston offers a “worry stone” to patients at her clinic, to “give them strength through the procedure.”

These counselors don’t suggest that women should need to heal from an abortion, or that most women do need to. And they are avowedly in favor of abortion rights. Still, the position of these providers within their own movement is tenuous. Torre-Bueno says that when she self-published her book and asked if she could hold a book party at Planned Parenthood in San Diego, the director said no. “He called me a ‘dupe of the antis,’ ” she remembers. (The director, who has since retired, says he doesn’t remember the conversation.) In 1995, after 17 years directing the Dallas clinic, Charlotte Taft says she resigned because the owner wanted to run a more traditional practice. By then, she says, Planned Parenthood had stopped sending her referrals.

The country’s largest abortion provider, with more than 77 clinics around the country, Planned Parenthood has standards for informed consent, and these acknowledge that some women experience sadness or guilt, adding that “these feelings usually go away quickly” and that “serious psychiatric disturbances” occur rarely. The National Abortion Federation, an umbrella group for abortion clinics, has similar guidelines. In practice, pre-abortion counseling varies. Many clinics say that women are encouraged to talk about their feelings but aren’t asked the pointed questions that Taft posed. “That sets people up as having to defend themselves and tell us personal things,” says Leslie Rottenberg, director of Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan center. “You should be able to make an appointment regardless of your beliefs or feelings. It’s a question of access.”

Rottenberg’s clinic provides post-abortion counseling — one or two sessions with a social worker — to any patient who asks for it. Other clinics can’t afford to offer that service and refer women who need help to local clergy members or therapists. Few clinics run support groups. Those who do say they’re often undersubscribed. It may be that women who experience grief after an abortion are more comfortable receiving counseling outside a clinic. Many providers have lately referred patients to a hot line called Exhale, founded seven years ago by Aspen Baker, shortly after she had an abortion when she was 23 and a recent graduate of U.C. Berkeley. Baker assumed counseling would be offered after the procedure. It wasn’t. She volunteered at California Naral and tried to talk about the sadness she was feeling. No one seemed receptive. So Baker raised $1,000 from friends and in 2002 set up Exhale as a volunteer-staffed hot line based in Oakland, Calif. She favors abortion rights, but her aim is to counsel women without taking sides in the debate. Since Exhale’s services became nationally available in June 2005, the hot line has received an average of 300 calls a month. A similar service, Backline, started in Portland, Ore., two years ago.

The abortion providers I talked to were unanimous in their praise for Exhale. Yet so far, this hasn’t translated into much financial support. Exhale has an annual budget of $315,000, most of which comes from foundations that don’t advocate for or against abortion. Backline’s budget is a tiny $36,000. Its founder, Grayson Dempsey, maintains that there is a demand for pro-choice post-abortion support groups and retreats. But she can’t afford to fill it.

There is considerably more money for post-abortion counseling on the anti-abortion side. In addition to the diocese-based services paid for by the Catholic Church, the Bush administration, in its first four years, spent more than $30 million on the 50-some crisis pregnancy centers, according to a report by Representative Henry A. Waxman, a Democrat from California.

Last summer, Waxman’s office investigated some of the crisis pregnancy centers and found that when women there asked about abortion’s health effects, 20 of 23 centers gave out false information. At 13 centers, this included characterizing the psychological effects of abortion as “severe, long-lasting and common.” “One center said that the suicide rate in the year after an abortion ‘goes up by seven times,’ ” Waxman’s report states.

Religious abortion-recovery programs don’t qualify for government money. Rachel’s Vineyard relies on financing from Priests for Life, a $7 million anti-abortion group that is independent of the Catholic Church. Oil of Joy’s finances are tighter. Last year, Arias raised $34,000. She is straining to pay her mortgage; meanwhile, as the Texas leader of Operation Outcry, she is expected to make donations to the Justice Foundation, which has a $1 million annual budget and paid its lead lawyer, Allan Parker, $123,000 in 2005.

While national groups like Focus on the Family, the National Right to Life Committee and Concerned Women for America warn about the dire effects of abortion on their Web sites and link to counseling ministries like Rachel’s Vineyard, they don’t finance abortion-recovery counseling. In part, that may be because the government and the Catholic Church do. But the lack of money may also reflect the strain of skepticism that Koop voiced. Francis Beckwith, a professor of church-state studies at Baylor University who is anti-abortion, has criticized abortion-recovery activists for their “questionable interpretation of social-science data” and for potentially undermining the absolutist moral argument against abortion. “For every woman who has suffered trauma as a result of an abortion, I bet you could find half a dozen who would say it was the best decision they ever made,” he told me. “And in any case, suffering isn’t the same as immorality.” Beckwith speaks at churches and colleges, and he says that most anti-abortion leaders don’t want the woman-protective argument to supersede the traditional fetus-centered focus, “because that’s where the real moral force is.”

These tensions surfaced in the campaign to retain South Dakota’s abortion ban. The state leader for the anti-abortion side, Leslee Unruh, who had an abortion in her 20s, called on post-abortive women to campaign and started a state tour for them called Fleet for Little Feet. Unruh says, “My strategy was to put the women on TV and have them tell their stories.” But the national pro-life groups refused to send her money to run those TV ads early in the election cycle, she says. “They won’t acknowledge women as the first victim. We’re always second to the baby.” Polls show that voters rejected the ban (by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin) because it did not include an exception for rape and incest survivors. But Unruh blames internal division. “I can tell you that the support I needed from the national groups I did not get,” she says. “I just got talk.”

One theme in the Justice Foundation’s 1,940 affidavits is the story of the woman who says that she was told at an abortion clinic she was carrying “a blob of tissue” and that she went through with the procedure only because of this lie. This narrative is being used in two pending lawsuits over what constitutes informed consent. In one suit in Middlesex County, N.J., Rosa Acuna claims that in April 1996, when she asked her doctor in the sixth or seventh week of her pregnancy whether “the baby was already there,” he answered, “Don’t be stupid, it’s only blood.” She is suing for emotional distress. The doctor denies the allegation. But the case is at a preliminary stage in which the question is whether Acuna can try to prove her allegations at a trial. Last April, the appellate division of the New Jersey courts said she could. The question at trial, the court said, would be what medical information a doctor must disclose “when the patient asks if the ‘baby’ is already ‘there.’ ”

If what Acuna says is true, then her doctor may have breached his duty by lying to her about the basic facts of pregnancy. But Acuna’s lawyer, Harold Cassidy, argues in court documents not that her doctor should have told her she was carrying an embryo but that he had a duty to tell her that the embryo “was a complete, separate, unique and irreplaceable human being.” Later this year, the Supreme Court of New Jersey will review Acuna’s case. A key issue is whether her trial will include evidence about the human status of the fetus. Cassidy argues that this is a medical fact. The doctor’s lawyers say it is a religious and philosophical question.

Cassidy is also involved in defending a 2005 South Dakota informed-consent law, which Planned Parenthood has challenged. In its 1992 ruling in Casey, which affirmed (with some caveats) the right to legal abortion enshrined in Roe, the Supreme Court said that states can require doctors to give patients “truthful and not misleading” information about abortion. Eighteen states include in their materials a description of abortion’s psychological effects. According to a 2006 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, seven of these states describe only harmful effects. South Dakota’s informed-consent law requires physicians to give patients written state-approved information that supplies a link between abortion and an increased risk of suicide, though no causal connection has been found. Both the patient and the doctor must certify that the patient has read and understood the materials; failure to do so is a misdemeanor offense.

Does such a law violate a doctor’s constitutional right to free speech? Robert Post, a Yale law professor, argues that the state should not be able to force doctors to convey inaccurate or misleading information. South Dakota’s law “endangers the integrity of physician-patient communications, because it threatens to transform physicians into mouthpieces for political majorities,” he writes in a coming law-review article.

South Dakota’s law also requires abortion providers to tell their patients what Cassidy argues Acuna’s doctor should have told her in the New Jersey case — “that the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” A federal district judge agreed with Planned Parenthood that the law would force doctors to articulate the state’s viewpoint on “an unsettled medical, philosophical, theological and scientific issue, that is, whether a fetus is a human being.” The judge granted a preliminary injunction that prevented the informed-consent provisions from taking effect. In October, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed that ruling. But the panel’s decision was vacated this month when the Eighth Circuit as a whole voted to rehear the case in April. The question of whether the state can require doctors to say that a fetus is a full human being and that abortion increases the risk of suicide is in legal limbo.

On a rainy morning in November, a dozen women gathered a block from the Supreme Court, at a row house owned by the Gospel of Life Ministries, an anti-abortion group. The women planned to spend the day rallying on the steps of the court while the justices heard a challenge to the federal partial-birth-abortion ban. They came from a constellation of groups: Operation Outcry; Rachel’s Vineyard; Project Rachel, the abortion-recovery ministry of the Catholic Church; and the Silent No More awareness campaign. Like Rachel’s Vineyard, Silent No More gets money from Priests for Life; it also has the backing of Anglicans for Life, another independent group. Once inside, the women closed their umbrellas and handed out mugs of coffee. Georgette Forney and Janet Morana, co-founders of Silent No More, checked on late arrivals from their cellphones. Theresa Burke was on her way from Pennsylvania. Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., would arrive later from Atlanta.

At the courthouse, the women unfurled banners and signs that read, “I Regret My Abortion” and lined up to hold them. A giant picture of a bloody fetus floated above the crowd. Behind Forney’s group, two dozen people in NOW and Naral T-shirts chanted: “Right to life, that’s a lie. You don’t care if women die,” and “You get pregnant, let me know. Anti-choicers got to go.” Forney eyed them. “All these years and they still haven’t figured out it would be wise to find common ground with women like us,” she said.

I asked her what she had in mind. She talked about making abortion “unthinkable” by making sure that women have better choices. At first this sounded like Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” formulation, or Hillary Clinton’s characterization of abortion as a “tragedy.” But along with promoting adoption, the reforms Forney and Morana described were Baby Moses laws, which make it easier not for women to avoid pregnancy in the first place or to take care of children to whom they give birth but to abandon newborns at places like fire stations and hospitals.

Forney and Morana compare abortion to smoking. “The suppression of truth about the harms of abortion is the same as the suppression of truth about the harms of cigarettes,” Morana said. Once the public understands the trauma of abortion, as they now do the health problems associated with cigarettes, then “changing the law will be an afterthought,” Forney predicted.

Rhonda Arias says she does not think that abortion will quietly disappear. She wants states to ban abortion outright, Roe or no Roe, “to end this covenant of death.” We were talking on the Sunday morning after the visit to Plane State Jail. Arias was stretched out on the couch in her living room; without makeup, her face looked lived-in and also alight. She opened her Bible to the first Book of Kings, Chapter 11. “Solomon builds a temple for Moab and Moloch — the false god who demanded child sacrifice,” she recounted. “And then ‘the Lord therefore said to Solomon: Because you have done this, and have not kept my covenant, and my statutes, which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom, and give it to your servant.’ So you see, when we allow the killing of children, we defy the will of God. There is so much blood defiling the land.”

Arias hugged a pillow to her and unwrapped a favorite memory. A few years ago, after she preached at a pro-life rally on the steps of the state capitol in Austin, a man jumped out of his pickup truck and grabbed her. “He said, ‘You made me want to worship God!’ That is the highest compliment anyone ever paid me.”

At the prison the day before, I watched the inmates drink in Arias’s preaching, too. Abortion-rights leaders would accuse her of manipulation, of instilling guilt in women to serve the anti-abortion movement’s political ends. But Rhonda Arias ministers from the heart; the lack of scientific support for her ideas merely underscores that she is a true believer.

Her ardor and influence is better explained, perhaps, by the theory of social contagion, which psychologists use to explain phenomena like the Salem witch trials or the wave of unfounded reports of repressed memories of sexual abuse. Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too — by preventing them from having the same choices.

And then there is the relief in seizing on a single clear explanation for a host of unwanted and overwhelming feelings, a cause for everything gone wrong. When Arias surveyed 104 of the prisoners she had counseled in 2004, two-thirds reported depression related to abortion, 32 percent reported suicide attempts related to abortion and 84 percent linked substance abuse to their abortions. They had a new key for unlocking themselves. And a way to make things right. “You have well-meaning therapists or political crusaders, paired with women who are troubled and experiencing a variety of vague symptoms,” Brenda Major, the U.C. Santa Barbara psychology professor, explained to me. “The therapists and crusaders offer a diagnosis that gives meaning to the symptoms, and that gives the women a way to repent. You can’t repent depressive symptoms. But you can repent an action.” You can repent an abortion. You can reach for a narrative of sin and atonement, of perfect imagined babies waiting in heaven.

Posted at 08:55 PM | Permalink

From WashPost

Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are leading an effort to forge dozens of small and medium-size, black and white Baptist organizations into a robust coalition that would serve as a counterweight to the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.

The giant SBC, with more than 16 million members, has long dominated the political, theological and social landscape among Baptists, often spawning resentment among smaller Baptist groups. It has also been closely aligned with the Republican Party.

The new coalition, which is Carter's brainchild, would give moderate Baptists a stronger collective voice and could provide Democrats with greater entree into the Baptist community. But Carter and other organizers are trying to walk a fine line, insisting that the alliance is not directly political while touting its potential to recast the role of religion in the public square.

"We hope . . . to emphasize the common commitments that bind us together rather than to concentrate on the divisive issues that separate us," Carter said. "There's too much of an image in the Baptist world, and among non-Christians, that the main, permeating characteristic of Christian groups is animosity toward one another and an absence of ability to cooperate in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood."

The Rev. Richard Land, head of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the smaller Baptist groups are in "a search for significance and relevance." He scoffed at the idea that the new coalition would be nonpartisan.

"I'm not going to question their motives. I just know that if I were them, I would be concerned about how it might appear to many people, the timing," Land said. "Purportedly they're going to hold a convention of several thousand people in Atlanta in early 2008, hosted by two former Democratic presidents, one of whom has a wife seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Some would see that as an overtly political activity."

Carter and Clinton were raised as Southern Baptists but have expressed dismay over the SBC's increasingly conservative bent since traditionalists defeated modernists in a struggle for control of the denomination in the 1970s and '80s. READ IT ALL

Posted at 02:17 PM | Permalink

Watch the video

Posted at 10:56 AM | Permalink

FROM NYTIMES: Declaring himself a proud conservative before a crowd of cheering supporters waving American flags, Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, on Saturday announced his candidacy for president.

Mr. Brownback, an evangelical Protestant turned Roman Catholic and a former Kansas agriculture secretary, said he would focus on reviving faith and families in America; combating abortion, poverty and wasteful government spending; opposing same-sex marriage; and revamping Social Security and the federal tax system.

“The last thing we need in America is to take God out of our public lives and institutions,” Mr. Brownback said during his speech in Topeka, Kan. “We need to embrace our nation’s motto, ‘In God we trust,’ and not be ashamed of it.

“To walk away from the Almighty is to embrace decline for a nation,” he said. “To embrace him leads to renewal, for individuals and for nations.”

Mr. Brownback, 50, was first elected to the House in 1994. Two years later, he was elected to the Senate, to complete the unexpired part of Senator Bob Dole’s term when Mr. Dole left to run for president.

Mr. Brownback acknowledged that he would be one of the lesser-known candidates in what is expected to be a crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls, including Senator John McCain of Arizona and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.

He said his bid might be “a long shot,” but he compared himself to other successful presidential candidates who had come from behind, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He said his ideas would separate him from the pack.

“I start out with less name ID, but I’ve been there before,” Mr. Brownback said at a news conference after his speech in Topeka, Kan. “My positions are at the heart of where the Republican Party is.”

With his opposition to abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, Mr. Brownback hopes to establish himself as the dominant conservative in the race. The American Conservative Union, which hails him as one of “the best of the best” in the Senate, gave him a 100 percent conservative rating in its most recent survey of Congress.

In recent weeks, Mr. Brownback has been emboldened by the struggles of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, whose conservative credentials have come under attack because of questions about his evolving positions on abortion and gay rights. Mr. Brownback said Saturday that he planned to march in an anti-abortion rally in Washington on Monday. READ IT ALL

Posted at 12:37 AM | Permalink

Watch the video here

Posted at 09:58 AM | Permalink

Bush reading My Pet Goat

From ABC News

A group of Methodist ministers from across the nation launched an online petition drive Thursday urging Southern Methodist University to stop trying to land George W. Bush's presidential library. The petition, on a newly created Web site, http://www.protectsmu.org, says that "as United Methodists, we believe that the linking of his presidency with a university bearing the Methodist name is utterly inappropriate."

"Methodists have a long history of social conscience, so questions about the conduct of this president are very concerning," said one of the petition's organizers, the Rev. Andrew J. Weaver of New York, who graduated from SMU's Perkins School of Theology.

Brad Cheves, SMU's vice president for external affairs and development, said Thursday that the Methodist church is diverse in its membership and opinions and that those involved with the petition reflect only one view.

"We believe the vast majority of the Methodist membership, university and community support the library and that it will benefit the faculty, students and community for generations to come," Cheves said.

SMU emerged as the apparent winner in the library competition last month when the site selection committee said it was entering into further discussions with just SMU, the 11,000-student, private university, which is first lady Laura Bush's alma mater. The Bushes are Methodists.

Some SMU professors have opposed Bush's foreign policy, mainly the war in Iraq. Some faculty members also have complained that the library complex's think tank dedicated to the philosophy of the Bush administration would hurt the school's reputation.

But at a faculty meeting Wednesday, SMU President R. Gerald Turner said those fears were unfounded. He said among the library's benefits were increasing the school's visibility nationwide and spurring economic development in the city. The project will be financed with a private fund drive aimed at raising at least $200 million.

While SMU's president said his university' exclusive talks with the selection committee would resume in a few days, the other finalists are Baylor University in Waco and the University of Dallas. A decision is expected in a few months.

Posted at 05:48 PM | Permalink

From RNS via EthisDaily

A New York judge has ordered comedian Jerry Seinfeld to pay his real estate agent, an observant Jew, her commission even though the agent would not show a $3.95 million property on the Sabbath.

New York Supreme Court Justice Rolando T. Acosta ruled that Seinfeld, who is also Jewish, should pay agent Tamara Cohen the fee, which could be as much as $98,000, even though Cohen was not available when the comedian and his wife wanted to see potential properties.

Seinfeld said Cohen did not deserve the fee because she did not return phone calls and was unavailable when he and his wife, Jessica, wanted to view the house. Seinfeld testified he did not know the agent was an observant Jew who did not work on the Sabbath.

Cohen began showing properties in September 2004 to Seinfeld's estate manager. On Feb. 11, 2005, Cohen showed the townhouse to Jessica Seinfeld and the estate manager. When they were unable to reach the agent for about 24 hours that weekend, the Seinfelds visited the house alone and agreed to purchase it. According to court papers, the comedian did not think Cohen was entitled to a full commission because she could not show him the premises when he wanted to see it.

Acosta ruled Jan. 2 that the agent was entitled to the commission. "The evidence clearly indicates that she served as the Seinfelds' real estate broker," he wrote.

"Apparently the court understood the difficulty of dealing with secular tradition and non-secular tradition, and I believe the court recognized that there must be some understanding on the part of the business community to be afforded to observant Jews in New York,"

Cohen's attorney Steven Landy, who specializes in real estate litigation, said in an interview.

Richard Menaker, Seinfeld's lawyer, said "the Seinfelds are very respectful of the Sabbath." He also contended that Cohen was a leasing agent who was inexperienced with sales, and that Cohen had rejected a finder's fee for locating the property.

"If someone is an active real estate broker and they go out of commission for the Sabbath," Menaker said, "you'd expect them to pick up their messages on Saturday evening, but there was no callback."

Posted at 10:43 AM | Permalink

From the LA Times

Canada's first sextuplets, born more than a week ago, are facing an additional complication to the usual premature baby's struggle for survival: Their parents' religion forbids blood transfusions, a typical part of a preemie's treatment.

The babies' condition remains a mystery, and the hospital refuses to confirm reports that one infant has died.

The six babies were born Jan. 5 and 6 in Vancouver, British Columbia, to parents who are Jehovah's Witnesses. Delivered at 25 weeks, more than halfway through the typical 40-week pregnancy, the four boys and two girls averaged 1.6 pounds and can rest in the palm of an average man's hand. The survival rate for such births is about 80%.

The parents have asked to remain anonymous, and the hospital has not provided information since shortly after the births, when a spokesman reported that the babies were in fair condition.

On Tuesday, hospital officials would not comment on a media report citing sources in the hospital that one of the boys had died.

"The family asks that their privacy be respected," said a spokeswoman for B.C. Women's Hospital in Vancouver. "They haven't provided instructions for releasing a statement."

The news of Canada's first sextuplets and the role of the parents' religion in their children's chances for survival have riveted a nation that prides itself on tolerance.

The infants face months in intensive care as their nascent organs, muscles and immunities develop enough for them to live on their own. Blood transfusions are a typical part of a preemie's treatment, experts say, because of their low blood volume and vulnerability to anemia. They also must have their blood drawn repeatedly for tests.

Although Jehovah's Witnesses can receive almost any medical intervention, including fertility treatments, organ transplants and vaccinations, the religion's interpretation of the Bible prohibits blood transfusions.

A passage in the Bible cited as the basis for the prohibition is from Leviticus: "And you must not eat any blood in any places where you dwell, whether that of fowl or that of beast. Any soul who eats any blood, that soul must be cut off from his people."

The prohibition probably was meant to prevent the contamination of water supplies, wrote religious scholar Michael Duggan of St. Mary's University College in Calgary, Alberta. But the religion, which uses 1st century Christianity as its model, has interpreted it literally to forbid the "consumption" or spilling of blood.

Mark Ruge, spokesman for the Jehovah's Witnesses in Canada, said, "It mentions in the Bible to abstain from blood, and so we follow that. We want the best for the children, but without blood."

Asked about the consequences of accepting a transfusion, Ruge said that those who did not follow the Bible's teachings would no longer be Jehovah's Witnesses "by their own accord."

Canada's child protection laws ensure that babies get the medical treatment necessary to keep them alive, even if it takes a court order.

A 1995 decision by Canada's Supreme Court in a similar case of a premature baby born to a Jehovah's Witnesses couple concluded that the infant's medical interests trumped the parents' religious rights.

Neither Vancouver's Child Welfare Department nor the hospital have applied for a court order, a provincial court official said.

Even if they don't have a choice, the parents face a conundrum. If they accept blood transfusions to save the babies' lives, it could cut them off from their religious community at a time when they needed its support.

When Lawrence Hughes, 56, was a Jehovah's Witness, he faced a similar problem. In 2002, his 16-year-old daughter, Bethany, needed blood transfusions as part of her treatment for leukemia. His wife, daughter and the Jehovah's Witnesses community in Calgary opposed the transfusions. After much struggle, he signed the consent forms, and was cut off from his family and congregation.

Jehovah's Witnesses typically live and pray together and discourage association with people outside the congregation.

"I was completely isolated," Hughes said.

After Bethany had 38 transfusions, her mother took her into hiding, and the girl eventually died. Hughes is suing the Jehovah's Witnesses, claiming the lawyers who fought the forced treatments did not act in his daughter's best interests.

"I knew that once I signed the consent form, that was it. I knew I'd lose my family, my friends and my faith," he said. "I did it to try to save my daughter, but I lost her too."

Hughes, who works at an architectural firm in Calgary, has joined with other former Jehovah's Witnesses and dissenters in the church to seek a change in policy regarding blood transfusions. In recent years, the religion has allowed patients to receive what it calls "fractions," or components of blood, but not whole blood.

The prohibition presents a problem for doctors as well, said Juliet Guichon, a medical bioethicist at the University of Calgary.

"The consequences of refusing blood in certain situations are fatal," Guichon said in a telephone interview. "There must be something to make people choose that. If it's coercion or fear, the physician must be aware of that."

Posted at 10:18 AM | Permalink

From NYTimes:

As Pentecostalism advances across the world, winning converts faster than any other Christian denomination and siphoning believers from more established faiths, it is also suffering its own slow leak: young people who are falling away from the faith.

Mainline Christian churches have grappled with the problem for years. And recently, evangelical leaders in the United States sounded an alarm over “an epidemic of young people leaving.”

But the loss is doubly distressing for Pentecostals, evangelical Christians who can be especially zealous in seeking new members and rejecting the secular culture they feel is luring adolescents away from religion. Against that backdrop, Ark of Salvation is an unusual success. Unlike most of the other Pentecostal churches they visit, this 60-member congregation has attracted a devoted core of teenagers — more than a dozen — who sing and pray at every service. This is no accident.

When the first of them showed up two years ago at the austere storefront on Amsterdam Avenue, dragged along by friends or family, they had little inclination toward religion or music. But Pastor Danilo Florian saw in them the seeds of his church band. More important, he saw in this motley bunch of knockabout youngsters the future of his fledgling church.

He gave them instruments. He paid for music lessons. And he lavished gifts that few of them had ever known, growing up in fractured families and on dangerous streets: Attention. Praise. Expectations.

Today, they are thriving. The bassist, Frankie Lora, looks as if he may defy his mother’s fears that he will end up like his brother, who is serving a life sentence for murder. The pianist, Juan Carlos Matias, once lonely and aimless, is studying to become an engineer. And the singer, Jessica Marte, who was cutting class and fighting at age 12, now dreams of opening a clothing store for Christian girls.

They have also embraced a strict — and sometimes strait-laced — moral code, which they are urged to spread to friends and strangers.

But they are still teenagers, living in a city filled with temptations for quick pleasure and easy money that the founders of Pentecostalism a century ago never imagined. At school, they have classmates who live only for the latest music, gadgets or fashions, or friends who sell drugs. At home, some have parents who ridicule their faith.

And being teenagers, they have their own doubts and questions about their newfound religion’s many rules and rituals. Frankie still recalls his disbelief when he saw people shouting, crying and twitching at his first service. “I was looking at them like they were retarded,” he said. “I never saw jumping like that in the street.”

Reaching these young people took a lot of work. Keeping them in church as they enter the wider world may prove even harder. READ IT ALL

Posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink

From the AP

Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) said Tuesday he hopes to patch things up with conservative Christian leader James Dobson, who recently said he wouldn't support the Republican's presidential bid under any circumstances. In a radio interview with KCBI, a Dallas Christian station, Dobson argued that McCain didn't support traditional marriage values and said he has prayed "we won't get stuck with him." Dobson is founder of Focus on the Family.

"I'm obviously disappointed and I'd like to continue and have a dialogue with Dr. Dobson and other members of the community," McCain said Tuesday during a stop in Columbia. McCain has said gay marriage should not be legal but has angered some conservatives with his opposition to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex unions. The Arizona senator said the issue should be left to the states.

"I'm happy to say that I've established a dialogue with a number of other leaders," including the Rev. Jerry Falwell, "Purpose Driven Life" author Rick Warren and Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.

McCain has reached out to conservatives he once crossed. Last May, he spoke at Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia. In 2000, Falwell opposed McCain's campaign for the GOP nomination and supported George W. Bush. At the time, McCain labeled Falwell and others on the right and the left as "agents of intolerance." During his 2000 presidential bid, McCain also criticized Bob Jones University, a Christian fundamentalist college, for its ban on interracial dating.

In a GOP debate with Bush, McCain said that given the opportunity to speak at the school as Bush had, he would have said: "Look, what you're doing in this ban on interracial dating is stupid, it's idiotic, and it is incredibly cruel to many people."

McCain said last year that he wouldn't turn down an opportunity to speak at Bob Jones. Since 2000, the school has lifted its interracial dating ban.

Posted at 04:50 PM | Permalink

From Faith & Action

Barack Hussein Obama was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan Muslim father of the same name and an American secular humanist mother named Ann Dunham. While Obama's father was raised in Islamic culture, he had become a functional atheist by the time he reached college. Despite his parents' lack of religion, young Obama received his early education in both Catholic and Muslim schools.

Obama's parents divorced when he was only two years old. Henceforth, the senior Obama was "almost entirely absent" from his son's life. Four years later, Ann Dunham relocated to Indonesia with her son to join her new husband Lolo Soetoro. A daughter, Maya, was born to the couple before their divorce. She returned to Hawaii where she went on to earn her MA in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama wrote of his mother, "She was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position paper liberalism."

Obama's mother was a huge influence in his life. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in October 2006, he said, "My mother--when I think about the values I hold most dear, they came from her." In a speech given at a Moms Rising event in 2006, he said, "Everything that I think is good about me, I got from her."

While Obama's mother was a quintessential secular humanist, he told Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Daren Briscoe, "[S]he was a deeply spiritual person, and when I moved to Chicago and worked with church-based community organizations, I kept hearing her values expressed in the church." Dunham died of ovarian cancer at age 53 before her son rose to national prominence.

For much of his childhood, Obama lived with his maternal grandparents. He describes them as having no religious faith. He says of his mother's mother, she was "always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn't see, feel, touch or count." His maternal grandfather, who he describes as a "dreamer," had an innate rebelliousness and a "complete inability to discipline his appetites." Perhaps this influenced Obama's own youthful experimentation with marijuana and cocaine.

While in Hawaii, Obama attended the exclusive Punahou School, a nominally Christian private school. Upon graduation, he went off to Occidental College in Los Angeles.

After two years, Obama transferred to Columbia College, the undergraduate wing of Columbia University in New York. He studied political science with a specialization in international relations. Following graduation in 1983, Obama worked for a year at a business-related publishing company, before moving to Chicago where he helped churches organize job training programs for residents of poor neighborhoods.

Obama left Chicago to study at Harvard Law School where he was elected the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He obtained his Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude in 1991. On returning to Chicago, Obama supported a voter registration drive, and then worked for the civil rights law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his federal election.

RELIGIOUS JOURNEY

During his early years in Chicago, Obama says he was a religious "skeptic . . . wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won."

Obama met the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. while attempting to recruit Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ for a community organizing drive. The very liberal United Church of Christ denomination notes, "In a sea of conservative black churches, Trinity stands out in that it has welcomed gay members, done outreach to people living with AIDS and advocated progressive positions on many social issues." Wright is the man to whom Obama has turned to "help him explain how his liberal positions jibe with his faith." Today, after 20 years, Obama still calls Wright his pastor, friend and mentor.

It was under Wright's tutelage that Obama made his public profession of Christian faith. This, in response to a sermon preached by Wright and entitled (like Obama's recent book), The Audacity of Hope. For Wright and his church, the gospel is fused with the black experience in America. The church's mission statement reads, "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian... Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain 'true to our native land,' the mother continent, the cradle of civilization."

Trinity also has "adopted the Black Value System," 12 "precepts and covenantal statements"[xvii] that form a sort of Ten Commandments-like code. The System's preamble charges, "These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered." The second value, after "Commitment to God," is "Commitment to the Black Community." The eighth is "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness." And the eleventh is "Pledge Allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System."

This exclusive commitment to a cultural and national identity played a major role in Obama's decision to identify himself with Christianity. He explains that he probably would have remained apart from any faith, "had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith."

Still, this embrace came with the condition, "that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved—that I was finally able to walk down the aisle."[i][xx]

This "walk down the aisle" had a distinctly different character from Evangelical conversion. Obama set out his own criteria for what he would and would not accept from the Christian faith. Pastor Wright, Trinity and the Christianity they proclaimed met his criteria. In other words, Obama came to Christ on his own terms, rather than surrendering unconditionally to Jesus' Lordship. This is important for all Christians to know, and particularly for Evangelical Christians whom Obama is actively courting for political purposes.

OBAMA NOT A "BIBLE CHRISTIAN"

[...] In fact, Obama picks and chooses what parts of the Bible he will accept or reject. For example, on the subject of same-sex relationships, Obama writes,

"I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount."

It is clear that Obama uses his own human criteria for what he will believe and what he won't believe. This is unacceptable to Evangelicals. The Word of God instructs us; we do not instruct it. We conform to God's Word; God's Word does not conform to us.

OBAMA'S FAITH NOT A CONFIDENT FAITH

[...]

Obama doesn't seem to have this assurance of his salvation and, sadly, he risks passing that doubt along to his own four year old daughter:

"I thought of Sasha, asking me once what happened when we die— ‘I don't want to die, Daddy," she had added matter-of-factly—and I hugged her and said, ‘You've got a long way to go before you have to worry about that,' which seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn't sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang."[ix][xxviii]

OBAMA'S "PROGRESSIVE" CHRISTIANITY NOT COMPATIBLE WITH EVANGELICALISM OR CLASSICAL ORTHODOXY

Obama defines himself as a "progressive." He admonishes those of us who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible that we have an added burden of translating our religious principles into what he calls "universal values." According to him, failure to do so in a "pluralistic democracy" means forfeiting even our highest moral standards because "we have no other choice."

Obama's progressivism, however, leads him to conclusions that are morally untenable, if not reprehensible, to Evangelicals and other traditionalist Christians.

He approves of same-sex romantic and sexual relationships, as do his church, his pastor and his denomination. He supports abortion for any reason, by any method, at any stage of pregnancy including during the birth process. In an E-mail under his wife Michelle's signature, his campaign for US Senate championed Roe v. Wade and partial-birth abortion. In 2002 as an Illinois legislator, Obama even voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies that survived late-term abortion.

OBAMA HAS A LONG WAY TO GO BEFORE MEANINGFULLY ENGAGING THE EVANGELICAL AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES

Barack Obama routinely appeals for an engagement of "all persons of faith in the larger project of American renewal." But there are many obstacles preventing Evangelicals and other traditional Christians from answering his call.

To gain our support, he must speak our language, not the other way around. Obama must acknowledge that he may be wrong about such essentials as the Bible, doctrine, the means of salvation and morality. (He will probably have to stop smoking too, as that would be one the simplest ways of avoiding offense with the large number of Evangelicals who hold to holiness codes.)

Obama is a member in a church that places devotion to race and nationality on par with devotion to Christ. His cultural exclusivity stands in direct opposition to the Evangelical concept of the transcendent universality of the Gospel. Jesus permanently nullified racial and gender barriers when he reached out to the Samaritan woman. (See John, chapter 4.) St. Paul writes in Galatians 3:28,
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Furthermore, Obama is affiliated with a denomination that has decisively rejected the cardinal truths of the Christian faith. This will be an enormous impediment toward his goal of unity.

Obama will also likely need to explain why his mentor, Pastor Wright, unapologetically uses language that insults millions of Americans, many of whom are Evangelicals. In one interview, Wright called those of us who voted for George Bush "stupid."

The fact is Barack Obama isn't really different from other liberal Christians. And, as is so often the case with liberals, he condescendingly reaches down toward those considered his benighted hillbilly Evangelical cousins with a kind offer of enlightenment. He does it more smoothly, with a bit more panache, but he does it just the same. If, as his pastor says, he truly "respects the beliefs of others—even when they differ from his own," he must do more than attempt to win our votes. Ideally, he would say, "I may very well be wrong on these critical issues, and I am open to learn from you." Then, he must stop talking and lecturing, no matter how congenially, and simply listen.

For humanity’s sake, Obama must err on the side of preserving those things that matter most: the public acknowledgment of God, the Sanctity of Marriage, and the Sanctity of Life. Should the Senator discover that a life in the womb is as precious as God declares it to be (see Psalm 139), we must presume he would not want any more irreparable harm to be done. Jesus said we will "know them by their fruits."

Barack Obama is not an Evangelical Christian. Each of us must decide how much weight to give this fact as he continues to make the rounds in our churches, but we must keep it at the forefront of our minds. Only then can we properly and prayerfully decide whether or not to take the Senator up on his invitation to talk. Should he run for president, Obama’s religious identity and the policies that result from it will be critical in assessing whether or not he has earned the Evangelical vote.

Posted at 12:31 PM | Permalink

From the SF Chronicle

Many of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most formative writings and sermons -- some dating to when King was a precocious 19-year-old seminary student in 1948 -- languished for decades in a battered cardboard box.

A decade before her death in 2006, King's widow, Coretta Scott King, flew to San Francisco to ask Stanford Professor Clayborne Carson to examine and write about the box's contents.

The texts, which illuminate the theological foundations that America's most celebrated social activist would repeatedly return to, are revealed in a book to be released today -- Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- by Stanford University's King Papers Project.

The collection includes documents from 1948 to 1963 -- the years covered by the book -- and "gets us closer to King's true identity" because they shed new light on how he viewed the Bible, Carson said.

"King used to say, 'People think of me as a civil rights leader, but fundamentally, I'm a Baptist preacher,' " said Carson, editor of "Advocate of the Social Gospel," which is based on the newly disclosed writings and is the sixth book produced by the King Papers Project. READ IT ALL

Posted at 06:05 PM | Permalink

Another essential article by Jeff Sharlet, from Harper's:

We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism. Those of us not engaged personally or emotionally in the biggest political and cultural movement of our times--those on the sidelines of history--keep trying to come up with theories with which to discredit the evident allure of this punishing yet oddly comforting idea of a deity, this strange god. His invisible hand is everywhere, say His citizen-theologians, caressing and fixing every outcome: Little League games, job searches, test scores, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the success or failure of terrorist attacks (also known as “signs”), victory or defeat in battle, at the ballot box, in bed. Those unable to feel His soothing touch at moments such as these snort at the notion of a god with the patience or the prurience to monitor every tick and twitch of desire, a supreme being able to make a lion and a lamb cuddle but unable to abide two men kissing. A divine love that speaks through hurricanes. Who would worship such a god? His followers must be dupes, or saps, or fools, their faith illiterate, insane, or misinformed, their strength fleeting, hollow, an aberration. A burp in American history. An unpleasant odor that will pass.

We don’t like to consider the possibility that they are not newcomers to power but returnees, that the revivals that have been sweeping America with generational regularity since its inception are not flare-ups but the natural temperature of the nation. We can’t conceive of the possibility that the dupes, the saps, the fools--the believers--have been with us from the very beginning, that their story about what America once was and should be seems to some great portion of the population more compelling, more just, and more beautiful than the perfunctory processes of secular democracy. Thus we are at a loss to account for this recurring American mood.

Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America--from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy--that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”--coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers--still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise. READ IT ALL

Posted at 06:02 PM | Permalink

From WorldNetDaily

A prominent Christian leader whose radio and magazine outreaches are solidly in support of biblically-based marriages -- and keeps in touch with millions of constituents daily -- says he cannot consider Arizona Sen. John McCain a viable candidate for president.

"Speaking as a private individual, I would not vote for John McCain under any circumstances," said James Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family as well as the Focus Action cultural action organization set up specifically to provide a platform for informing and rallying constituents.

Dobson, who always is careful to note that he's not speaking for the non-profit ministry, which cannot advocate for or against candidates legally, also doesn't hesitate to state his personal opinions on social or political issues and agendas.

Several times he's talked to Republicans, the traditionally conservative political party, about the need to maintain the values of that large part of the U.S. population, or lose the support of those people.

His most recent comments came during an interview on the Jerry Johnson Live program on KCBI 90.9 FM.

The show host noted that pro-family conservatives already are thinking about the next cycle of leadership in the United States, which will be determined in the 2008 presidential and congressional elections. He also noted that McCain and New York mayor Rudy Guiliani appear to be the leaders.

Then he asked Dobson to listen to a statement from McCain and respond.

"I think, uh -- I think that gay marriage should be allowed if there's a ceremony kind of thing, if you wanna call it that -- I don't have any problem with that," McCain says.

"Dr. Dobson, would you be comfortable with someone like John McCain as the conservative or Republican candidate for president?" Johnson asked.

"Well, let me say that I am not in the office. I'm in the little condo so I can speak for myself and not for Focus on the Family," Dobson said in rejecting McCain's leadership.

He noted that legislation he'd just been discussing on the program, regarding an attempt by Democrat leaders in Congress to create obstacles for ministries such as Focus to reach constituents with action messages about pending legislation, is being supported by McCain, too.

"That came from McCain, and the McCain Feingold Bill kept us from telling the truth right before elections and there are a lot of other things. He's not in favor of traditional marriage, and I pray that we won't get stuck with him," Dobson said.

The provisions of the new congressional proposal, hidden deep inside a plan to reform lobbying rules to eliminate the many recent scandals involving members of Congress, would require pro-family groups to provide documentation of their actions to the government any time they try to spark any "grass-roots" action.

Phone calls, personal visits, e-mails, magazines, broadcasts, phone banks, appearances, travel, fundraising and other items all would be subject to government tabulation, verification and audits, Dobson said during a recent program. "On and on it goes."

"Clearly, the objective here is to hide what goes on from the public and punish and silence those of us who would talk about what our representatives are doing," Dobson said of the plan by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. American Family Association Chairman Donald Wildmon, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and American Values President Gary Bauer joined Dobson in urging listeners to flood Capitol Hill with phone calls demanding those speech limits be removed.

Bauer said the telephone number to call is: 202-224-3121.

Focus also has begun an online petition, at Focuspetitions.com.

Wildmon characterized the Washington proposal as a message to the American public: "We don't want to hear from you, and this is the way we're going to handle it."

Dobson also earlier scolded Republicans for blaming the 2006 election victories by Democrats in many races across the country on conservatives.

"Dick Armey emerged from four years in the wilderness to blame conservative Christians for Tuesday's defeat. They were, he said, 'too involved' with the party. He can't be serious! Someone should tell him that without the support of that specific constituency, John Kerry would be president and the Republicans would have fallen into a black hole in '04," Dobson said in a story WND reported earlier.

"Values Voters are not going to carry the water for the Republican Party if it ignores their deeply held convictions and beliefs," he said.

"Republican leaders in Congress during this term apparently never understood, or they forgot, why Ronald Reagan was so loved and why he is considered one of our greatest presidents. If they hope to return to power in '08, they must rediscover the conservative principles that resonated with the majority of Americans in the 1980s – and still resonate with them today. Failure to do so will be catastrophic," Dobson said.

Dobson noted he'd been interviewed by U.S. News and World Report after the 2004 elections and warned if Republicans squandered their opportunity, they would pay a price at the polls in either 2008 or 2006.

Dobson's predictions about values and the Republican Party go back even further than that, too.

In 1998 he told a reporter that the GOP was in danger of losing its ability to "claim to speak for those of us with deep moral convictions."

He said at that time the party has "ignored the moral issues year after year, term after term" and said at that time it was "time to fish or cut bait."

At that time he also warned the GOP Christians and conservatives "will abandon them if they continue to ignore the most important issues."

Posted at 04:08 PM | Permalink

The Rev. Ted Haggard was Alexandra Pelosi’s tour guide

From NY Times

You are a young documentary filmmaker with a reputation for capturing politicians’ antics. In a deliberate departure from politics, your latest film is a road trip into the world of evangelical Christians that includes a drive-through church, a Christian wrestling federation, a stand-up Christian comic, an evangelical Elvis and a biblical miniature golf course complete with the empty tomb of Jesus.

It just so happens, though, that your designated tour guide in that world is the Rev. Ted Haggard, then president of the National Association of Evangelicals who, after your film is finished, is accused of buying illegal drugs from a male prostitute and paying him for sex. And your mother, it turns out, makes history, becoming the first female speaker of the House just weeks before your film is broadcast.

Those two big events are the back story for Alexandra Pelosi, whose film “Friends of God: A Road Trip With Alexandra Pelosi,” is to be shown on HBO on Jan. 25. The youngest child of Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat sworn in last week as speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi said the other day she worried that her film would not be received in an “open-minded way.”

People might love it or hate because of her mother or because of its association with Mr. Haggard, she said. But what she really wanted, Ms. Pelosi said, was to further the conversation about religion and culture.

“I believe in the culture war,” she said. “And you know what? If I have to take a side in the culture war I’ll take their side,” meaning the Christian conservatives. “Because if you give me the choice of Paris Hilton or Jesus, I’ll take Jesus.”

Ms. Pelosi wrote, directed and produced “Friends of God,” which took her through 16 states and the District of Columbia with a small, hand-held camera. It is offered as a series of snapshots, she said, with a focus on conservative evangelicals, including the ministers Jerry Falwell and Joel Osteen. In the film Mr. Haggard explains the allure of evangelical Christianity and extols the primacy of sex among evangelicals.

“I unfortunately chose the wrong leading man,” Ms. Pelosi said of Mr. Haggard, whom she picked for his credibility. She liked him, she said, and they spent a great deal of time together.

“Pastor Ted was my tour guide,” she said. “When I met him he was so reasonable and open, and he took me camping at Pikes Peak. He taught me how to shoot a gun at the top of Pikes Peak. I thought he was the most reasonable man I had met on the road.”

After his fall, Ms. Pelosi scurried back to the editing room, saddened. “We had to take some stuff out,” she said. “But you can’t do an entire movie without the failed guy.”

Ms. Pelosi, 36, is best known for her films “Journeys With George” (about George W. Bush) and “Diary of a Political Tourist” (about Democratic presidential candidates).

“I would like to think that evangelicals would love this movie,” she said, adding that she tried hard to make them look their best. “But a lot of them won’t even watch it because they don’t want to watch my mom’s daughter’s movie.”

The Rev. Leith Anderson, who replaced Mr. Haggard as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said he expected that evangelical Christians would decide to watch “Friends of God” for the same reasons as other viewers: buzz and reviews. “I hope more and more Americans realize there is a broad diversity of evangelicals, a diversity in race, politics and denominations,” said Mr. Anderson, the senior pastor of the Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn. “If that comes across in the documentary that’s really good.”

“Friends of God” opens with an on-screen declaration that the documentary (which Ms. Pelosi began shooting on her honeymoon in June 2005) was completed before Mr. Haggard’s scandal.

Ms. Pelosi said she thought many viewers might want to sneak a peek at Mr. Haggard, the founder and former senior pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group,” Mr. Haggard says slyly to the camera, to which the effusive Ms. Pelosi responds, “No way.” Mr. Haggard then asks a parishioner at his 14,000-member church how often he has sex with his wife. The man says: “Every day. Twice a day.”

Days before the Democrats captured the House and Senate, Mr. Haggard was dismissed by his church’s board of overseers for “sexually immoral conduct.” A male prostitute in Denver had said in a radio interview that Mr. Haggard had been a monthly customer and buyer of methamphetamines. Mr. Haggard responded that not all the accusations were true. But he stated in a letter read in his church that “enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from ministry.”

Did Ms. Pelosi have any inkling that Mr. Haggard was not as advertised?

“I did,” she said. “People flock to the church for a reason. Some people flock to the church for a reason. It seemed like there was some reason he was so drawn to me. There was something in him. I mean, if he was a true red-state evangelical we wouldn’t have sort of clicked.” And he never gay-bashed, she said.

But Ms. Pelosi said the film’s point was that the evangelical Christian movement was big — bigger than any one pastor.

“Depending on whom you ask, there could be between 50 and 80 million evangelical Christians in America,” Ms. Pelosi says in “Friends.”

On the road, she said, she was repeatedly asked about her own beliefs. “I got saved five times a day,” she said, describing herself as a believer in God and a lapsed Roman Catholic who dislikes church. But she and her husband, Michiel Vos, a journalist for Dutch media, intend to make certain that their son, Paul Michael Vos (born Nov. 13), goes to church, she said, so he would have “more than himself and capitalism to believe in.”

As a first-time mother, a fairly new wife and the sister of four siblings, Ms. Pelosi clearly has her own take on so-called family values. But at least one Pelosi never sees any of her work in advance but is invited to screenings like everyone else, she said.

“The last thing I need is her editing my film,” Ms. Pelosi said cheerfully, talking about her mother. “She’ll be subtle, the same way she comes to my house and says I need to drop one of the baby’s feedings. You don’t get to be speaker of the House by being subtle.”

Posted at 10:02 AM | Permalink

Alternet has a couple of good stories on this creepy movement. Read about it here. Or, to watch Nightline's coverage of the Quiverfull movement go here

Related: Quiverfull: The Fundamentalist "Feminists".

Posted at 10:00 AM | Permalink

From Americans United for Separation of Church and State

A Michigan public school district is under pressure to provide a constitutionally suspect and factually flawed Bible course to its high school students.

The curriculum being pushed by a parent in Howell, Mich., is the product of a North Carolina-based group called the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. The Council was founded in 1993 and has peddled its curriculum relentlessly nationwide. Its Web site argues that public schools are failing students by not focusing their attentions on the Bible. “The Bible,” the Council maintains (inaccurately), “was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 or 30 years.”

The Howell Board of Education is set to meet this evening to discuss the issue. Board members should withstand political pressure and reject the Council’s Bible course, which is suited for some Sunday school sessions, but not the public schools. In fact, in the late 1990s, a federal judge barred a Ft. Myers, Fla., school from using the curriculum. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich in Gibson v. Lee County concluded that the course improperly sought to teach New Testament stories, such as the resurrection of Jesus, as secular history.

The Council, founded and led by Elizabeth Ridenour, has not created an objective, academic study of the Bible. Ridenour’s group is supported by Religious Right activists because its course is a vehicle to spread a specific strain of Christianity – the one they all approve of. Ridenour’s Board of Directors includes attorneys from the American Family Association, the Alliance Defense Fund and former television actor turned evangelical mouthpiece, Chuck Norris. The Council’s advisory board is packed with similar-minded folk, such as televangelist D. James Kennedy and Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist and chairman of the Conservative Caucus.

In a “President’s Message” posted on the Council’s Web site, Ridenour claims, “The world is watching to see if we will be motivated to impact our culture, to deal with the moral crises in our society, and reclaim our families and children.”

Ridenour and her Religious Right fellow travelers believe our government is too secular, and they yearn for a return to a time when public school officials could lead their students in Protestant prayers, Bible readings and other religious activities.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has long opposed the efforts of Ridenour’s group. In a Jan. 5 letter to the Howell school superintendent and school board, Americans United Litigation Counsel Aram A. Schvey urges the officials to avoid use of Ridenour’s Bible course, which raises “constitutional questions and would expose the school district to a risk of costly and lengthy litigation.”

Schvey’s letter goes on to note that “any class focused solely or even predominantly on the Bible is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny.”

Ridenour’s course is all about promoting a Religious Right understanding of the Bible. It is a tool to proselytize, and Howell public school officials, as well as others nationwide, should have nothing to do with it.

Posted at 10:58 AM | Permalink

From the AP; hat tip Right Reverend Rabbi Judah

The director of a nonprofit evangelical drama company pleaded no contest to two counts of corruption of minors.

"I'm not contesting those facts, even though, sir, they are not true," Paul Daniel Neidermyer III, 59, of Manheim Township, told Lancaster County Judge David L. Ashworth on Monday. "I'm pleading this way to bring closure to my life."

Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey A. Conrad accused Neidermyer, director of Maranatha Productions Inc., of conducting nude acting classes with two 17-year-old boys in his basement.

"I wasn't in the country. I was in Britain. I brought 45 witnesses from Sweden, England and the U.S. because I was thinking I was going to trial," Neidermyer said.

Ashworth sentenced Neidermyer to five years probation, fined him $500, and prohibited him from having unsupervised contact with anyone under the age of 18.

Posted at 10:09 AM | Permalink

From Reuters

Praying online in a support group may help women with breast cancer cope with the disease more effectively, a new study shows. Dr. Bret Shaw of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found that breast cancer patients who used a higher percentage of religion-related words in their communications with an Internet support group had lower levels of negative emotions, better functional well-being, and more confidence in their ability to deal with their illness.

"Breast cancer patients who want to pray can use online support groups as a place to cope with their illness with other people going through similar situations," Shaw told Reuters Health. "Our data suggest that this might make you feel better."

Shaw decided to launch the study after observing how common it was for people to use prayer in online support groups. "We noticed a lot of people were exchanging prayers on line, praying for themselves and other group participants," he said.

However, he added that "some women were so kind of turned off by the overly religious tone of the groups that they did not want to participate."

To investigate the health, social and emotional effects of online prayer for women with breast cancer, Shaw and his team loaned a group of women computers linked to the Web. They also provided training on computer and Internet use. The women were surveyed at the study's outset and again after four months of support group participation.

Among the 97 women who posted more than twice to the group, those who used a higher percentage of religion-related words (such as bless, faith, heaven and pray) showed lower levels of negative emotions, better functional well-being, and greater health-related self-efficacy, meaning they had more confidence in their ability to cope with their illness.

But there was no association between the use of religion-related words and women's levels of breast cancer-related concerns, emotional well being, social support, or positive reframing, a coping strategy that involves looking at a challenge in a more positive light.

The women used a number of different religion-related coping mechanisms, Shaw noted, such as believing in an afterlife, not fearing death, believing that "God gives you what you need to face your challenges," and focusing on the "blessings" in one's life rather than the problems.

Most women in the study were Christian, and Shaw said he is interested in investigating whether prayer has similar effects for people of other faiths.

He and his colleagues also suggest looking at whether an "online chaplain or spiritual guidance counselor" could provide additional benefit by guiding patients toward religious coping methods most likely to bring them comfort and the strength to get through their breast cancer treatment.

Posted at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Dr. Anthony Atala, head of Wake Forest's regenerative medicine institute

From the AP

Stem cell researchers reacted with enthusiasm and reservations to a report that scientists have found stem cells in amniotic fluid, a discovery that would allow them to sidestep the controversy over destroying embryos for research.

Researchers at Wake Forest University and Harvard University reported Sunday that the stem cells they drew from amniotic fluid donated by pregnant women hold much the same promise as embryonic stem cells.

They reported they were able to extract the stem cells from the fluid, which cushions babies in the womb, without harm to mother or fetus and turn their discovery into several different tissue cell types, including brain, liver and bone.

But Dr. Anthony Atala, head of Wake Forest's regenerative medicine institute and the senior researcher on the project, said the scientists still don't know exactly how many different cell types can be made from the stem cells found in amniotic fluid. The scientists said preliminary tests in patients are years away.

The cells from amniotic fluid "can clearly generate a broad range of important cell types, but they may not do as many tricks as embryonic stem cells," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientist at the stem cell company Advanced Cell Technology. "Either way, I think this work represents a giant step forward for stem cell research."

Dr. George Daley, a Harvard University stem cell researcher, said the finding raises the possibility that someday expectant parents can freeze amnio stem cells for future tissue replacement in a sick child without fear of immune rejection.

Nonetheless, Daley said, the discovery shouldn't be used as a replacement for human embryonic stem cell research.

"While they are fascinating subjects of study in their own right, they are not a substitute for human embryonic stem cells, which allow scientists to address a host of other interesting questions in early human development," said Daley, who began work last year to clone human embryos to produce stem cells.

Atala said the research reported in the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology expands far beyond similar work.

At a heart research conference in November, Swiss researcher Simon Hoerstrup said he managed to turn amniotic fluid stem cells into heart cells that could be grown into replacement valves. Hoerstrup has yet to publish his work in a scientific journal.

"Our hope is that these cells will provide a valuable resource for tissue repair and for engineered organs as well," Atala said.

It took Atala's team some seven years of research to determine the cells they found were truly stem cells that "can be used to produce a broad range of cells that may be valuable for therapy."

Atala said the new research has found even more promising stem cells with the potential to turn into many more medically useful replacement parts.

"We have other cell lines cooking," Atala said.

The hallmark of human embryonic stem cells, which are created in the first days after conception, is the ability to turn into any of the more than 220 cell types that make up the human body. Researchers are hopeful they can train these primordial cells to repair damaged organs in need of healthy cells.

However, many people, including
President Bush, oppose the destruction of embryos for any reason. The Bush administration has restricted federal funding for the embryo work since 2001, leading many scientists to search for alternative stem cell sources.

The advance is the latest in the so-called regenerative medicine field that has sprung from Atala's lab in Winston-Salem, N.C.

In April, Atala and his colleagues rebuilt bladders for seven young patients using live tissue grown in the lab.

In the latest work, Atala's team extracted a small number of stem cells swimming among the many other cell types in the amniotic fluid.

One of the more promising aspects of the research is that some of the DNA of the amnio stem cells contained Y chromosomes, which means the cells came from the babies rather than the pregnant moms

Posted at 04:14 PM | Permalink

From archdiocese.la

See in the fish pin a sign of recognition of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers. The pin signals solidarity with all people of faith who promote justice and inclusivity for every person in their faith communities.

In 2006 we celebrated our 20th anniversary of this ministry. The Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Catholics was founded by Cardinal Roger Mahony on February 4, 1986 and is supported throughout the Archdiocese at parish level a an active outreach ministry with gay and lesbian Catholics, their parents, families and friends.

Posted at 10:07 AM | Permalink

From Americablog

Don't say we didn't warn you. To the theocrats, taking rights away from the homos was the low-hanging fruit. But, their victories over the gays emboldened them. Now, they are coming for the straight people -- and they want to change the rules for divorce. But, let's be realistic. That's just a first step -- a slippery slope. You know they really want to ban divorce. READ IT ALL

Posted at 11:20 AM | Permalink

From NY Sun:

By Day 365, Governor Spitzer will propose legislation legalizing gay marriage in New York, a top aide to the governor said yesterday.

The Spitzer administration moved to reassure gay-rights advocates that it wasn't backing down from a campaign promise to support a same-sex marriage bill. The governor did not address the issue specifically in his 61-minute State of the State address on Wednesday.

"The governor made a commitment to advancing it this year, and he will do so," Mr. Spitzer's communications director, Darren Dopp, told The New York Sun.

Gay marriage, however, isn't a Day One issue, he said. For now, the administration is chiefly concerned with pushing forward its ethics and economic agenda and is keeping the issue of gay marriage off the front burner. "We have to prioritize and that's how we prioritized," Mr. Dopp said. "That's not to say other matters are not important."

Outlining his priorities for the year, Mr. Spitzer's State of the State address did not mention gay marriage but envisioned New York as a "state that understands that the civil rights movement still has chapters to be written."

Posted at 10:25 AM | Permalink

Take it at your own risk, (though we kinda don't see the point). From the blasphemychallenge.com

It's simple. You record a short message damning yourself to Hell, you upload it to YouTube, and then the Rational Response Squad will send you a free The God Who Wasn't There DVD. It's that easy.

You may damn yourself to Hell however you would like, but somewhere in your video you must say this phrase: "I deny the Holy Spirit."

Why? Because, according to Mark 3:29 in the Holy Bible, "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." Jesus will forgive you for just about anything, but he won't forgive you for denying the existence of the Holy Spirit. Ever. This is a one-way road you're taking here.

See others who have taken the challenge.

Posted at 10:23 AM | Permalink

Last year, our boy Pat predicted this for 2006:

“There will be panic and terror… There will be earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruption… this is going to be the year when the hand of the Lord will be felt.”

Sounds like 2007 will be a doozy too. From the AP

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

Posted at 10:17 AM | Permalink

The former New York Times Mideast Bureau chief warns that the radical Christian right is coming dangerously close to its goal of co-opting the country’s military and law enforcement.

From TruthDig; Hat Tip Dark Christianity

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.

During the past two years I traveled across the country to research and write the book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I repeatedly listened to radical preachers attack as corrupt and godless most American institutions, from federal agencies that provide housing and social welfare to public schools and the media. But there were two institutions that never came under attack—the military and law enforcement. While these preachers had no interest in communicating with local leaders of other faiths, or those in the community who did not subscribe to their call for a radical Christian state, they assiduously courted and flattered the military and police. They held special services and appreciation days for all four branches of the armed services and for various law enforcement agencies. They encouraged their young men and women to enlist or to join the police or state troopers. They sought out sympathetic military and police officials to attend church events where these officials were lauded and feted for their Christian probity and patriotism. They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as “satanic.” All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society. READ IT ALL

Posted at 12:11 PM | Permalink