LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY thedemonprist)

sunfell may find the first one of particular interest.

The first article showed up on Yahoo. It concerns the Air Force and reports of religious prosetylizing (hope I spelled that right):


By ROBERT WELLER, Associated Press Writer Tue May 3, 3:27 PM ET

DENVER - A task force will investigate the religious climate at the Air Force Academy after reports of intolerance, including incidents of anti-Semitism, officials said Tuesday.

It will assess Air Force policy and guidance when it comes to religious respect and tolerance, acting Secretary of the Air Force Michael L. Dominguez said in a statement.

The task force also will look into practices by commanders "that either enhance or detract from a climate that respects both the free exercise of religion and the establishment clauses of the First Amendment."

A preliminary assessment is due by May 23, officials said.

The creation of the task force comes after complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence at the school that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive. [emphasis mine]

Last week, Americans United for Separation of Church and State sent Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a 14-page report based on a two-month investigation. The group said it talked with about 15 cadets and staff.

The report concluded that students, faculty, staff and members of the chaplains' office frequently pressured cadets to attend chapel and receive religious instruction. Others said prayers were frequently conducted before official events.

Mikey Weinstein of Albuquerque, N.M., a 1977 graduate who has sent two sons to the school, applauded the formation of the task force. He has said his younger son has been the target of anti-Semitic comments.

"It sounds as though the Pentagon is talking the talk, and that is step one," he said. "Step two is whether they can walk the walk. There are too many afflicted by the unconstitutional evangelical control of the Air Force Academy at this point to offer any premature optimism until we see some positive, comprehensive action."

The academy said it first learned of reports of religious intolerance in a survey of cadets that included 55 complaints. Some cadets accused evangelical Christians of harassing both Christians and Jews; some of the Jewish cadets said they were blamed for the death of Jesus Christ.

The Air Force said "considerable efforts" have been made over the past several months to address issues of religious tolerance, including a new training program called Respecting the Spiritual Values of all People, or RSVP.

"This program encourages people to confidently and authentically live out their own faith and belief commitments and deeply respect others whose spiritual strength comes from a faith or source different from their own," Dominguez said. "Such mutual respect is essential to the culture of the airmen."

This is the second time the academy near Colorado Springs has been under a high-profile investigation in the past two years. Nearly 150 women came forward in 2003 to say they had been assaulted by fellow cadets in the previous decade, with many alleging that they were punished, ignored or ostracized by commanders when they spoke out.

The academy responded by overhauling the chain of command and policies involving reports of assault.
___

On the Net:
Air Force Academy: http://www.usafa.af.mil
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State: http://www.au.org

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The second article is also from Yahoo, in a roundabout way; I followed a link that had listed related subjects and found this. It's an opinion piece from the Chicago Sun-Times:


No need to fear theocratic coup
April 26, 2005
BY MICHAEL BARONE

If you read the headlines, you run the risk of thinking we are headed toward a theocracy. Alarmists note that George W. Bush invokes his religious faith in many speeches and that his positions on abortion, embryonic-stem cell research and faith-based charities are informed by it. They decry the law Congress passed to provide federal judicial review in the Terri Schiavo case. Vocal American Catholics bewail the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan called it ''a full-scale assault'' on liberal Catholics. We look abroad at the violence done by Islamist fanatics and wonder, without any clear way of being sure, how far such doctrines have taken hold among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. We note, more reassuringly but perhaps with some wariness, that most Iraqi voters seem to have followed the lead of the country's most powerful cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

But whether the United States is on its way to becoming a theocracy is actually a silly question. No religion is going to impose laws on an unwilling Congress or the people of this country. And we have long lived comfortably with a few trappings of religion in the public space, such as ''In God We Trust'' or ''God save this honorable court.'' The real question is whether strong religious belief is on the rise in America and the world. Fifty years ago, secular liberals were confident that education, urbanization and science would lead people to renounce religion. That seems to have happened, if you confine your gaze to Europe, Canada and American university faculty clubs.

But this movement has not been as benign as expected: The secular faiths of fascism and communism destroyed millions of lives.

America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite. Economist Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening argues that we've been in the midst of a religious revival since the 1950s, in which, as in previous revivals, ''the evangelical churches represented the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological and social changes that undermined the received culture.''

In the 2004 presidential exit poll, 74 percent of voters described themselves as churchgoers, 23 percent said they were evangelical or born-again Protestants and 10 percent said they had no religion.

This is in line with longer trends. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark in The Churching of America 1776-1990 used careful quantitative analysis to show that in America's free marketplace of ideas, the religions and sects that have grown are those that make serious demands on members. Those that accommodate secular critics and make few demands decline in numbers. The Roman Catholic Church continues to grow in America; the Assemblies of God and the Mormon Church grow even faster. But mainline Protestant denominations, which spend much effort ordaining gay bishops or urging disinvestment in Israel, lose members.

We see continuing secularism in Europe, but healthy competition among faiths elsewhere. In Latin America, the competitors are Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism. In Africa, competitors are Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam. In East Asia, Christianity has grown in Korea and, underground, in China. In South Asia, the competition for 500 years has been between Hinduism and Islam.

In free societies, each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birth rates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests.

In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in The Empty Cradle and Ben Wattenberg in Fewer, birth rates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in ''family values'' are more likely to have families.

This doesn't mean we're headed to a theocracy: America is too diverse and freedom-loving for that. But it does mean that we're probably not headed to the predominantly secular society that liberals predicted half a century ago and that Europe has now embraced.

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I'm curious to see what others think about this; my skeptic side says it's either a dismissal of the fear in general (likely IMO), or an attempt to lull the 'sheeple' back into docile mode.

Next, we have some people who 'get it'...and one that doesn't.

I was surfing around last night and found a few links when trying to look up some information on a pending Illinois bill - SB 457, which would allow for comprehensive sexual education in schools, and not the hearts 'n flowers version of "Abstinence ONLY! Birth control? Condoms? What're those??" nonsense. FYI, I had sex ed starting in the 5th grade, which was in the 1980's...you do the age-math...anyway, even though I grew up in a conservative area of the Midwest, I seem to remember that we had comprehensive SE that, while it did include voluntary abstinence as the only 100% effective way to avoid STDs and pregnancy, also discussed birth control and condoms (though we didn't have any of the exemplary condom-on-a-banana demonstrations), and no religious agenda was even so much as breathed upon.

But I digress. From this link, I browsed the Letters section and found some neat gems:

CHRISTIANS WERE PLAYED BY BUSH

It is time for many Christians to realize that they were played by the president in the November election. He played on their fears regarding two issues: abortion and homosexual marriage. By couching his campaign rhetoric around those two hot-button issues, he successfully led well-intentioned conservative voters to avoid the pressing issues of the Iraq war, Medicare and Medicaid funding woes, the budget deficit, and the unjust tax cut for the wealthy.

I truly doubt Jesus would have so casually overlooked the killing of thousands of Iraqis in the name of freedom, the deaths of almost 1,500 American soldiers in an unjust military action, and the plight of many Americans who struggle to make ends meet on a daily basis. Jesus called on the church to take care of widows and orphans and help the poor. He didn’t call for political activism. Some church historians seem to indicate that Judas was the one who got hung up on political activism, and things didn’t work out so well for him. Too many of our churches preach conservative politics, the point being that churches shouldn’t be in the business of preaching politics, period. [emphasis mine]

Contrary to the teachings in some churches, compassionate conservatism has more to do with helping the less fortunate and caring for poor people than standing on a picket line protesting an abortion doctor, worrying about the effects of gay marriage on traditional marriages, or making sure our retirement plans are maximizing their return potential. The church should be Christians emulating the love and compassion that Jesus modeled 2,000 years ago to a lost, hurting, and despairing world. [emphasis mine] Over the past several years, our society has been caught up in the “What Would Jesus Do?” phenomena. It is my belief that if Jesus were here today, he would be spending much of his time performing “I” surgery.

Chris Babb
Rochester

And here's a letter from the clueless:

GOVERNOR TRUMPS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

We are outraged by Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s decision to issue an emergency rule that strips pharmacists of their God-given liberty to live out their faith and belief system.

This executive rule requires pharmacies in Illinois to fill prescriptions for contraceptives even if the pharmacist on duty has moral or religious objections to dispensing that drug. This order will effectively force many Illinois pharmacists to violate the tenets of their faith.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. In February, we witnessed the governor sign SB 3186, a bill that effectively takes away the freedom of churches and people of faith to disagree — and to make hiring decisions based on their beliefs. Now the governor is again requiring Illinois citizens to ignore or even breach their conscience, and forcing a segment of the population to accept the values and ideals of the irreligious left. Public servants have no right to interpret sacred religious teachings for the rest of us — nor do they have the right to demand that we violate them.

The governor and his liberal friends have again revealed how little they care about the liberties and moral freedoms of people of faith; otherwise, they would not compel pro-life pharmacists to dispense poisonous drugs that cause the death of a human being.

David E. Smith
Senior Policy Analyst
Illinois Family Institute
Chicago

I live about 60 miles SW of Chicago, which is where a recent incident of a pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription happened - that prompted the gov. to issue this emergency order in question. I was *shocked* to hear that it happened in Chicago (right downtown, no less), of all places; to my knowledge, that city has a fair reputation for being liberal more often than not. Not to mention that it's too close to home for me: I live in a rural area, and while it may be undergoing some serious development right now (my county is the second-fastest growing in the *nation*), who's to say that pharmacies nearby might not pull the same shit?

My dad, for instance, *depends* on medications for blood pressure and diabetes. If BC can be denied on grounds for religious reasons, what's to stop these fanatics from denying other drugs to others for the same reasons? "You're sick because it's God's will." "God is punishing you for your sins." Um, no - I don't give a flying you-know-what what kind of drug it is, if it's legally prescribed and I have the legal means to obtain it, you'd damn well better fork over the drugs or I promise you, I'll make your life so much hell in whatever way I can that you'll wish you'd have just STFU and done your job.

Fortunately, people like this guy have common sense:

NO LICENSE TO DISCRIMINATE

David E. Smith of the Illinois Family Institute avoids the fact that pharmacists are licensed by the state [“Letters,” April 14]. Therefore, the state has the ability to reprimand those who neglect to provide the service for which they were licensed. If pharmacists cannot or will not do their licensed job, then they need to find another profession in which their beliefs do not negatively impact the public.

If we truly embrace a democracy, as defined in our Constitution, we cannot allow religious discrimination or allow religious zealots to pick and choose, cafeteria-style, the parts of the Constitution they will abide by. [emphasis mine]

George R. Andrews
Springfield

And last, but certainly not least, another person who 'gets it':

HYPOCRITES AND LIARS

Much has been made by commentators and pundits from all avenues of the political spectrum about the role morality and values played in the 2004 election and it’s apparent that one of those values is concern for the life of the unborn fetus, a cause taken up by the disingenuous “pro-life” movement.

However, it seems as if the concern of most — but certainly not all — “pro-lifers” for human life ends at birth, when this mortal coil really gets tricky and fraught with danger.

How do I know “pro-life” concerns end at birth? Easily: Pro-lifers voted en masse for George W. Bush, the butcher of Fallujah and Baghdad and the maestro of murder and mayhem for at least 100,000 Iraqis killed by coalition forces. As reported in a very recent research study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Maryland, and reported in a British medical journal, many of those thousands upon thousands of victims were children and women.

Where’s the “pro-life” outrage? I don’t see Right to Life contingents marching alongside anti-war, pro-quality of life groups like the Sierra Club, United for Peace and Justice, and SEIU. Why is it that the dominant elements of the Republican Party, the political agency for the so-called religious right, are pro-life/anti-woman and pro-execution, even if that means executing innocent and/or poorly defended prisoners of the state? Pro-lifers, why is it acceptable for the government to slice and dice essential public services, services imperative to improve the quality of life for low-income children, while, at the same time, Bush’s tax cuts enrich the coffers of the elite? These are glaring and inhumane contradictions on the part of “pro-lifers” and the “religious right.”

Also, why the lack of concern? Is one American fetus really worth 10,000 Iraqi civilians? Are white babies that much more important in the minds of the “pro-lifers” than brown or black babies? Aren’t we all God’s children? [emphasis mine]

The deceivers and manipulators should not be allowed to dictate the terms of life and liberty so let’s call these self-righteous, self-serving “Apocalyptics” appropriately: smug and arrogant frauds and cheats. Better yet, let’s use biblical terms: Like the self-serving priests, opportunistic political officials and greedy money changers who crucified Christ for defying their authority and embracing society’s disenfranchised, disadvantaged, and disposable, they are hypocrites and liars.

Michael Ziri
Springfield