From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom.

If you are committed to reproductive rights and social justice, this is THE place to be. On April 7-9, 2006, people will be gathering at Hampshire College [in Amherst, Massachusetts] to unite for reproductive justice. For this 20th annual reproductive rights conference, we are expecting hundreds of participants from the US and abroad and are offering more than 30 workshops and trainings. Conference speakers address reproductive freedom as it relates to a broad range of social justice initiatives including economic justice, healthcare reform, racial equality, peace, freedom from violence, youth liberation, civil liberties, and LGBTQ rights.

Over the weekend, you will learn about and share organizing experiences and strategies, broaden your understanding of reproductive rights, and make connections with other related movements and issues.

The conference is free and open to everyone. Whether you have been working on reproductive rights for decades or are new to the movement, you belong here! The conference is a forum for learning and networking for people of all ages and from a diversity of backgrounds.

This week has been a seminal moment in the religious right's campaign to push theology into the public square. Over at DefCon Blog, a number of posts have highlighted two bills that passed the Georgia legislature this week:

Media Matters catches ABC's Jake Tapper simply broadcasting Ricky Scarborough's "War on Christians" ( etc. ) conference without any context whatsoever: "nowhere in Tapper's report were any progressive voices included, nor were any Christian leaders quoted who disagree with the notion that there is a "war on Christianity." [ click on link for full story ]

Summary: ABC correspondent Jake Tapper quoted several participants in a conference titled "The War Against Christians" who complained that the concerns of conservative Christian voters are being ignored on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. But nowhere in Tapper's report were any progressive voices included, nor were any Christian leaders quoted who disagree with the notion that there is a "war on Christianity.".....

The March 28 report was not Tapper's first report on religion that lacked progressive voices. As Media Matters has previously documented, while noting during a January 24 ABC Nightline report that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s confirmation would mean that a majority of the Supreme Court would consist of Catholics, Tapper stated that "liberals do have some concerns about such a Catholic court." But that report quoted no identifiable liberals or Democrats either expressing concern about a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court or rebutting the notion that a Catholic court per se provokes concern.

In the context of ABC's outrageous refusal to air United Churches of Christ TV ads while airing ads from James Dobson's Focus on The Family, ABC's loyalties have become plain :  the network panders to the Christian right.

Looks like things are getting interesting in the Chaplains Corps of the US military:

Chaplains Group Opposes Prayer Order

(Registration needed)

An association that represents more than 70 percent of the chaplains in the U.S. military, including many evangelical Christians, is opposing a demand by conservatives in Congress for a presidential order guaranteeing the right of chaplains to pray in the name of Jesus.

The rising calls for an executive order are based on "confusion and misinformation," because Christian chaplains routinely pray in the name of Jesus, in public, thousands of times a week in military chapels around the world, said the Rev. Herman Keizer Jr., chairman of the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces.

"This has been portrayed as though chaplains are not allowed to pray in Jesus's name, without any distinction between what they do all the time in worship services and what they do occasionally, in ceremonial settings where attendance is mandatory," Keizer said.

Known by the initials NCMAF, Keizer's group is a private, 40-year-old association of more than 60 Christian, Jewish and Muslim denominations. It says it represents 5,430 of the 7,620 chaplains in the armed forces.

It is good to know that the wool can't be pulled over everyone's eyes.

Here's a Salon article by Michelle Goldman:

Sinners in the hands of an angry GOP

You'll need a day pass to read it, but make sure you read the Editors Choice letters about this article, too.

I, as well as others, have reported previously on the increasing concern that various Jewish organisations are having regarding dominionism in general and the close relationships several Jewish groups have historically had with dominionist groups in particular.

First the Anti-Defamation League, and then the head of the Reform Judaism congregation in the US, issued statements of concern; later, Rabbi James Rudin wrote a paper on dominionism and its threat to separation of church and state--and by extention its threat to the Jewish community.

Now this has culminated in a new anti-dominionist group called Jews On First.  There's a lot of good info there, and a number of potential allies (I've already shared the link to Talk2Action with them).

If only more of "us" who define outselves a Christians could  have the opportunity to do this!!

The MRFF is an organization founded by former cadet Mikey Weinstein, who is suing the USAF Academy:

The suit seeks to counter attempts, which have persisted for more than a decade, to impose Evangelical Christian beliefs and practices on Academy Cadets.

There are links to stories about the progress of this suit, as well as the retreat of the USAF in their policy on secterian prayer. Here are the links to the MRFF site and blog:

MRFF

MRFF Blog

This is a very welcome addition to the blogsphere!

Great op-ed in today's LA Times.

The connection between Christianity and political power is enough to make this believer hang her head. And yet to attack this Christianity as all of Christianity is, of course, an error. It ignores the fact that medieval Christianity was reformed -- by Martin Luther and the Church of England, among others. But most of all, it neglects a history that includes someone such as the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who organized the Confessing Church to resist Nazi exclusion laws, joined the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and paid for it with his life.

Bonhoeffer believed that the heart of what it meant to be a Christian was to act on behalf of the marginalized -- the helpless, the sick, the poor, the friendless. He distinguished between what he called "cheap grace," that form of lip service I think we can all identify with, and "costly grace," meaning the kind that gets you into trouble.

If I think of costly grace, I remember the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks; the abolitionists; the Christians of Jubilee 2000 who successfully pressured Britain and the United States to forgive the developing world's crippling debt; the Quakers who protect and advise pacifists; the women and men who work daily in soup kitchens, for living-wage ordinances, against torture at Guantanamo Bay. None of us have done enough, and that is partly why so many people only know about the Christianity that cozies up to power.

Source
[Registration required]

Elizabeth Ridenour founded and heads the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and is a member of the hard Christian right associated Council on National Policy. Many prominent leaders of the hard Christian right sit on NCBCPC's board. Ridenour's website states quite bluntly the NCBCPC's position that the US was founded as a Christian nation :

The Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years.

That position is consistent with the following alleged excerpt from a 1998 article by Elizabeth Ridenour - pertaining to her motivation for starting the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools In short ( per the excerpt below ) Elizabeth Ridenour feels that she has been called, by God, to a personal mission : to reintroduce the Bible into America's schools.

The Bible and Its Influence, published in September 2005  by the Biblical Literacy Project (BLP) to give high school teachers a resource for teaching about the Bible that would not spawn lawsuits, has been adopted by only six school districts, according to the March 15, 2006 issue of Religion BookLine, an e-newsletter published by Publishers Weekly.

According to the latest research from the Barna Group,  (http://www.barna.org) 76 Million Americans NEVER go to church!