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From USA Today:
What worries Southern Baptist leaders even more than the membership numbers is a steady decline in the conversion ritual that gave their denomination its name — baptisms.
Annual rates of baptisms have steadily declined not only in recent years, but also during the past 35 years. In 2007, Southern Baptist churches reported 345,941 baptisms. That's down 12% from 2002 and 22% from 1972.
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From the BBC:
Openly gay US bishop Gene Robinson was forced to halt a sermon at a west London church after being heckled.
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His ordination as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 split the Anglican Communion, and he has been excluded from the conference amid deep Anglican divisions over the issues of women bishops and homosexuality in the Church.
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Hat-tip to Out Astoria: In aftermath of Monday's assault on Father Braxton, Director of Carmen's Place, a homeless shelter for LGBT youth, participants gather to discuss hostility they face daily in school and in the streets of Queens, New York.
....Father Lewis Braxton, director of Carmen's Place, was attacked in front of the shelter by four teenaged boys on Monday night after stepping in to defend one of the residents of the shelter who was being harassed and threatened.
"I'm shocked that this happened on such a busy street," said Father Braxton. "This speaks to the need for a real conversation about the safety of trans people in this city."
With somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of homeless youth identifying as LGBT and statistics showing that LGBT youth are 3 to 5 times more likely to commit suicide, this shelter meets an essential need. These young people, many of whom have been thrown out of their homes, depend on safe havens like Carmen's Place and Generation Q to fulfill their emotional, psychological and social needs, and in the case of those without homes, their most basic needs.
[There is need for a] hate crimes law, school-based initiatives such as Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) that focus on prevention of hate crimes as well as interventions of identity-based bullying, and funding for safe havens like Carmen's Place and Generation Q.
"This attack is not isolated or an aberration" states Marisa Ragonese, the director of Generation Q. "Our youth come in here frequently with stories of being spit on, chased, harassed, or hit as they travel from the train less than 2 full blocks away to Generation Q."
In response to the harassment that LGBT teens have been reporting for years and the city and state's failure to implement the (DASA), Generation Q facilitates workshops, free of charge, to schools, after-school programs, and community spaces on homophobia, hate speech, confronting harassment, and developing anti-slur policies.
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The term "First Freedom" is often applied to American's freedom of religion because the first item in the Bill of Rights declares: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
The religious right is by definition a political movement. It seeks to affect the governance, law, and culture of the United States, in large measure by subverting the principle of the separation of religion and the state. "We the people," and not theological precepts, should be the basis of our great republic. Undoubtedly, under the Constitution the religious right has every right to attempt to alter our country. But that means we also have the right to defend it. The Constitution provides for ways for it to be changed...or protected.
Please sign the petition at First Freedom First to help uphold the cherished principle of keeping religion and the state separate.
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Frederick Clarkson takes a look at the schismatic Episcopalians in the US aligning themselves with Peter Akinola of Nigeria--an "ostentatiously anti-gay" Anglican Archbishop who "who makes James Dobson seem liberal and Hagee a relative man of peace"--and the actions of the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD).
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Sen. Obama is being reported to seek to expand President Bush's faith-based initiatives program. This means federal dollars--tax money--going to organizations that have a legal right to discriminate against gay Americans. This also is likely to mean additional tax dollars going to policing all religious charities to make sure they don't violate the Civil Rights Act (and some will), to make sure they don't proselytize (and some will), and engage in a host of not-so-charitable activities that (for some such organizations will) include distributing anti-choice literature, engaging in reversion therapy, and engaging in other forms of subtle and sometimes not subtle coercion.
That is what you get when you blend church and state: a mess.
What makes faith-based organizations faith-based is religious belief. That's why "faith" is in the term "faith-based." No federal dollars should go to such organizations. Obama is wrong on this issue.
Remember that the Roman state from Constantine onward ceded the care of the poor to the church; the church went from being a tolerated religion to the only legal one (basically mandatory) in no small part because of the power the church accumulated when it effectively became an arm of the state.
Am I suggesting that faith-based charities getting federal dollars will lead to theocracy? Of course not.
Besides Iraq, the hallmark of what in the UK is referred to as Bush-Blairism is a watering down of the division between religion and governance. It is so hated there because Britain is, after all, not only the home of many organizations like the "Sally Army," but because there is no official separation of Church and State. The British people know full well that religious charity almost always comes with strings attached. They know that faith-based means what it says: religion. And they know it first-hand because for centuries they have been taxed to-—in part—-prop up such religion-based practices.
Faith-based federal initiatives are a Pandora's Box.
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