speaking of outrageous double standards ...

Jon Stewart on the Sarah Palin Gender Card

looking good for jesus

I wonder if the product would have been pulled as quickly in the U.S.

'Jesus' cosmetic row in Singapore
A leading retailer in Singapore has withdrawn a cosmetics range with a Jesus theme after complaints from local Roman Catholics, local media report.

The range, named Looking Good for Jesus, was on sale at three Top Shop outlets in the Asian city state.

Catholics complained the cosmetics' marketing was disrespectful, full of sexual innuendo and trivialised Christianity.

About 15% of Singapore's 4.4 million population is Christian.

The products included a "Virtuous vanilla" lip balm and a "Get Tight with Christ" hand and body cream, featuring a picture of Christ flanked by two adoring women.

"Why would anyone use religious figures to promote vanity products? It's very disrespectful and distasteful," the Straits Times newspaper quoted accountant Grace Ong, 24, as saying.

A spokesman for the Wing Tai company - which runs the UK retailer's outlets - told the newspaper it did not want to offend its customers, and withdrew the products last month.

It was not clear whether other shops were still selling the range.

quotable

"The Jesus freak outside is wicked hot. What a waste."
-Status message on my gay co-worker Jerry's Gmail profile

god help us

So much for turning the other cheek.

don't want to ruin your day this early, but i feel you should know:
http://www.godtube.com/

american madrassas

Last week, Leo and I watched the most disturbing documentary I've seen in a very long time. It's called "Jesus Camp" and focuses on a youth pastor, Becky Fischer, who indoctrinates kids at a fundamentalist evangelical Christian summer camp. The tactics are frightening, as is the mix of right-wing political agendas and scripture that is used to teach children to "take back America for Christ."

The home-schooled kids are taught that global warming is a lie spawned by pro-evolution forces, that abortion must be stopped by "righteous judges" and politicians (they even bless a cardboard cut-out of a smirking George W. Bush), and that they must form an “army” to defeat the godless. At one point, they destroy objects labeled as "government" and later go to Washington DC as part of a pro-life protest. Other highlights include Ted Haggard railing about homosexuality, pastor Becky Fischer praying over the equipment to keep the devil from messing up her PowerPoint slides, a little girl commanding a bowling ball to reach the pins, and the requisite speaking in tongues and laying on of hands practiced in Pentecostal churches.

The cultish manner in which these kids are taught to be soldiers of Christ left me wanting to get the hell out of this country before the home-schooled fundamentalists take over. Controversy about the film, and vandalism of the campground where the kids are trained in Devils Lake, ND (no joke) led to the camp being shut down indefinitely.

The film left me cold, thinking about the tactics and the complicity of parents in what amounts to an American Madrassa. I was still chewing on that one when I stumbled on this story, about how fundamentalist churches are using Halo 3 to recruit new footsoldiers in their (un)holy war.

Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: October 7, 2007

First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

The Colorado Community Church is one of many across the nation reaching out to young people through the video game Halo.

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.

The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

But the question arises: What price to appear relevant? Some parents, religious ethicists and pastors say that Halo may succeed at attracting youths, but that it could have a corroding influence. In providing Halo, churches are permitting access to adult-themed material that young people cannot buy on their own.

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.

“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.

Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.

There is little doubting Halo’s cultural relevance. Even as video games have grown in popularity, the Halo series stands out. The first Halo and Halo 2 sold nearly 15 million copies combined. Microsoft says that Halo 3 “is on track to become the No. 1 gaming title of all time.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry, a nonprofit organization in Arvada, Colo., that helps churches on youth issues.

“It’s very pervasive,” Mr. Palmer said, more widespread on the coasts, less so in the South, where the Southern Baptist denomination takes a more cautious approach. The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, “We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,” explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels “between God and the devil.”

Players of Halo 3 control the fate of Master Chief, a tough marine armed to the teeth who battles opponents with missiles, lasers, guns that fire spikes, energy blasters and other fantastical weapons. They can also play in teams, something the churches say allows communication and fellowship opportunities.

Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.

Microsoft said Halo 3 was a “space epic” that was not intended to make specific religious references or be more broadly allegorical. Advocates of using the game as a church recruiting tool say the religious overtones are sufficiently cartoonish and largely overlooked by players.

Martial images in literature or movies popular with religious people are not new. The popular “Left Behind” series of books — it also spawned a video game — dealt with the conflict preceding the second coming of Christ. Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”

Mr. Kenerly said the idea that Halo is inappropriately violent too strictly interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” “I’m not walking up to someone with a pistol and shooting them,” he said. “I’m shooting pixels on a screen.”

Mr. Kenerly’s brother, Ken Kenerly, 43, is a pastor who recently started a church in Atlanta and previously started the Family Church in Albuquerque, N.M., where quarterly Halo nights were such a big social event that he had to rent additional big-screen TVs.

Ken Kenerly said he believed that the game could be useful in connecting to young people he once might have reached in more traditional ways, like playing sports. “There aren’t as many kids outdoors as indoors,” he said. “With gamers, how else can you get into their lives?”

John Robison, the current associate pastor at the 300-member Albuquerque church, said parents approached him and were concerned about the Halo games’ M rating. “We explain we’re using it as a tool to be relatable and relevant,” he said, “and most people get over it pretty quick.”

David Drexler, youth director at the 200-member nondenominational Country Bible Church in Ashby, Minn., said using Halo to recruit was “the most effective thing we’ve done.”

In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.

Among parents at the Colorado Community Church, Doug Graham, a pediatric oncologist with a 12-year-old son, said that he was not aware of the game’s M rating and that it gave him pause. He said he felt that parents should be actively involved in deciding whether minors play an M-rated game. “Every family should have a conversation about it,” he said.

Mr. Barbour, the youth pastor at the church, said the game had led to a number of internal discussions prompted by elders who complained about its violent content. Mr. Barbour recently met for several hours with the church’s pastor and successfully made his case that the game was a crucial recruiting tool.

In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”

“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

Thanks for the film recommendation, Vanoosheh & E

good god

I wonder who would win a Jesus vs. Samson smackdown.

Retailer Wal-Mart gets religious — toys, that is
By Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY
Wal-Mart (WMT) is about to bring religion to the toy aisle.

Early next month, 425 Wal-Mart stores nationwide will begin carrying faith-based toys from One2believe that target parents who would rather that their kids play with a Samson action figure than a Spider-Man action figure.

PHOTOS: Wal-Mart adds Bible action figures

It's the first time the world's largest retailer has carried a full line of religious toys. "We're seeing interest from parents in faith-enriching toys," says Melissa O'Brien, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

Religious products have become a multibillion-dollar business, and the toy move comes as it targets a younger audience. Fox recently created FoxFaith, a 20th Century Fox unit to distribute family movies with Christian themes. In January, Universal Pictures will release The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything — A VeggieTales Movie, based on the spiritual characters by Big Idea.

But until now, most faith-based toys have sold successfully only in specialty religious stores, not at mass-market retailers, warns Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine. "Once children turn 4, parents tend to get them what they want. And right now, kids are asking for Transformers."

About one-sixth of Wal-Mart's 3,300 stores will carry the One2believe line, which will get 2 feet of toy aisle shelf space, says O'Brien.

One way Wal-Mart decided where to carry them, she says: Stores that sell a lot of Bibles will carry the new line.

"We view this as an opportunity to reach that audience," she says.

But one religious leader does not consider Wal-Mart in the fold.

"They'll carry anything that sells," says David Croyle, president of FamilyLife, a non-denominational ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ. "This simply signals intelligent buying within Wal-Mart."

For David Socha, CEO of One2believe, it's a dream come true. "Our goal is to give the faith-based community an alternative to Bratz dolls and Spider-Man," he says.

The toys are based on biblical stories. For example, there's a set of 3-inch figures based on Daniel in the lion's den for about $7. A 12-inch talking Jesus doll is about $15. And 14-inch Samson or Goliath action figures are about $20.

The toys target kids from pre-school to age 12, he says, and also are sold online at one2believe.com.

Since 9/11, there's been a surge in faith-based products, says Bob Starnes, vice president of licensing at Big Idea, the firm behind VeggieTales. That's because most Americans have a "faith perspective," he says.

Laurie Schacht, president of The Toy Book, a toy industry publication, says some parents also are dissatisfied with toys from conventional toymakers: "There are a lot of wild things out there. Parents want to give kids wholesomeness."

antediluvian delusion

1. I really hope Eddie Izzard hears about this place, because I'm dying to hear some new material on this subject from him.
2. I happen to know someone who would love this museum. Yes, she's religious. Yes, we're friends. Yes, she believes in creation and all the other hooha in the Bible.

I have a rule that my natural history museums be grounded in evidence-based science, and not faith. Reactions amongst my other heathen friends has ranged from "I'm speechless" to "look, you're talking about people who believe 5 fishes and 4 loaves of bread are adequate nourishment for 5,000 people ... which actually explains the republican stance on the minimum wage."

Creation Museum Review: Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs
May 24, 2007
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.

But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.

What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.

For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.

It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.

Outside the museum scientists may assert that the universe is billions of years old, that fossils are the remains of animals living hundreds of millions of years ago, and that life’s diversity is the result of evolution by natural selection. But inside the museum the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall.

It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.

So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.

There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.

Whether you are willing to grant the premises of this museum almost becomes irrelevant as you are drawn into its mixture of spectacle and narrative. Its 60,000 square feet of exhibits are often stunningly designed by Patrick Marsh, who, like the entire museum staff, declares adherence to the ministry’s views; he evidently also knows the lure of secular sensations, since he designed the “Jaws” and “King Kong” attractions at Universal Studios in Florida.

For the skeptic the wonder is at a strange universe shaped by elaborate arguments, strong convictions and intermittent invocations of scientific principle. For the believer, it seems, this museum provides a kind of relief: Finally the world is being shown as it really is, without the distortions of secularism and natural selection.

The Creation Museum actually stands the natural history museum on its head. Natural history museums developed out of the Enlightenment: encyclopedic collections of natural objects were made subject to ever more searching forms of inquiry and organization. The natural history museum gave order to the natural world, taming its seeming chaos with the principles of human reason. And Darwin’s theory — which gave life a compelling order in time as well as space — became central to its purpose. Put on display was the prehistory of civilization, seeming to allude not just to the evolution of species but also cultures (which is why “primitive” cultures were long part of its domain). The natural history museum is a hall of human origins.

The Creation Museum has a similar interest in dramatizing origins, but sees natural history as divine history. And now that many museums have also become temples to various American ethnic and sociological groups, why not a museum for the millions who believe that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old and was created in six days?

Mark Looy, a founder of Answers in Genesis with its president, Ken Ham, said the ministry expected perhaps 250,000 visitors during the museum’s first year. In preparation Mr. Ham for 13 years has been overseeing 350 seminars annually about the truths of Genesis, which have been drawing thousands of acolytes. The organization’s magazine has 50,000 subscribers. The museum also says that it has 9,000 charter members and international contributors who have left the institution free of debt.

But for a visitor steeped in the scientific world view, the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar. Nature here is not “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson asserted. In fact at first it seems almost as genteel as Eden’s dinosaurs. We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but “to ‘talk’ to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light.”

Meanwhile a remarkable fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in Wyoming offers “silent testimony to God’s worldwide judgment,” not because it shows a predator and prey, but because the two perished — somehow getting preserved in stone — during Noah’s flood. Nearly all fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.

The heart of the museum is a series of catastrophes. The main one is the fall, with Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge; after that tableau the viewer descends from the brightness of Eden into genuinely creepy cement hallways of urban slums. Photographs show the pain of war, childbirth, death — the wages of primal sin. Then come the biblical accounts of the fallen world, leading up to Noah’s ark and the flood, the source of all significant geological phenomena.

The other catastrophe, in the museum’s view, is of more recent vintage: the abandonment of the Bible by church figures who began to treat the story of creation as if it were merely metaphorical, and by Enlightenment philosophers, who chipped away at biblical authority. The ministry believes this is a slippery slope.

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

But given the museum’s unwavering insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the believer?

In the museum’s portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses?

But for debates, a visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.

The Creation Museum opens Monday at 2800 Bullittsburg Church Road, Petersburg, Ky.; (888) 582-4253.

judge not, lest ye be judged

no sarcasm? no way.

I'm a regular effing Pollyanna. Well, not exactly...

I believe in the power of positivity. And the laws of attraction/ prolepsis (projecting the kinds of energy that you'd like to get back). But I also believe that sarcasm and humor are fundamentally good ways of dealing with a world that often seems more than a little bit off-kilter. That's why I put them out there and surround myself with people who know how to strike the right balance between negativity and denial. I'm annoyed by (and more than a little suspicious of) people who are perpetually positive.

Or, as my "proud to be a negative nancy" boyfriend put it:

that's funny. all this article makes me want to do is complain incessantly about how america is a nation of five-year olds.

does that mean i'm a lost cause?

or maybe there's something to this approach. maybe if i stopped complaining about how corrupt politicians and businesspeople are, eventually the pent-up rage would boil over and i would pick a few of them off with a rifle. and that would be "positive, active thinking" rather than my old, "negative, passive thinking."

this entire nation is one big carny religious revival tent. i paid my five dollars. i saw the geek and the bearded lady. i just want to go back out onto the real world.

Here's what all the fuss is about:

Pastor preaches against complaining
POSTED: 10:00 p.m. EDT, May 3, 2007
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- The Rev. Will Bowen tries not to complain. He wants everyone else to stop carping, too -- all 6 billion of us on the planet.

And his message, first preached in a sermon at his small suburban church, has caught on -- even though some critics note complaining serves an important function.

Last July, Bowen challenged worshippers at Christ Church Unity to quit complaining as a way to bring more prosperity into their lives. The congregation is part of the Association of Unity Churches, which offers what it calls "practical Christianity" -- a way of life leading to health, prosperity, happiness and peace of mind.

"When you're focusing your attention on what's wrong or complaining, you're going to get more of what you're complaining about," Bowen says.

Positive thinking is not a new concept, but Bowen's spin came with a contemporary twist: the silicone bracelet. At the July sermon, Bowen handed out about 250 purple bracelets he wanted his congregants to use to remind themselves to stop complaining, criticizing or gossiping. Sarcasm was another no-no.

He challenged them to refrain from complaining for 21 days because, he said, that is how long it takes to break habits. Whenever they found themselves failing they were to switch the bracelet to the other wrist and start over.

"Complaining draws all of its essence from negativity," the 47-year-old Bowen says. "When you complain, you do it typically to attract attention or sympathy. It's you saying, 'There's something wrong with me.'

"You're sending out this vibrational energy into the universe that you're a victim, and the universe responds with more negativity."

Bowen thought the challenge would be easy for him since he's a "positive minister guy." But he broke three bracelets after moving them from wrist to wrist so many times before making his 21 days. It took him nearly three months.

The bracelets and the no-complaining challenge were a hit with church members, who came back looking for more bracelets, which the church gives out free. People at their offices wanted them. Family, friends, students wanted the purple bracelet and to take the 21-day challenge.

By October, reporters came calling. After the initial burst of publicity, the church sent out more than 1 million free bracelets. Requests came in via the church's Web site from around the world -- Russia, South America, Asian countries. Some Pentagon employees began using the bracelets, which they kept on their desks because they were not allowed to wear them, says Tom Alyea, a church board member who has been coordinating the no-complaining effort with Bowen.

"When they find themselves complaining, they move the bracelet from one side of the desk to the other," Alyea says.

But Barbara S. Held, psychology professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, says Bowen's approach is misguided. Complaining is an important, necessary tool for some people, she said.

"If we lived in a world in which there was nothing to complain about I think it might make perfect sense," Held says. "But we don't."

Held, author of the book "Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching: A 5-Step Guide to Creative Complaining," says people cope in different ways and some people need to vent. "The tyranny of the positive attitude in America, which Reverend Bowen wants to spread to the entire world" can actually hurt some people, she says.

"The research is compelling. When you force people to use a coping style that goes against their nature their functioning goes down," she says. "I'm not pushing pessimism. I'm saying let people cope in the way they cope and don't make them feel defective."

Still, Bowen's no complaining mission has resonated widely. He does several interviews a week and gets a lot of questions about what exactly constitutes complaining.

He explains it this way: "Complaining is saying, 'Man, that sucks.' What changes things is saying, 'This is not the way I would like it to be. This is how I would like it to be.' It's painting a picture or creating a vista to get people to look in that direction. It's where you want to move toward."

Bowen attributes his campaign's appeal to people "being tired of negativity," and to the changes he says people experience when they move away from complaining. Schools, prisons and homeless shelters have taken up the no complaint challenge, he says.

"When you're not articulating complaints then they have nowhere to go, and your brain literally stops producing them, and you become a happier person," he says.

Since Bowen's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in March, volunteers have taken orders for more than 4 million bracelets. They've been coming in to the Web site at about 1,000 a day, Alyea says.

The bracelets are free, but the church includes a donation envelope in each packet it sends out. Alyea has contacted some Web sites that have offered copycat Complaint Free World bracelets but laughs about another site that he says "for $3 will send you a bracelet so you can complain all you want."

Bowen will not say how much the bracelets cost the church or what the donations amount to. But so far, contributions are keeping up with costs, he says.

A book, "A Complaint Free World" is due in October, and Bowen's next goal is a nationwide No Complaining day, preferably the day before Thanksgiving.

Held likely wouldn't support that idea.

"If they want to stop complaining and be optimistic and look on the bright side, fine," she says. "But why cram the agenda down everybody's throat? You don't see the kvetchers and complainers saying that everybody has to complain."

the party with family values

This Sunday's Doonesbury killed me.

Via Hos

sweet jesus

This gives the words "this is my body, given for you; do this in remembrance of me" a whole different flavor.
I think it's sacrilegious that he wasn't made out of dark chocolate.

Chocolate Jesus exhibit canceled: NYC gallery inundated with angry calls ahead of display during Holy Week
The Associated Press
Updated: 12:33 p.m. PT March 30, 2007

NEW YORK - A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled Friday amid a choir of complaining Catholics that included Cardinal Edward Egan.

The "My Sweet Lord" display was shut down by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan, said Matt Semler, the gallery's creative director. Semler said he submitted his resignation after officials at the Roger Smith Hotel shut down the show.

The six-foot sculpture was the victim of "a strong-arming from people who haven't seen the show, seen what we're doing," Semler said. "They jumped to conclusions completely contrary to our intentions."

But word of the confectionary Christ infuriated Catholics, including Egan, who described it as "a sickening display."

Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever."

"It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding," he said.

The hotel and the gallery were overrun Thursday with angry phone calls and e-mails about the exhibit. Semler said the calls included death threats over the work of artist Cosimo Cavallaro, who was described as disappointed by the decision to cancel the display.

"In this situation, the hotel couldn't continue to be supportive because of a fear for their own safety," Semler said.

The sculpture was to debut Monday evening, the day after Palm Sunday and just four days before Roman Catholics mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday. The final day of the exhibit was planned for Easter Sunday.

The artwork was created from more than 200 pounds of milk chocolate, and features Christ with his arms outstretched as if on an invisible cross. Unlike the typical religious portrayal of Christ, the Cavallaro creation does not include a loincloth.

Cavallaro is best known for his quirky work with food as art: Past efforts include repainting a Manhattan hotel room in melted mozzarella, spraying five tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home, and festooning a four-poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham.

Via Leo

what would jesus wiki?

Apparently, the overly tolerant, anti-American, and anti-Christian Wikipedia is too permissive. Enter Conservapedia, a site that allows wingnuts young and old to maintain a firm grip on ignorance.

What Would Jesus Wiki?
By Michael Calore| Feb. 28, 2007

An alternative Wikipedia written by conservative Christians has become a major target of mockery on the web.

Conservapedia, a wiki-based encyclopedia that offers the historical record from a conservative perspective, is attracting lots of derisive comments on blogs and a growing number of phony articles written by mischief makers.

Conservapedia "is a gold mine of unintentional hilarity," wrote Mark Frauenfelder on Boing Boing last Monday.

The Wonkette political blog encouraged its readers to contribute to "this fast-growing, Jeebus-and-America-friendly online resource." So did the ScienceBlogs network, which said, "There's much fun to be had."

Even conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan are bemused.

Conservapedia brands itself on its main page as "a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American."

"The site is intended as a resource for the general audience, but without the defects of Wikipedia," says Conservapedia's project leader, Andy Schlafly, a conservative writer and attorney.

Schlafly argues that Wikipedia's content displays a liberal bias, and that the site is rife with so much gossip, vulgarity and long-winded writing that it has become unusable as an educational resource.

In fact, creating a conservative-minded online encyclopedia for students was Schlafly's prime motivation for launching Conservapedia. He started the site in late November 2006 in conjunction with 58 high-school-level, home-schooled students from the New Jersey area.

Wikipedia's content, which is maintained and edited by its readership, has spurred a rash of criticism lately for perceived inaccuracies, bias and vandalism. The Wikipedia community polices itself, weeding out inaccurate content whenever possible, but Schlafly contends that's not enough.

"Wikipedia does not poll the views of its editors and administrators," Schlafly says. "They make no effort to retain balance. It ends up having all the neutrality of a lynch mob."

Using the same open-source software as Wikipedia, Conservapedia's entries are written in a manner sympathetic to the views of the religious right, social conservatives and creationists. The Conservapedia entry on homosexuality, for example, begins with four biblical citations decrying same-sex relationships.

"We have clear principles that we display, whereas Wikipedia pretends to be neutral and ends up biased," says Schlafly, who is the son of famous conservative politician and activist Phyllis Schlafly.

Conservapedia's entry on kangaroos says that, "like all modern animals ... kangaroos are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood."

The site's entry on George Washington identifies the first U.S. president as "the person other than Jesus who declined enormous worldly power ... by voluntarily stepping aside as the ruler of a prosperous nation."

After it launched, the site quickly found itself picked apart by bloggers of all stripes. Conservapedia was lampooned by conservative blogger Jon Swift for its brash denial of scientific facts in favor of biblical rhetoric.

Science blog The Loom and liberal blog Daily Kos also pointed to some of Conservapedia's more unconventional entries.

With all of the attention, vandals quickly followed. The site's entries were edited to include parody-style riffs on topics and bogus source citations. Schlafly says most of the vandalism was edited out or under control within a week, and that the site will continue to thrive.

"All they accomplished was to give us enormous publicity," he says.

Even so, many have pointed out that while the vandalism on the site is easy to spot, some of the parody on the site is more nuanced, and thus more difficult to identify.

Conservapedia isn't the first example of the religious right turning to social software to reach a wider web audience -- there's also CreationWiki, an encyclopedia of creation science written from a Christian perspective.

While CreationWiki remains mostly unscathed by the web's parodists, Conservapedia has fallen victim to countless attacks. One entry in particular has gotten a great deal of attention: the page about a tree-dwelling mollusk called the Pacific Northwest arboreal octopus.

Schlafly is amused by the page and its references to the endangered species falling victim to the ravages of logging and suburban encroachment. He sees it as a parody of environmentalists, and he plans to leave it up.

"Conservatives have a sense of humor, too," he says.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Andrew Sullivan failed to respond to requests for comment for this story.

i guess this is where we part ways

As seen in this week's New Yorker:

Thanks, Leo

grandma had premarital sex, too

If 9 out of 10 Americans have had premarital sex (going back to the 1940s), then why does the current administration keep pushing for abstinence-only education?

Or, as Leo put it:

so if 90% of americans engage premarital sex, and 33% are fundamentalist christians, what's the percentage of americans that should keep their hypocritical, do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do noses out of everyone else's fucking business? (pun fully intended.)

The bottom line: Americans are getting it on. Why are our precious tax dollars being used to fund abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds?

Even grandma had premarital sex, survey finds
Americans weren't any more chaste in the past, researchers report
The Associated Press
Updated: 2:59 p.m. PT Dec 20, 2006

NEW YORK - More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

Sex stable since the '50s
Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

“The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds,” Finer said.

Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

“It would be more effective,” Finer said, “to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active — which nearly everyone eventually will.”

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers.

White House: Wait longer, please
“One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity,” he said. “The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease.”

He insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults.

“Absolutely not,” Horn said. “The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults.”

Horn said he found the high percentages of premarital sex cited in the study to be plausible, and expressed hope that society would not look askance at the small minority that chooses to remain abstinent before marriage.

However, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group which strongly supports abstinence-only education, said she was skeptical of the findings.

“Any time I see numbers that high, I’m a little suspicious,” she said. “The numbers are too pat.”

the "one day" approach to reach your ideal weight--and stay there

Yes, folks. It's more advice from Ted Haggard.

Where, exactly, does meth fit into this plan?

The Jerusalem Diet: The "One Day" Approach to Reach Your Ideal Weight--and Stay There

a haggard wife made him do it

In case you missed the case of Ted Haggard (the evangelical pastor accused of buying meth from a gay escort), here's the follow-up.

Apparently, some members of the evangelical community are defending Pastor Ted, saying that responsibility for his sin rests on Mrs. Haggard, because "she let herself go." So much for "From This Day Forward."

The pastor's wife made him do it

Our friends at EvangelicalRight.com knew we'd be eager to hear about this response to Ted Haggard's scandal, from our old pal/nemesis Pastor Mark Driscoll. Driscoll leads Seattle's Mars Hill Church, and a good portion of the larger evangelical youth movement, teaching the doctrine of wifely submission to Christians nationwide. (To learn more about Driscoll, you can read Salon's excerpt from my book "Righteous: Dispatches From the Evangelical Youth Movement".)

Driscoll blames Haggard's affair with a male escort not on the former pastor's homosexuality -- which he abhors as much as that other spawn of Satan, feminism, -- but on his wife, Gayle Haggard. Why? 'Cause, he says, Gayle let herself go.

"At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this," he wrote on his blog. "It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either."

As we all know, this argument is as illogical -- that a man would have sex with another man because he was turned off by his aging wife, and not because he's gay -- as it is demeaning. How she looks should have no bearing on this. But, I must rise to Mrs. Haggard's defense, if only to point out that Driscoll is obviously using her as an opportunity for frat-boy girl-bashing of the highest right, guys? high-five! order. Find a picture of Gayle Haggard. It's easy to do this week, with her husband's fall from grace splashed over the front pages. And look at her. Come on: She looks fabulous.

Her failing is not in too few hours on the treadmill, but in her beliefs. First, that she should submit to her husband, as she has preached to her women's ministry in Colorado Springs, and as she and Ted wrote in a book they published this year called "From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime." (It's still for sale today at the New Life Church bookstore, and available for your ironic viewing at Amazon.) And second, that he can be healed of his "sickness" -- that under the close watch of Focus on the Family's James Dobson, God can cast the gay out, and the girl-crazy boy she married will be hers once more.

With Jesus' help, her faith asserts, Haggard can be just as straight as the aggressively heterosexual pastor Mark Driscoll, who, on his blog, is quick to explain that his fidelity to his wife -- and, thus, the Lord -- has everything to do with his blonde bride's hotness, lest we think he would have married a woman who wouldn't keep herself up to his specifications. Otherwise how could he have resisted the women who ache to provide him with earthly pleasures?

He writes, "I started the church ten years ago when I was twenty-five years of age. Thankfully, I was married to a beautiful woman. I met my lovely wife Grace when we were seventeen, married her at twenty-one, and by God's grace have been faithful to her in every way since the day we met. I have, however, seen some very overt opportunities for sin. On one occasion I actually had a young woman put a note into my shirt pocket while I was serving communion with my wife, asking me to have dinner, a massage, and sex with her. On another occasion a young woman emailed me a photo of herself topless and wanted to know if I liked her body." Yeah, dude!

Via Sharon

evangelical pastor admits he bought meth

I really can't put it any better than Leo did today:

somebody needs to grab kerry by the ears and make him read this story. THIS is what you do the week before pivotal elections. you find a major effin' hypocrite on the other side and splash his private life all over the papers. you DO NOT make faux-clever remarks that appear to slander the military.

of course, this will probably make people ignore the fact that, until this morning, the government was running a "how to build a nuclear bomb" website for aspiring terrorists. but i have to give them credit. it's sooooo much more efficient than the old economy, brick and mortar "let's build a school in panama and fly all the terrorists in" method they used to favor.

4 days left, kids. hope you all plan to get out and vote!!!

Accused pastor admits he bought meth
But Haggard claims he never used drug that he bought from gay escort

BREAKING NEWS
NBC News and news services
Updated: 11:20 a.m. PT Nov 3, 2006

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The Rev. Ted Haggard admitted Friday he bought methamphetamine and received a massage from a gay prostitute who claims he was paid for drug-fueled trysts by the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals.

"I bought it for myself but never used it," Haggard told reporters gathered outside his home. "I was tempted, but I never used it."

Haggard, 50, said he never had sex with Mike Jones, a 49-year-old Denver man who raised the allegations this week.

Haggard said he received a massage from Jones after being referred to him by a Denver hotel.

Haggard, who was leaving his home with his wife and three of his five children, said he bought the meth because he was curious.

Haggard stepped down as president of the 30 million-member association Thursday and also gave up leadership of his 14,000-member New Life Church pending the investigation into allegations he had sex with Jones over the past three years.

"It is important for you to know that he confessed to the overseers that some of the accusations against him are true,” Ross Parsley, the acting senior pastor at New Life Church stated in an e-mail to church members.

“He has willingly and humbly submitted to the authority of the board of overseers, and will remain on administrative leave during the course of the investigation,” the e-mail stated. A copy was obtained by KMGH-TV in Denver.

Haggard, a married father of five who has been called one of the most influential evangelical Christians in the nation, denied the allegations late Wednesday, telling NBC affiliate KUSA-TV of Denver: “I've never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife, I’m faithful to my wife. So I don't know if this is election year politics ... or what it is.”

Alleged voice mails
Jones provided to KUSA-TV what he said were voice mails from Haggard. The station had University of Colorado expert Richard Sanders compare them to its earlier interview of Haggard.

“It certainly sounds like the same person,” Sanders said, adding that he expected to have a final report later Friday.

KUSA-TV reported excerpts late Thursday.

“Hi Mike, this is Art,” one call began. “Hey, I was just calling to see if we could get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply.”

A second message, left a few hours later, began: “Hi Mike, this is Art, I am here in Denver and sorry that I missed you. But as I said, if you want to go ahead and get the stuff, then that would be great. And I’ll get it sometime next week or the week after or whenever.”

Jones said Haggard, whose middle name is Art, was referring to methamphetamine. “There’s some stuff on there (the voice mails) that’s pretty damning,” he said.

Jones said he also has an envelope he said Haggard used to mail him cash.

Gay marriage on state ballot
The allegations come as voters in Colorado and seven other states get ready to decide Tuesday on amendments banning gay marriage. Besides the proposed ban on the Colorado ballot, a separate measure would establish the legality of domestic partnerships providing same-sex couples with many of the rights of married couples.

Jones told The Associated Press he decided to go public with his allegations because of the political fight. Jones, who said he is gay, said he was upset when he discovered Haggard and the New Life Church had publicly opposed same-sex marriage.

“It made me angry that here’s someone preaching about gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex,” said Jones, who added that he isn’t working for any political group.

Jones, whose allegations were first aired on KHOW-AM radio in Denver, claimed Haggard paid him to have sex nearly every month over three years. Jones also said Haggard snorted methamphetamine before their sexual encounters to heighten his experience.

Jones said he had advertised himself as an escort on the Internet and that a man who called himself Art contacted him. Jones said he later saw the man on television identified as Haggard.

He said that he last had sex with Haggard in August and that he did not warn him before making his allegations this week.

Haggard was appointed president of the evangelicals association in March 2003. He has participated in conservative Christian leaders’ conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied members of Congress last year on U.S. Supreme Court appointees after Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement.

After Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in 2004, Haggard and others began organizing state-by-state opposition. Last year, Haggard and officials from the nearby Christian ministry Focus on the Family announced plans to push Colorado’s gay marriage ban for the 2006 ballot.

At the time, Haggard said that he believed marriage is a union between a man and woman rooted in centuries of tradition, and that research shows it’s the best family unit for children.

“Homosexual activity, like adulterous relationships, is clearly condemned in the Scriptures,” the evangelicals association says on its Web site. The Bible says homosexuality is a sin that “brings grave consequences in this life and excludes one from the Kingdom of God.”

Haggard’s resignation from the NAE seems unlikely to do lasting damage to the organization, an umbrella group for a diverse and independent-minded membership. At his own church, Haggard’s decision to step aside — if it became permanent — would have a more profound effect.

“One would hope and pray that this matter would be resolved expeditiously and quickly and he can be restored back to being the pastor of the church and the leader of the NAE,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative Washington think tank.

‘That’s not Ted’
New Life Church member Brooks DeMio, 44, said he thinks Jones is a liar and can’t believe Haggard would engage in sex with a man.

“He loves the Lord, homosexuality is a sin and that’s not Ted,” DeMio said. “His desire is to serve other people and uphold the word of God. ... I don’t know him well enough to give a complete character description, but I know him enough to know it’s not true.”

Carolyn Haggard, spokeswoman for the New Life Church and the pastor’s niece, said a four-member church panel will investigate the allegations. The board has the authority to discipline Haggard, including removing him from ministry work.

“This is really routine when any sort of situation like this arises, so we’re prepared,” Carolyn Haggard said. “The church is going to continue to serve and be welcoming to our community. That’s a priority.”

oh lordy

This four-part series, "In God's Name," examines how American religious organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government.

The second article in the series shows how U.S. judges have used the separation of church and state to shield religious employers of all faiths from labor laws and most employee lawsuits. What these churches are doing is downright immoral.

Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Published: October 9, 2006
J. Jeffrey Heck, a lawyer in Mansfield, Ohio, usually sits on management’s side of the table. “The only employee cases I take are those that poke my buttons,” he said. “And this one really did.”

His client was a middle-aged novice training to become a nun in a Roman Catholic religious order in Toledo. She said she had been dismissed by the order after she became seriously ill — including a diagnosis of breast cancer.

In her complaint, the novice, Mary Rosati, said she had visited her doctor with her immediate supervisor and the mother superior. After the doctor explained her treatment options for breast cancer, the complaint continued, the mother superior announced: “We will have to let her go. I don’t think we can take care of her.”

Some months later Ms. Rosati was told that the mother superior and the order’s governing council had decided to dismiss her after concluding that “she was not called to our way of life,” according to the complaint. Along with her occupation and her home, she lost her health insurance, Mr. Heck said. Ms. Rosati, who still lacks health insurance but whose cancer is in remission, said she preferred not to discuss her experience because of her continuing love for the church.

In court filings, lawyers for the diocese denied her account of these events. If Ms. Rosati had worked for a business or almost any secular employer, she might have prevailed under the protections of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Instead, her complaint was dismissed in December 2002 by Judge James G. Carr of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, who decided that the order’s decision to dismiss her “was an ecclesiastical decision” that was “beyond the reach of the court” because “the First Amendment requires churches to be free from government interference in matters of church governance and administration.”

Legislators and regulators are not the only people in government who have drafted special rules for religious organizations. Judges, too, have carved out or preserved safe havens that shield religious employers of all faiths from most employee lawsuits, from laws protecting pensions and providing unemployment benefits, and from laws that give employees the right to form unions to negotiate with their employers.

Some of these exemptions are rooted in long traditions, while others have grown from court decisions over the last 15 years. Together, they are expanding the ability of religious organizations — especially religious schools — to manage their affairs with less interference from the government and their own employees.

The most sweeping of these judicial protections, and the one that confronted the novice nun in Toledo, is called the ministerial exception. Judges have been applying this exception, sometimes called the church autonomy doctrine, to religious employment disputes for more than 100 years.

As a rule, state and federal judges will handle any lawsuit that is filed in the right place in an appropriate, timely manner. But judges will almost never agree to hear a controversy that would require them to delve into the doctrines, governance, discipline or hiring preferences of any religious faith. Citing the protections of the First Amendment, they have ruled with great consistency that congregations cannot fully express their faith and exercise their religious freedom unless they are free to select their own spiritual leaders without any interference from government agencies or second-guessing by the courts.

To do otherwise would be an intolerable government intrusion into employment relationships that courts have called “the lifeblood” of religious life and the bedrock of religious liberty, explained Edward R. McNicholas, co-chairman of the national religious institutions practice in the Washington, D.C., office of Sidley Austin, a law firm with some of the country’s largest religious organizations among its clients.

Judges have routinely invoked the ministerial exception to dismiss lawsuits against religious employers by rabbis, ministers, cantors, nuns and priests — those “whose ministry is a core expression of religious belief for that congregation,” as Mr. McNicholas put it.

But judges also have applied the exception to dismiss cases filed by the press secretary at a Roman Catholic church, a writer for The Christian Science Monitor, administrators at religious colleges, the disgruntled beneficiaries of a Lutheran pension fund, the overseer of the kosher kitchen at a Jewish nursing home and a co-founder of Focus on the Family, run by the conservative religious leader James C. Dobson. Court files show that some of these people were surprised to learn that their work had been considered a “core expression of religious belief” by their employer.

Religious employers have long been shielded from all complaints of religious discrimination by an exemption that was built into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and expanded in 1972. That historic exemption allows them to give preference in hiring to candidates who share their faith. In recent years, some judges have also refused to interfere when religious groups have dismissed lesbians, unwed mothers and adulterous couples, even if they profess the same faith, because they have violated their employers’ religious codes.

A federal court decision has given religious broadcasters an exemption from some of the fair-hiring requirements of the Federal Communications Commission, even when they are hiring secretaries and receptionists. Two other decisions, one in federal court affecting a Mormon church and the other in a state court of appeals case involving a Roman Catholic nursing home, affirmed the right of religious employers to dismiss employees whose faith changed after they were hired.

“These are very difficult cases because they pull at some very fundamental heartstrings,” said Steven C. Sheinberg, a lawyer at Outten & Golden, specializing in employment law. “There’s our belief that employees should be free of discrimination in their work, versus our belief that religious organizations should be free to hire people who best help them fulfill their religious mission, without the intrusion of government.”

Employees at religious institutions face other risks as well, thanks to pension law exemptions granted by Congress and upheld by the courts. Religious employers are exempt from Erisa, the federal pension law that establishes disclosure requirements and conflict-of-interest restrictions for employee pension plans. That exemption has given rise to several cases in which workers at religious hospitals found that their pensions had vanished because of practices that would not have been allowed under Erisa’s rules.

A related exemption frees religious employers from participating in the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government-run insurance program that provides a safety net for corporate pension plans. And some significant court decisions in labor disputes in the last several years have made it easier for religious schools and colleges to resist collective bargaining efforts.

But for Mr. Heck, the question of whether these workplace exemptions are fair to religious employees was crystallized by the case of Ms. Rosati, the novice nun in Toledo.

He said the doctor involved in her case had been prepared to testify under oath on Ms. Rosati’s behalf. The doctor “had quite a vivid memory about these events.” In fact, Mr. Heck said, the doctor had cautioned the nuns who accompanied Ms. Rosati that it would be virtually impossible for the ailing novice to get affordable insurance anywhere else if she were dropped from the diocesan health.

Lawyers for the diocese disputed Ms. Rosati’s account of that visit and denied that health reasons were the causes of her rejection by the order, the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary, which is covered by the diocesan health plan. For the court “to even begin to inquire into that decision-making process, we believe, crosses the line set by the First Amendment,” said Gregory T. Lodge, a lawyer for both the Toledo diocese and the order, which operates under papal authority.

“I understand and absolutely appreciate that in matters of religion, the state has no business meddling,” Mr. Heck said. “It would be unthinkable for a judge to be able to say, ‘Hey, I don’t like the way you’re interpreting the Book of Luke.’ ”

But what religious principle is offended when an employee simply grows old or becomes ill, he asked. If the answer is “none,” he continued, judges should be more willing to “look behind the curtain.”

Exemptions From Employee Suits

For 28 days last May, Lynette M. Petruska, a former nun who now lives in St. Louis, thought she had finally found judges willing to listen to her complaint against Gannon University, a coeducational Catholic college in downtown Erie, Pa. As it turned out, she was wrong.

Ms. Petruska was educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten to college commencement, graduated at the top of her law school class and practiced law for several years before deciding to become a nun. In 1999, as she was working toward taking her final vows, she became the first woman to serve as Gannon’s chaplain.

Three years later she was demoted and, according to her complaint, effectively forced out. In her lawsuit, she said this action was in response to her having notified the administration of a case of sexual misconduct by a senior university official, resisted efforts to cover up that case and opposed proposals to weaken campus policies on sexual harassment. In 2004, she sued, accusing the university administration of forcing her out simply because she was a woman and because she had opposed the sexual harassment others experienced on campus.

Gender bias claims against religious employers have generally been dismissed under the ministerial exception. But some judges across the country have been less quick to dismiss cases where sexual harassment or abuse of an employee is involved. And unlike many other plaintiffs, Ms. Petruska claimed that her supervisor had actually acknowledged to her that she was being demoted solely because of her sex, not because of any religious doctrine.

Judge Sean J. McLaughlin of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania nevertheless ruled that Gannon was protected by the First Amendment and the ministerial exception from any court interference in its choice of chaplain. Gannon itself argued that it had many women in leadership positions and that Ms. Petruska had resigned simply because she was unhappy with a staff reorganization. But its fundamental argument was that it would be unconstitutional for the court to second-guess these disputed decisions.

“You may ask, ‘Why should these decisions go unquestioned?’ The reason is plain and simple: The First Amendment protects a church’s right to freely exercise its religion,” said Evan C. Rudert, a lawyer for the university. “And that includes organizing itself as it chooses and selecting those who it believes will serve best as its leaders — without interference from the courts.”

Then, last May, in a decision that caused considerable comment in legal circles around the country, a federal appeals court panel reversed the trial judge’s decision.

For four weeks, the prevailing law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands — the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — was that “employment discrimination unconnected to religious belief, religious doctrine, or the internal regulations of a church is simply the exercise of intolerance, not the free exercise of religion.”

Appellate Judge Edward R. Becker wrote that opinion; his colleague on the three-judge panel, Judge D. Brooks Smith, filed a stinging dissent. A few days later, Judge Becker died. On June 20, in a rare move, the Third Circuit granted Gannon’s routine request to have the case reconsidered and named Judge Smith to the new three-judge panel that would do so.

On Sept. 6, the new panel swept the earlier decision away, unequivocally restoring the protections for religious employers that it had put in doubt. As Judge Smith put it, the ministerial exception “applies to any claim, the resolution of which would limit a religious institution’s right to choose who will perform particular spiritual functions.”

Ms. Petruska, who has left her order and returned home to work at her old law firm, describes herself as a feminist who is “committed to peace and freedom.” She has a long history of putting her words into action — she has been arrested at protest marches, most recently at an antiwar rally the day before the Iraq war began, she said. She plans to appeal the ruling against her.

“I think this issue needs to be decided by the Supreme Court,” she said. And she has hopes that the justices will agree with Judge Becker that, absent some grounding in religious doctrine, sex discrimination by religious employers is wrong.

No Recourse On Age Bias

Add age discrimination to that wish list, the Rev. John Paul Hankins says.

At 73, Mr. Hankins can look back on 50 years in a loving marriage, 40 years as a minister in the United Methodist Church — and 3 years as the plaintiff in an uphill court fight over his denomination’s mandatory retirement policy.

Eight months after he turned 70, that policy forced Mr. Hankins to leave his pulpit in the historic Stony Brook Community Church in Stony Brook, N.Y., where he had served for 37 years. He loved his flock and the feeling was mutual: the congregation withheld part of its annual contribution to the regional church that year to express its dismay.

“He had served for many, many years and wanted to continue to serve, and his congregation wanted that, too,” said David S. Warren, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University who had been a member of the congregation for more than 25 years but who left because of how Mr. Hankins was treated.

Mr. Hankins said he was suing because age discrimination is almost as hateful and senseless to him as the racial segregation and bias against women that used to be “mandatory policies” of his church.

“I feel, and have long felt, that discrimination in any form has no place in the life of a faith community,” he said.

Under the federal age discrimination law, most employees of all but the smallest businesses can sue if they are forced to retire for no other reason than that they reached a certain birthday; increasingly, government and academic employees have the same protection. But Mr. Hankins knows his complaint will probably never come to trial simply because he is a clergy member trying to sue his church. Indeed, court rulings around the country suggest that if he had been forced out at any age and for almost any reason — for a deceptive reason, or even for no reason at all — he would face the same judicial roadblock.

“I never, ever thought that the last years of my ministry would be involved in a fight like this,” Mr. Hankins said.

Lawrence H. McGaughey, the lawyer for the regional Methodist governing body and its bishop, acknowledged that there is a movement in the church to eliminate the retirement rule opposed by Rev. Hankins. But if the rule is ultimately changed, it should be the church’s decision, not a court’s, he said.

“Any private employer would feel the same way — they’d like to be able to make these decisions without having to face the courts,” Mr. McGaughey said. “But the difference is the First Amendment.”

He continued: “We’re talking about worship here. Are you going to go into church and have someone standing there who was ordered to be there by the courts? There are certain things a government just cannot do in this country.”

In September 2003, a federal trial judge on Long Island ruled that Mr. Hankins’s complaint was barred by the ministerial exception. Last February, a federal appeals court panel sent the case back, directing the trial judge to decide the case by applying a 1993 federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, rather than the ministerial exception doctrine. But there was little in the instructions to the trial court to encourage Mr. Hankins.

He nevertheless thinks his complaint will eventually help his church see that its mandatory retirement rule is unfair.

“I don’t need to win the case,” Mr. Hankins said. “I feel the movement of history at work here, I really do. Ideas find their feet, and start to walk.”

State judges have been equally reluctant to interfere in disputes between religious employers and their staff members — to the sad frustration of Rabbi Isaac H. Celnik of Albuquerque.

Rabbi Celnik, one of the youngest men ever ordained in Conservative Judaism, was just 30 when he was hired in 1971 as the spiritual leader of Congregation B’nai Israel. Eight years later, he entered into a 30-year contract with the synagogue, an arrangement his congregation endorsed by a margin of almost nine to one, he said.

Then the medical problems began. In 1996, Rabbi Celnik was told he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease; in April 2000, his wife, Peggy, was told she had breast cancer. In October 2000, he said, the president of the congregation’s governing board at the time suggested he retire on disability.

But the rabbi did not consider himself disabled and did not want to retire, he said. He had two young children and a wife whose treatment required continuing health insurance. He “loved the work, and loved the congregation,” he said. Indeed, when the synagogue’s cantor resigned a month after the retirement discussion, Rabbi Celnik proposed, and the board agreed, that he would take on the cantor’s duties as well, he said.

But the relationship deteriorated as he tried to negotiate retirement terms that would provide him and his family with adequate financial security. In January 2002, after those negotiations faltered, he was dismissed; in 2003, he sued. But last February, the state’s court of appeals dismissed his case, based on the ministerial exception, also called the church autonomy doctrine.

“We are sympathetic to Rabbi Celnik’s struggles with Parkinson’s and the manifestation of the disease after so many years of service,” the chief judge wrote. But he ruled that the dispute “is precisely the type of religious debate that the church autonomy doctrine is intended to protect from judicial review.”

The congregation’s current president, Alan M. Chodorow, declined to discuss the details of the dispute. “I do not want to talk about anything that might impair our search for reconciliation and forgiveness” with Rabbi Celnik, he said. “But I will say that we believe strongly in the separation of church and state, and that the state should not have any part in choosing our spiritual leaders.”

But Mr. Chodorow said that he was sympathetic to the situation that this freedom for congregations created for employees and that he believed that religious institutions have to provide other protections by contract. Although clergy members in many faiths work without formal contracts, the model contract in wide use within Conservative Judaism provides that rabbis and cantors can terminate the agreement without cause and seek binding arbitration to resolve disputes, he said.

The church autonomy doctrine “takes away certain rights and this is put in specifically for the purpose of preserving rights,” Mr. Chodorow said.

Rabbi Celnik and his wife continue to struggle with the financial and physical burdens of his deteriorating health and her second episode of cancer. “They don’t teach this in rabbinical school,” the rabbi said in a recent interview. Teach what? Mrs. Celnik answered before he could: “Don’t get old. Don’t get sick.”

Mr. McNicholas, the Sidley Austin lawyer, acknowledged that some “unjust and sinful” treatment has been protected from litigation by the ministerial exception. But he argued that “the openness of the religious process” would remedy those situations, making it possible for a clergy member dismissed by one congregation to find a home in another.

But what if they are sick? “That’s harder — and very troubling,” Mr. McNicholas said. “But if you have a judge deciding it, that’s just too much intervention in the process of deciding the hiring issues” at religious institutions. “There’s no easy answer.”

Protections Against Unionization

The University of Great Falls, in Montana, has a tidy urban campus, a bold crucifix-topped chapel, a master’s program in criminal justice and, according to one student’s Internet posting, a cafeteria that serves pretty good spaghetti.

What the small Roman Catholic college doesn’t have is a faculty union.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. In 1995, the Montana Federation of Teachers, which had unionized most of the public universities in Montana, asked the National Labor Relations Board to recognize it as the collective bargaining agent for the teaching staff at Great Falls.

“Some of the faculty members there traveled in circles that included professors at the other schools,” recalled James McGarvey, who was president of the Montana Federation of Teachers at the time. (It has since merged with the Montana Education Association.) Teachers at those other campuses had better pay and more favorable work rules, and some professors at Great Falls had expressed interest in seeing whether the federation could help them as well, according to Mr. McGarvey. “We felt we had a pretty strong showing,” he said.

J. C. Weingartner, a union lawyer who worked on the campaign, said that while “pay did come into it, it wasn’t what got it started.” That spark was discontent among some professors over the president’s appointing members to an important advisory council who “did not reflect the views of the majority of the faculty” in negotiations with the administration, he said. “So they felt their interests would be better served with collective bargaining.”

The university, which has a new management team today, declined to comment on the long legal battle.

But when the labor board held a hearing on the union’s request, the university’s lawyers argued that the board had no jurisdiction because the university was a religious institution, and to force it to negotiate with the union would violate its religious liberty.

The university based its case largely on a 1979 decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the labor board’s jurisdiction did not extend to religious schools. After that decision, which resulted in what is called the Catholic Bishop doctrine, the board began case-by-case examinations to determine whether the schools that came before it were sufficiently religious — whatever their faith — to be exempt from its jurisdiction.

The University of Great Falls did not qualify, the board concluded in February 1996.

For the next seven years, the little Catholic college fought both the federal labor board and the faculty union, keeping lots of lawyers busy and incurring official charges of unfair labor practices in the process. In 2002, it won.

The federal appeals court panel in Washington ruled that a three-prong test should be the labor board’s only standard for determining which schools were religious enough to be exempt from the nation’s collective bargaining laws under the Catholic Bishop decision.

Any school that is nonprofit, has a religious affiliation and presents itself to the public as a religious institution must be exempted from jurisdiction, the court said. And that included the University of Great Falls.

And the court ruled that the labor board’s old case-by-case approach had to stop immediately. For the board even to conduct such inquiries raised serious issues of religious freedom, the judges said.

Of course, some casually faithful or broadly tolerant schools that might previously have failed to win a labor board exemption would easily pass the court’s new test.

The appellate judges anticipated that complaint, and dismissed it. “If the university is ecumenical and open-minded, that does not make it any less religious, nor N.L.R.B. interference any less a potential infringement of religious liberty,” they said.

David Strom, general counsel of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, doesn’t mince words about the impact of the Great Falls decision. “It means that the difficulty of organizing a religiously affiliated college has become enormous.”

Although federal statistics show that one of every seven colleges in the country describes itself as a religious institution, it is not clear how far-reaching the Great Falls decision will be. On its face, it would seem likely to reduce any union-driven salary pressures on exempt religious schools, allowing them to maintain more competitive tuition levels. However, some colleges that might be eligible for an exemption under the new rules may already have collective bargaining in place or may not oppose unions as fiercely as the Montana university did.

And the decision limits only the protections of the National Labor Relations Act. But last fall, in a case involving teachers at Catholic schools in Boston, a federal district judge in Massachusetts ruled that part of another federal labor statute called the Taft-Hartley Act could not be applied to church-operated schools without raising First Amendment issues.

Notwithstanding the protracted battle in Great Falls, Catholic institutions are not doctrinally opposed to collective bargaining, said Julie N. Secviar, senior vice president for strategic resources for the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago Service Corporation, which manages Catholic hospitals, nursing homes and retirement communities.

In fact, the ethical health care directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops require “recognition of the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively without prejudice to the common good.”

Next, Exemptions for Hospitals?

At the other end of the spectrum stand the Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian denomination with more than 14 million members worldwide. Like many denominations, it provides global humanitarian relief and maintains a large network of church schools and colleges, including Loma Linda University in California. But it also operates the largest Protestant nonprofit health care system in the country, with 38 hospitals in 10 states, 23 nursing homes and 44,000 employees.

And not one of those employees is in a union, for a very simple reason: The church believes that collective bargaining “defies Christ’s admonitions that behavior must be directed by individual conscience” and “is inherently disruptive” of the church’s healing mission, as lawyers for the denomination first explained to the national labor board in 1998.

The lawyers were responding to a petition by the California Nurses Association to represent the nonsupervisory nurses employed at Ukiah Valley Medical Center.

As in the Great Falls case, the lawyers argued that the labor board had no jurisdiction because the hospital was a religious institution and to force it to recognize or bargain with a union would violate its freedom under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

As in the Great Falls case, the labor board ruled otherwise. The next step should have been union balloting, explained Jeffrey A. Berman, the Sidley Austin lawyer who represented the hospital in the case. But the nursing association withdrew its petition and the case ended, he said.

According to the American Hospital Association, about one of every four of its members has a religious affiliation. But the Adventists’ problem before the labor board was that hospitals, unlike religious schools, were specifically included in the board’s jurisdiction by Congress. The only labor-law accommodation that Adventists have been able to win from Congress was a provision in 1974 allowing church members to pay the equivalent of their union dues to one of several agreed-upon secular charities, according to Mr. Berman.

Adventist hospitals are still waiting for their own Great Falls moment. As Mr. Berman put it, “We’re not asking for carte blanche, for the ability to be exempt from all laws — just with respect to what is unique about these hospitals.”

reason: one man, many wives, big problem

There's so much to say on this topic that I'd better not get started.

Reason: One Man, Many Wives, Big Problems: The social consequences of polygamy are bigger than you think
As if they didn't already have enough on their minds, Americans are going to have to debate polygamy. And not a moment too soon.

For generations, taboo kept polygamy out of sight and out of mind in America. But the taboo is crumbling. An HBO television series called "Big Love," which benignly portrays a one-husband, three-wife family in Utah, set off the latest round of polygamy talk. Even so, a federal lawsuit (now on appeal), the American Civil Liberties Union's stand for polygamy rights, and the rising voices of pro-polygamy groups such as TruthBearer.org (an evangelical Christian group) and Principle Voices (which Newsweek describes as "a Utah-based group run by wives from polygamous marriages") were already making the subject hard to duck.

So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.
If the coming debate changes that, it will have done everyone a favor. For reasons that have everything to do with its own social dynamics and nothing to do with gay marriage, polygamy is a profoundly hazardous policy.

To understand why, begin with two crucial words. The first is "marriage." Group love (sometimes called polyamory) is already legal, and some people freely practice it. Polygamy asserts not a right to love several others but a right to marry them all. Because a marriage license is a state grant, polygamy is a matter of public policy, not just of personal preference.

The second crucial word is "polygyny." Unlike gay marriage, polygamy has been a common form of marriage since at least biblical times, and probably long before. In his 1994 book The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Robert Wright notes that a "huge majority" of the human societies for which anthropologists have data have been polygamous. Virtually all of those have been polygynous: that is, one husband, multiple wives. Polyandry (one wife, many husbands) is vanishingly rare. The real-world practice of polygamy seems to flow from men's desire to marry all the women they can have children with.

Moreover, in America today the main constituents for polygamous marriage are Mormons* and, as Newsweek reports, "a growing number of evangelical Christian and Muslim polygamists." These religious groups practice polygyny, not polyandry. Thus, in light of current American politics as well as copious anthropological experience, any responsible planner must assume that if polygamy were legalized, polygynous marriages would outnumber polyandrous ones — probably vastly.

Here is something else to consider: As far as I've been able to determine, no polygamous society has ever been a true liberal democracy, in anything like the modern sense. As societies move away from hierarchy and toward equal opportunity, they leave polygamy behind. They monogamize as they modernize. That may be a coincidence, but it seems more likely to be a logical outgrowth of the arithmetic of polygamy.

Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.

For the individuals affected, losing the opportunity to marry is a grave, even devastating, deprivation. (Just ask a gay American.) But the effects are still worse at the social level. Sexual imbalance in the marriage market has no good social consequences and many grim ones.

Two political scientists, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, ponder those consequences in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population. Summarizing their findings in a Washington Post article, they write: "Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages — money, skills, education — will marry, but men without such advantages — poor, unskilled, illiterate — will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population."

The problem in China and India is sex-selective abortion (and sometimes infanticide), not polygamy; where the marriage market is concerned, however, the two are functional equivalents. In their book, Hudson and den Boer note that "bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence." To get ahead, they "may turn to appropriation of resources, using force if necessary." Such men are ripe for recruitment by gangs, and in groups they "exhibit even more exaggerated risky and violent behavior." The result is "a significant increase in societal, and possibly intersocietal, violence."

Crime rates, according to the authors, tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.) In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

Hudson and den Boer suggest that societies become inherently unstable when sex ratios reach something like 120 males to 100 females: in other words, when one-sixth of men are surplus goods on the marriage market. The United States as a whole would reach that ratio if, for example, 5 percent of men took two wives, 3 percent took three wives, and 2 percent took four wives — numbers that are quite imaginable, if polygamy were legal for a while. In particular communities — inner cities, for example — polygamy could take a toll much more quickly. Even a handful of "Solomons" (high-status men taking multiple wives) could create brigades of new recruits for street gangs and drug lords, the last thing those communities need.

Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street --
literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness."

True, in modern America some polygynous marriages would probably be offset by group marriages or chain marriages involving multiple husbands, but there is no way to know how large such an offset might be. And remember: Every unbalanced polygynous marriage, other things being equal, leaves some man bereft of the opportunity to marry, which is no small cost to that man.

The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands.

By this point it should be obvious that polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it.

As the public focuses on a subject it has not confronted for generations, the hazards of polygamy are likely to sink in. In time, debating polygamy will remind us why our ancestors were right to abolish it. The question is whether the debate will reach its stride soon enough to prevent polygamy from winning a lazy acquiescence that it in no way deserves.