ReligionDispatches.org

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the creation of the Obama administration's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and its accompanying Advisory Council. While candidate Obama had promised to fix the constitutional problems with the Bush-era Faith-Based Initiative, President Obama backtracked on those promises.

Obama had made three pledges: to end the exemption allowing federal grantees to discriminate in hiring based on religion; to require houses of worship receiving federal grants to form separate non-profits so that federal funds would not be directed to sectarian organizations; and to put in place oversight and monitoring of proselytizing by federal grantees.

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Planned Parenthood has a calm, measured, and effective YouTube response to the Focus on the Family/Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad: Pam Tebow made the right choice for herself, so trust other women to make the right choices for themselves. Perhaps it will garner fewer viewers than a Super Bowl ad, but as Katha Pollitt points out, blowing $2.5 million on a 30-second spot is not exactly a hallmark of good financial stewardship.

The Super Bowl won't be the Heisman trophy winner's only high-profile appearance this week. Yesterday, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Tebow rubbed shoulders with the world's most powerful people and delivered the closing prayer.

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As the trial of Scott Roeder, charged with murdering Dr. George Tiller in church last year, wraps up, the defendant made an extraordinary confession on the witness stand: "I shot him," Roeder admitted, after declaring "I did what I thought was needed to be done to protect the children."

Roeder's lawyers are aiming to have their client convicted not of the first-degree murder he has confessed to planning and executing, but of a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. They claim he had the legal requisite of "an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force."

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Even if you live in a football-free zone, by now you've heard about Focus on the Family's $2.5 million Super Bowl ad buy for a 30-second spot about how the mother of football star Tim Tebow, facing a possibly deadly medical condition during her pregnancy, rejected her doctor's advice to have an abortion.

Pro-choice groups are calling on CBS to pull the ad because Focus on the Family is an "extremist group" and CBS's decision to air an anti-choice ad was "outrageous."

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is now pushing the House and Senate to get health care reform passed -- but the bishops define "reform" in a very particular way. In a letter to all members of Congress, the bishops declare the "health care debate, with all its political and ideological conflict, seems to have lost its central moral focus and policy priority, which is to ensure that affordable, quality, life-giving care is available to all."

Note the words "life-giving," which are loaded with meaning for the bishops' stance on abortion and "conscience protections" for health care providers, insurers, employers, and the insured. In other words, as the bishops state in their letter, a reform bill without these "protections" is "not true health care reform." It's their clever way of trying to duck blame for stalling the bill -- we support "true" reform, honest!

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The most astonishing thing about the ABC News revelations that military contractor Trijicon inscribed New Testament verses on its rifle sights is that getting rid of them hasn't been a no-brainer.

Remember all the hand-wringing over taxpayers paying for other people's abortions? Taxpayers have committed $660 million for the military's contract with Trijicon, even though it hasn't exactly been cagey about its worldview. "We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals," reads its web site. 

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As the recriminations fly among Democrats this morning over who is responsible for their loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat the late Ted Kennedy held for more than 40 years, the conservative movement is rejoicing over what it is characterizing as a "new" American revolution -- a new tea party, if you will -- emerging out of Massachusetts.

The geography is rife with symbolism: the first shots of the 2010 revolution fired in the heart of blue America, potentially killing Kennedy's life work and setting the stage for a Republican resurgence in New England, of all places. But what pro-life activists aren't saying right now -- but which is evident to anyone who understands how they operate -- is that Scott Brown is their tool for killing health care reform. He's hardly their new star.

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Evangelical pastors, writers, and activists have stepped up to condemn Pat Robertson's remarks about Haiti, saying that he does not represent them, nor do comments represent Christianity. If that's true, why does anyone care about anything Robertson says at all?

Judging a public figure's influence is a tricky business. Sure, best-selling books, sell-out crowds and the like tell you something. You could look at the 700 Club's Nielsen ratings, or do a public opinion survey on someone's favorability ratings, or ask other other evangelicals to name their most "influential" brethren. Or you could perform the Washington journalist's task of eliciting gossip ("asshole" is how one conservative operative once described Robertson to me) and figure out whether the person in question has any "juice."

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Lou Engle, founder of The Call and other charismatic intercessory prayer organizations, has a new target on the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday: a forthcoming Planned Parenthood facility in Houston that he claims will practice eugenics because of its location in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood.

"Houston, we have a problem," Engle intones in a new "crisis" video on his web site. In the video, which is filled with his characteristic predictions of the earth-shattering impact of his prayer movement, he claims that an unspecified "they" are calling the clinic "an abortion super center." But who is the they? Engle himself.

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The Family Research Council has jumped on the bandwagon of right-wing opposition to President Obama's nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers. The gripe is that in a 2008 interview, Southers pointed to, among other groups, "Christian identity" and "anti-abortion" groups as possible domestic terrorist threats.

"That's right," reads FRC's Washington Update. "The man chosen to be first line of defense against another 9-11 is more worried about churchgoers than radical Islamic fundamentalists."

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Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has now expressed some reluctance about pending LGBT criminalization, imprisonment and death penalty bill -- but not because he thinks it's unjust, but because it has "foreign policy implications," according to a report by NTV Uganda. 

In the NTV Uganda broadcast, the reporter notes that "the government seems to have buckled under pressure from the West." Museveni is shown addressing his National Resistance Movement party's National Executive Council Meeting, and describing how the subject of visits and calls from western leaders, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have been "gays."

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When I first heard that Sarah Palin had landed a gig as a contributor to Fox News, I thought: now Fox News viewers will have a taste of Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Not that Palin will be preaching -- or preaching explicitly, that is. But to my ears, her speaking style is so unmistakenly influenced by the sort of personal testimony and revelatory expressions of what God says, does, or wants, as expressed through the speaker, that is a staple of televangelism pioneered by Oral Roberts, Kenneth Copeland, and Paul Crouch.

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Amid a cacophony of news stories about the Democrats supposedly losing a grip on power because of the retirements of Byron Dorgan and Chris Dodd, the Senate leadership is now fretting that Harold Ford, Jr., who faced the Tennessee Republican Party's shamefully racist ads in his unsuccessful 2006 run for the Senate from that state, is now considering running for Senate in his new home state of New York.

Ford is thought to be considering a challenge to Kristen Gillebrand, who was appointed to the seat last year when Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State. But is New York ready for his brand of conserva-faithiness?

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Bart Stupak might have been destined for obscurity in the history of the House of Representatives had it not been for his vociferous advocacy for his pseudonymous restriction on womens' access to a legal medical procedure in the (partially) Affordable Health Care for (part of) America Act. Now he will be known as the hero of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the religious right, for whom he is the poster boy of "conscience."

Stupak uses a profile in today's New York Times to complain that the Democratic Party spurned him. He's voting his conscience; they're a bunch of baby-killers.

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Activists and politicians opposed to reproductive choice and for extending the Hyde Amendment to ensure that not one fraction of one penny of taxpayer money might go to pay a premium to an insurance company that might cover someone's abortion have claimed that it's the voters who demand such stringency: they are opposed to abortion and opposed to paying for anyone else's. The argument has been great cover for representatives voting for the Stupak amendment (or holding out for something similar in the Senate) when in fact it's religious activists like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Stop the Abortion Mandate who have been applying the pressure.

Now Catholics for Choice -- which for months has been contesting the notion that rank and file Catholics agree with the bishops on this issue -- has released a poll from four Congressional districts represented by Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment. The results: their constituents are not opposed to funding abortion in health care reform.

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As more activists call attention to the activities of The Fellowship, or The Family, the secretive fundamentalist powerhouse whose National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) is this Thursday, a group of religious leaders has launched an alternative American Prayer Hour to condemn The Family's role in the kill-the-gays bill pending in the Ugandan parliament.

"Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for," said the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the Ninth Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday morning. "We have a duty to confront those who are praying for those things that would break God's heart."

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Senate Democrats clinched the final vote for cloture -- breaking the Republican's filibuster -- of their health care bill early this morning by securing the vote of Ben Nelson (D-NE) with a restrictive abortion amendment that infuriated both pro-choice and anti-choice activists.

The amendment, now part of the bill that the Senate will vote on later this week, would require women purchasing coverage from the insurance exchange with federal subsidies to write two checks: one for their premium, and one for the portion of the premium that would cover a (hypothetical) abortion. In addition, states could opt out of allowing insurers who cover abortion to participate in exchanges in their states -- placing a further impediment on accessing an abortion for some women.

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Kyle at Right Wing Watch has the details on Rod Parsley's claims that a "demonically-inspired financial attack" is threatening his ministry. Parsley's ministry, World Harvest Church, recently paid $3.1 million to settle a case alleging that a teacher in World Harvest's pre-school brutally abused a young child.

This isn't the first time Parsley's ministry has been sued, or the first time he suggested his legal troubles were the sources of his financial problems. In my 2005 expose of Parsley, I detailed three lawsuits Parsley faced in the 1990s:

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Via Brian Beutler at TPMDC, the Associated Press is reporting that the coveted vote of Nebraska's Ben Nelson for health care reform might be lost over abortion language. Nelson's Stupak-like amendment was rejected by the Senate last week. To win Nelson's approval, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) reportedly proposed a compromise amendment which Nelson says "doesn't get to the fundamental issue of barring federal funding for abortions."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) had written a letter to Senators on Monday, arguing that anything short of Stupak-type language (barring federal money from subsidizing premiums paid to insurance plans which cover abortion services) would not get their support. Bishop Daniel DiNardo, chair of the USCCB's committee on pro-life activities, insisted that since the Senate voted to extend the principle of the Hyde amendment (which prohibits federal funds from directly paying for an abortion) in appropriations bills, then it should extend that same principle to health care. (Such language is already in the Senate health care bill; Nelson's failed amendment attempted to extend Hyde to be even more restrictive). Just as the bishops pressured the House to include the Stupak amendment when the House bill adequately incorporated Hyde, they are pressuring the Senate to include Nelson's.

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It's no secret that the religious right is opposed to health care reform (a.k.a. "death panels," "government takeover," or "Obamacare") but as the Senate races to the winter recess with its bill that's controversial even to progressives, the religious right is using new Christmas-themed rhetoric to rally the base to oppose it.

Big supporters of the Stupak amendment on the House side, the religious right was up in arms when the Senate version, the Nelson-Hatch amendment, was defeated last week. Even though the religious right claims many reasons for opposing health care reform, including "rationing" and the much dreaded march of supposed socialism, abortion has been, and continues to be front and center as a mobilizing tool. But now, in the (ahem) spirit of the season, the movement is using new rhetoric that allowing (even tangential) government subsidy of abortion is turning America into a land run by a modern King Herod, who attempted to murder the baby Jesus.

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Oral Roberts, the pioneering televangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University, died today at the age of 91.

Roberts was adored in the charismatic world, with major televangelists crediting him with their own success. Roberts, who was the first prime-time televangelist and popularized seed-faith theology, was a mentor to many: Word of Faith icon Kenneth Copeland was Roberts' personal pilot before launching his own ministry. Carlton Pearson, who later went on to reject the idea of hell, only to be rejected by his Pentecostal brethren, in his youth was a member (as was Kathy Lee Gifford) of Roberts' World Action Singers. He and Roberts were so close that Roberts referred to him as "my black son."

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I highly recommend Fred Clarkson's piece about how pro-choice advocates came to accept the extension of the Hyde restrictions on abortion coverage in health care reform as "abortion neutral" or "maintaining the status quo." In other words, since pro-choice advocates consider the Hyde restrictions -- which prohibit the use of federal monies to cover abortions for poor women receiving Medicaid, and under other federal programs -- unfair and discriminatory, how could extending those restrictions to women covered by a public insurance option or buying into an insurance exchange with federal subsidies to be "abortion neutral?" And why would you want to extend a "status quo" that you believe is unfair and discriminatory in the first place?

As I reported here both before and after the passage of the Stupak amendment in the House of Representatives, reproductive rights advocates agreed to an extension of Hyde to the House health care reform bill -- as embodied in the Capps Amendment -- in order to avoid a fight on abortion and help get health care reform passed. Indeed, in the days before the House vote, they would have even held their noses and acquiesced to a proposed amendment by Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN), intended to satisfy Stupak, the Catholic bishops, and other religious activists who believed that Capps was not "abortion neutral."

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In his statement this morning condemning Uganda's proposed criminalization of homosexuality, Rick Warren omitted some critical items. While he condemned the proposed law in Uganda, and dissassociated himself from the anti-gay pastor Martin Ssempa, he neglected to address hateful homophobic rhetoric by other pastors with whom he continues to partner.

Last month, Ssempa told me he was mystified by Warren's cutting of ties with him, since they both hold "similar biblical positions on homosexuality," as do other religious leaders in Uganda and in Rwanda, which is Warren's first "purpose-driven nation."

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After refusing to comment on the proposed brutal anti-gay law in Uganda for well over a month as international outcry multiplied, Rick Warren this morning issued a statement and video on his web site, calling on Ugandan pastors to oppose the law, and rebutting reports about his relationships with political and religious leaders in Uganda.

Warren (like our own Candace Chellew-Hodge did in criticizing Warren's silence) quotes Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Warren states:

[I]t is my role to correct lies, errors and false reports when others associate my name with a law that I had nothing to do with, completely oppose and vigorously condemn. I am referring to the pending law under consideration by the Ugandan Parliament, known as the Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

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Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), a Methodist, reportedly sought the stamp of approval of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) for his anti-abortion amendment to the Senate health care bill. Although the amendment, which mirrors the Stupak-Pitts amendment on the House side, is unlikely to pass the Senate, Nelson says he won't vote to end debate on the bill if his amendment isn't included. That means that Majority Leader Harry Reid will need the assistance of at least one Republican to obtain the 60 votes he needs for cloture, or ending debate (and that's assuming that all other Democrats vote the party line).

Nelson is expected to introduce his amendment today, and the vote on it will likely be Tuesday or Wednesday.

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