Prison Fellowship Ministries Forced to Close Bible Program at Iowa Prison

Prisoners can get free education, medical, cable TV, etc. but can't have Bible study..

A judge has ruled that a Bible-based prison program violates the First Amendment's freedom of religion clause by using state funds to promote Christianity to inmates. Prison Fellowship Ministries, which was sued in 2003 by an advocacy group, was ordered Friday to cease its program at the Newton Correctional Facility and repay the state $1.53 million.

"This calls into question the funding for so many programs," said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which filed the suit. "Anyone who doesn't stop it is putting a giant 'sue me' sign on top of their building." Lynn's group accused Prison Fellowship Ministries of giving preferential treatment to inmates participating in the program. They were given special visitation rights, movie-watching privileges, access to computers and access to classes needed for early parole.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt called the perks "seemingly minor benefits" that constituted unfair treatment to those not in the religious program. Despite any claims of rehabilitating inmates, the program "impermissibly endorses religion," Pratt wrote.

The InnerChange Freedom Initiative was implemented in Newton in 1999. State prison officials have said they hired the religious group to improve inmate behavior and reduce recidivism - not promote Christianity. Ministry president Mark Earley said in a statement Friday that the group plans to appeal the ruling and believes its program is constitutional. "This decision, if allowed to stand, will enshrine religious discrimination," Earley said. "It has attacked the right of people of faith to operate on a level playing field in the public arena and to provide services to those who volunteered to receive them."

The judge gave the group's workers 60 days to leave the prison, though he put a stay on his order, meaning the decision won't officially be implemented until the appeals process is complete.

Source. More details here



BLACK HATE CRIME

In view of the Leftist credo that only whites can be racist, I thought I might post the story below. Note that the TV channel from which the post is taken has a logo for hate crime that depicts a BLACK hand! What IS the world coming to?



Concrete Toss Incident Being Treated As Bias Crime: Nassau Police said Carl Graves has been arrested before for hurling rocks, but that this time it had a horrible, hurtful message. The motivation, they said, was about the color of the victim's skin.

Kim McCandless of West Islip strapped her children into her minivan she'd driven to the Sunrise Mall, where police said an angry 20-year-old man intentionally picked up a chunk of concrete and hurled it at her windshield as she was driving into the mall. In the backseat were two of Kim's little ones, along with a niece and nephew. McCandless was obviously shaken. ”If this rock had crashed through the window, would it have fazed him, that he hurt innocent little kids, or me? I could be dead,” McCandless said. Kim said she watched in disbelief as the suspect and a few of his friends then sauntered away, laughing.

Witnesses helped police with descriptions, and they picked up Graves, of Amityville. And what he allegedly told investigators has startled the entire community. Detective Lt. Karl Schoepp of the Nassau County Police Department provided a description. “The subject was walking around the mall with a few friends, and were discussing the fact that with the closing of the arcade, and movie theatre, that the mall had 'become too white.'" "This fueled his rage. He picked up a rock, about six inches of heavy concrete, and held it in his pocket waiting to do something.”

McCandless' shock has turned into anger. “It's a bias crime," she said. "To know it's about a skin color bothers me even more. I have to raise four kids.” The physical damage can be repaired but Kim and her husband, Christopher, who are religious, acknowledge that this act of alleged unprovoked racism leaves the family searching for answers. ”You read about stuff like this," Christopher McCandless said. "You don't expect it to happen to you.” Added Kim McCandless: ”Race. It shouldn't be about that. It should be about life.”

Now years of life -- one family facing years of emotional hardship. And a young man who pleaded not guilty, and is being held on $10,000 bond, facing seven years for hate crime charges.

Source



Australian PM firmly against homosexual marriage



Prime Minister John Howard said today he had scuttled the ACT's homosexual unions law because it challenged a major characteristic of Australian society. "The Bill is plainly an attempt to mimic marriage under the misleading title of civil unions," Mr Howard told ABC radio. "We are not anti-homosexual people or gay and lesbian people, it is not a question of discriminating against them, it is a question of preserving as an institution in our society marriage as having a special character."

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said he would try to stop the Government using their constitutional powers to quash the territory's law. "Kerry Nettle on behalf of the Greens will move (a) disallowance (motion) in the Senate and that means there will be a vote, following a debate," Senator Brown told ABC radio. But Labor, which the Greens need for their motion to succeed, has not immediately offered their support to the plan. Opposition Leader Kim Beazley said he would look at the ACT legislation before making a decision. "We will take a careful look at what the ACT has come out with and we will determine our position on the basis of that analysis," Mr Beazley told ABC radio.

Earlier, the ACT Government condemned the decision to overturn the territory laws, vowing to take its fight to the Governor-General. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock emerged from a cabinet meeting yesterday with a directive to the Governor-General to use Commonwealth powers to scrap the territory laws before they could be used. The ACT Parliament voted just three weeks ago to allow gay couples to enter into a civil union, with almost the same status as marriage. But Prime Minister John Howard said it was unacceptable that the laws would have equated civil unions with marriage.

ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope said he would lobby his federal Labor colleagues and Governor-General Michael Jeffery not accept the Howard Government's decision. "I can make representations to the governor-general imploring him not to be party to an act that would discriminate against Australian citizens who have a different sexual orientation," Mr Stanhope told ABC radio. "I would be gravely disappointed if my federal colleagues, in the Labor Party did not seek at least - acknowledging the numbers in the Federal Parliament - to have the disallowable instrument disallowed. "It is simply not appropriate that federal parliament, through its processes, send that signal that the Federal Parliament of Australia believes it's appropriate to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples." Mr Stanhope said he was angry and disappointed by Cabinet's decision and accused the Government of conjuring a "wedge issue". "The Prime Minister, I believe, is simply using another marginalised, disempowered group for his, I think, quite odious political purposes," he said.

Federal Parliament, with Labor's support, voted in 2004 to explicitly define marriage in the Marriage Act as a union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others. Mr Ruddock said that even with amendments to the civil union laws designed to address federal concerns, the ACT was still being deliberately confrontational.

The Federal Opposition's attorney-general spokeswoman Nicola Roxon urged Coalition MPs to reject the move and said she would urge caucus to disallow it. "This is another stunning example of the Howard Government's arrogance, riding roughshod over the democratically elected ACT legislature," she said. The Australian Greens said they would also oppose the Government's "discriminatory" decision. "John Howard is yet again exposing his homophobic attitude towards some members of our community," Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said. The Federal Government's decision follows a push by United States President George W. Bush for a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Source



Why I Published the Muhammad Cartoons

By Flemming Rose



European political correctness allows Muslims to resist integration, argues the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten. Instead, Muslims should be treated just like all Europeans -- including being subject to satire. He argues that publishing the caricatures was an act of "inclusion, not exclusion."

The worldwide furor unleashed by the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed that I published last September in Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper where I work, was both a surprise and a tragedy, especially for those directly affected by it. Lives were lost, buildings were torched and people were driven into hiding.

And yet the unbalanced reactions to the not-so-provocative caricatures -- loud denunciations and even death threats toward us, but very little outrage toward the people who attacked two Danish Embassies -- unmasked unpleasant realities about Europe's failed experiment with multiculturalism. It's time for the Old Continent to face facts and make some profound changes in its outlook on immigration, integration and the coming Muslim demographic surge. After decades of appeasement and political correctness, combined with growing fear of a radical minority prepared to commit serious violence, Europe's moment of truth is here

Europe today finds itself trapped in a posture of moral relativism that is undermining its liberal values. An unholy three-cornered alliance between Middle East dictators, radical imams who live in Europe and Europe's traditional left wing is enabling a politics of victimology. This politics drives a culture that resists integration and adaptation, perpetuates national and religious differences and aggravates such debilitating social ills as high immigrant crime rates and entrenched unemployment.

As one who once championed the utopian state of multicultural bliss, I think I know what I'm talking about. I was raised on the ideals of the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War. I saw life through the lens of the countercultural turmoil, adopting both the hippie pose and the political superiority complex of my generation. I and my high school peers believed that the West was imperialistic and racist. We analyzed decaying Western civilization through the texts of Marx and Engels and lionized John Lennon's beautiful but stupid tune about an ideal world without private property: "Imagine no possessions/ I wonder if you can/ No need for greed or hunger/ A brotherhood of man/ Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world."

It took me only 10 months as a young student in the Soviet Union in 1980-81 to realize what a world without private property looks like, although many years had to pass until the full implications of the central Marxist dogma became clear to me.

That experience was the beginning of a long intellectual journey that has thus far culminated in the reactions to the Muhammed cartoons. Politically, I came of age in the Soviet Union. I returned there in 1990 to spend 11 years as a foreign correspondent. Through close contact with courageous dissidents who were willing to suffer and go to prison for their belief in the ideals of Western democracy, I was cured of my wooly dreams of idealistic collectivism. I had a strong sense of the high price my friends were willing to pay for the very freedoms that we had taken for granted in high school -- but did not grasp as values inherent in our civilization: freedom of speech, religion, assembly and movement. Justice and equality implies equal opportunity, I learned, not equal outcome.

Now, in Europe's failure to grapple realistically with its dramatically changing demographic picture, I see a new parallel to that Cold War journey. Europe's left is deceiving itself about immigration, integration and Islamic radicalism today the same way we young hippies deceived ourselves about Marxism and communism 30 years ago. It is a narrative of confrontation and hierarchy that claims that the West exploits, abuses and marginalizes the Islamic world. Left-wing intellectuals have insisted that the Danes were oppressing and marginalizing Muslim immigrants. This view comports precisely with the late Edward Said's model of Orientalism, which argues that experts on the Orient and the Muslim world have not depicted it as it is but as some dreaded "other," as exactly the opposite of ourselves -- that should therefore to be rejected. The West, in this narrative, is democratic, the East is despotic. We are rational, they are irrational.

This kind of thinking gave birth to a distorted approach to immigration in countries like Denmark. Left-wing commentators decided that Denmark was both racist and Islamophobic. Therefore, the chief obstacle to integration was not the immigrants' unwillingness to adapt culturally to their adopted country (there are 200,000 Danish Muslims now); it was the country's inherent racism and anti-Muslim bias.

A cult of victimology arose and was happily exploited by clever radicals among Europe's Muslims, especially certain religious leaders like Imam Ahmad Abu Laban in Denmark and Mullah Krekar in Norway. Mullah Krekar -- a Kurdish founder of Ansar al Islam who this spring was facing an expulsion order from Norway -- called our publication of the cartoons "a declaration of war against our religion, our faith and our civilization. Our way of thinking is penetrating society and is stronger than theirs. This causes hate in the Western way of thinking; as the losing side, they commit violence."

The role of victim is very convenient because it frees the self-declared victim from any responsibility, while providing a posture of moral superiority. It also obscures certain inconvenient facts that might suggest a different explanation for the lagging integration of some immigrant groups -- such as the relatively high crime rates, the oppression of women and a tradition of forced marriage.

Dictatorships in the Middle East and radical imams have adopted the jargon of the European left, calling the cartoons racist and Islamophobic. When Westerners criticize their lack of civil liberties and the oppression of women, they say we behave like imperialists. They have adopted the rhetoric and turned it against us.

These events are occurring against the disturbing backdrop of increasingly radicalized Muslims in Europe. Muhammed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, became a born-again Muslim after he moved to Europe. So did the perpetrators behind the bombings in Madrid and London. The same goes for Mohammed Bouyeri, the young Muslim who slaughtered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam. Europe, not the Middle East, may now be the main breeding ground for Islamic terrorism.

Lessons from the United States

What's wrong with Europe? For one thing, Europe's approach to immigration and integration is rooted in its historic experience with relatively homogeneous cultures. In the United States one's definition of nationality is essentially political; in Europe it is historically cultural. I am a Dane because I look European, speak Danish, descend from centuries of other Scandinavians. But what about the dark, bearded new Danes who speak Arabic at home and poor Danish in the streets? We Europeans must make a profound cultural adjustment to understand that they, too, can be Danes.

Another great impediment to integration is the European welfare state. Because Europe's highly developed, but increasingly unaffordable, safety nets provide such strong unemployment insurance and not enough incentive to work, many new immigrants go straight onto the dole.

While it can be argued that the fast-growing community of about 20 million Muslim immigrants in Europe is the equivalent of America's new Hispanic immigrants, the difference in their productivity and prosperity is staggering. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study in 1999 showed that while immigrants in the United States are almost equal to native-born workers as taxpayers and contributors to American prosperity, in Denmark there is a glaring gap of 41 percent between the contributions of the native-born and of the immigrants. In the United States, a laid-off worker gets an average of 32 percent compensation for his former wages in welfare services; in Denmark the figure is 81 percent. A culture of welfare dependency is rife among immigrants, and it is taken for granted.

What to do? Obviously, we can never return to the comfortable monocultures of old. A demographic revolution is changing the face, and look, of Europe. In an age of mass migration and the Internet, cheap air fares and mobile phones everywhere, cultural pluralism is an irreversible fact, like it or not. A nostalgic longing for cultural purity -- racial purity, religious purity -- easily descends into ethnic cleansing.

Yet multiculturalism that has all too often become mere cultural relativism is an indefensible proposition that often justifies reactionary and oppressive practices. Giving the same weight to the illiberal values of conservative Islam as to the liberal traditions of the European Enlightenment will, in time, destroy the very things that make Europe such a desirable target for migration.

Europe must shed the straitjacket of political correctness, which makes it impossible to criticize minorities for anything -- including violations of laws, traditional mores and values that are central to the European experience. Two experiences tell the tale for me.

Shortly after the horrific 2002 Moscow musical theater siege by Chechen terrorists that left 130 dead, I met with one of my old dissident friends, Sergei Kovalev. A hero of the human rights movement in the old Soviet Union, Kovalev had long been a defender of the Chechens and a critic of the Russian attacks on Chechnya. But after the theater massacre he refused, as always, to indulge in politically correct drivel about the Chechens' just fight for secession and decolonization. He unhesitatingly denounced the terrorists, and insisted that a nation's right to self-determination did not imply a free ticket to kill and violate basic individual rights. For me, it was a clarifying moment on the dishonesty of identity politics and the sometime tyranny of elevating group rights above those of individuals -- of justifying the killing of innocents in the name of some higher cause.

The other experience was a trip I made in the 1990s, when I was a correspondent based in the United States, to the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. There I wrote a story about the burgeoning, bustling, altogether vibrant Russian immigrant community that had arisen there -- a perfect example of people retaining some of their old cultural identity (drinking samovars of tea, playing hours of chess and attending church) while quickly taking advantage of America's free and open capitalism to establish an economic foothold. I marveled at America's ability to absorb newcomers. It was another clarifying moment

An act of inclusion.

Equal treatment is the democratic way to overcome traditional barriers of blood and soil for newcomers. To me, that means treating immigrants just as I would any other Danes. And that's what I felt I was doing in publishing the 12 cartoons of Muhammad last year. Those images in no way exceeded the bounds of taste, satire and humor to which I would subject any other Dane, whether the queen, the head of the church or the prime minister. By treating a Muslim figure the same way I would a Christian or Jewish icon, I was sending an important message: You are not strangers, you are here to stay, and we accept you as an integrated part of our life. And we will satirize you, too. It was an act of inclusion, not exclusion; an act of respect and recognition.

Alas, some Muslims did not take it that way -- though it required a highly organized campaign, several falsified (and very nasty) cartoons and several months of overseas travel for the aggrieved imams to stir up an international reaction.

Maybe Europe needs to take a leaf -- or a whole book -- from the American experience. In order for new Europe of many cultures that is somehow a single entity to emerge, in a manner similar to the experience of the United States, both sides will have to make an effort -- the native-born and the newly arrived.

For the immigrants, the expectation that they not only learn the host language but also respect their new countries' political and cultural traditions is not too much to demand, and some stringent (maybe too stringent) new laws are being passed to force that. At the same time, Europeans must show a willingness to jettison entrenched notions of blood and soil and accept people from foreign countries and cultures as just what they are, the new Europeans.