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CBC Radio One, 2002-09-22
Rushdie and Enright discuss a variety of topics.
Among them, the causes of the events of September 11, 2001:
Rushdie locates "God", i.e. monotheism, high on the list of those causes.
The Guardian — United Kingdom, 2002-09-17
The actor Christopher Reeve, paralysed seven years ago in a riding accident, says he could have been close to walking
again today were it not for the Bush administration's capitulation to the Catholic church over cloning, and profiteering
by the US pharmaceutical industry.
"We've had a severe violation of the separation of church and state in the handling of what to do about this emerging
technology," Reeve tells the Guardian...
Reeve...says he is "angry and disappointed" that President
Bush has obstructed developments in therapeutic cloning and stem cell research which might have led, by now, to human
trials aimed at rebuilding the nervous systems of quadriplegic people.
"There are religious groups - the Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe - who think it's a sin to have a blood transfusion.
Well, what if the president for some reason decided to listen to them, instead of to the Catholics, which is the group
he really listens to in making his decisions about embryonic stem cell research?" Reeve says. "Where would
we be with blood transfusions?"
Mr Bush acted unjustly, he says, in appointing a commission to examine therapeutic human cloning but then announcing
his opposition to the technique before the commission could publish its report.
...
Progress has also been impeded by pharmaceutical companies using the courts to try to guarantee a bigger share of the
profits from drugs under development, Reeve alleges.
CBC Radio One: Commentary, 2002-09-12
One of the legacies of September 11th was the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. With their demise the condition
of millions of women improved overnight. Sally Armstrong is a Canadian reporter who has documented the Taliban's
persecution of women since 1997. On Commentary she says she fears the darkness of that time could return.
...the anniversary of September 11th wasn't marked with much relief for the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan.
The new transitional government is still caught in the vice grip of the fundamentalists. The single success story,
the liberation of the women and girls to return to work and school, is once again in peril.
During the Loya Jirga in June, when the Grand Council selected a two-year transitional government to prepare the country
for elections, the fundamentalists played another menacing card in the poker game of power. They proclaimed that
Dr. Sima Samar, the Minister of Women's Affairs, was the Salmon Rushdie of Afghanistan and called for her execution.
The Chief Justice, who was also a fundamentalist, said he was prepared to send the case to trial. Everyone knew
the real issue was the advances Dr. Samar had made for women and girls. But the fundamentalists made it clear:
they would bring down the government if it didn't back off on women's rights. Then, in a deal with the devil,
Samar was dropped from the cabinet; the transitional government took office and Samar's case was stayed.
Now, as the Commissioner of Human Rights, Samar continues her struggle. But she's the first to admit the country
is still in chaos. She has no budget, no staff and no office in her position as Human Rights Commissioner.
The women who have managed to find jobs are not being paid and they are still too afraid of the fundamentalist
thugs on the streets to take off their burqas.
Two weeks ago there was an attempt to ban the voices of women from radio and television....
Public Broadcasting System (PBS) —
USA, 2002-09-11
This program presented a number of interviews on the religious implications of the events of September 11, 2001.
Remarkably. some of these interviews provide us with an extremely rare phenomenon: honest recognition,
by representatives of several mainstream religions, of how religion itself was a major motivator of the terrorist
attacks on the United States.
Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete:
From the first moment I looked into that horror on Sept. 11, into that fireball, into that explosion of horror, I knew it.
I knew it before anything was said about those who did it or why. I recognized an old companion. I recognized religion.
Look, I am a priest for over 30 years. Religion is my life, ... Therefore, I know it.
And I know, and recognized that day, that the same force, energy, sense, instinct, whatever, passion -- because religion
can be a passion -- the same passion that motivates religious people to do great things is the same one that that day
brought all that destruction. When they said that the people who did it did it in the name of God, I wasn't the slightest
bit surprised. It only confirmed what I knew. I recognized it.
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield:
Religion drove those planes into those buildings. That's upsetting, but that's what happened. This idea that somehow
that's not Islam, so we shouldn't worry is not only naïve; it's stupid. It's wrong. There's a very rich tradition which
they delved into to justify what they did.
...
You don't sterilize these traditions and say "No, no, no, they don't do anything wrong." Because what's really
going on when we do that is that we don't want -- If Islam is clean, and that's not real Islam, then I don't have to ask
where is it real Jewish, and Christians don't have to ask where is it real Christian. The worst thing we can do is
make some kind of compact where none of us admit the blood on our hands. What we really have to do is admit the blood
on all of our hands -- not because it's equal blood, but because we've all been bloodied by these traditions, and
wishing that it weren't so isn't going to change anything....
Reuters, 2002-09-09
A California appeals court ruled on Monday that officials in a Los Angeles suburb could not begin meetings with prayers
invoking Jesus Christ, saying that doing so amounted to an unconstitutional endorsement of Christianity over other religions.
A three-judge panel of the state's Second District Court of Appeal agreed with a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who ordered
the city of Burbank to ban before council meetings prayers that promote any one faith or belief over another.
...
The Second District opinion would apply to legislative bodies across California unless overturned on further appeal.
...
The ruling follows a June decision by a three-member panel of a federal appeals court in California that the Pledge of
Allegiance could not be recited by school children because the phrase "under God" rendered it unconstitutional.
Webmaster's comment:
A wise and necessary application of the principle of church/state separation,
especially necessary in a country as fanatically religious as the United States.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 2002-09-04
Atheists in the US are organising themselves into a political force, planning a march of
"Godless Americans" on Washington.
The latest American Religious Identification Survey shows that nearly 13% of the US population describes itself as
"atheist". That's 30-million Americans, a figure much larger than most individual religious denominations.
And America's atheists are becoming better organised. In November, representatives of the nation's secular humanists will
march on Washington, in a mass protest against what they see as the insidious incursion of religion into the public domain.
The march is being organised by a group called American Atheists, a group that describes itself as an activist organisation
protecting the civil rights of Godless Americans everywhere. And they're not just interested in the separation of church
and State. American Atheists regard religion as a pernicious evil, comparable to racism and sexism, and they'd like to see it
eradicated altogether.
Ellen Johnson is the President of American Atheists, and she says that the Godless Americans' march on Washington is an
attempt to maintain the rage in the wake of this year's Pledge of Allegiance controversy, when a Californian judge
found that the words "under God" in the pledge were unconstitutional. The finding sparked off a public outcry,
appeals were lodged against the ruling, and the case is continuing to grind its way through the courts.
See also:
CBC Television, 2002-09-04
An updated news report about a particularly reprehensible sect which practices polygamy and effectively holds women -- especially teenage girls -- prisoners in their own families.
In a barren stretch of rust-coloured mountains on the Utah-Arizona border, an offshoot sect of the Mormon Church still practices what it has always preached; that multiple marriages are ordained by God, and are a ticket to heaven. Girls in their teens are often selected for marriage to much older men.
See also:
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