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THOMAS —
American Legislative Information on the Internet, 2003-03-27
The House of Representatives of the American Congress approves (346 to 49) a bill calling for
"a day for humility, prayer, and fasting" in support of the war in Iraq.
Recognizing the public need for fasting and prayer in order to secure the blessings and protection of
Providence for the people of the United States and our Armed Forces during the conflict in Iraq and under
the threat of terrorism at home
...
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the President should issue a proclamation--
(1) designating a day for humility, prayer, and fasting for all people of the United States; and
(2) calling on all people of the United States--
(A) to observe the day as a time of prayer and fasting;
(B) to seek guidance from God to achieve a greater understanding of our own failings and to learn how we can do
better in our everyday activities; and
(C) to gain resolve in meeting the challenges that confront our Nation.
Webmaster's comment:
Further evidence that the American government is on a religious crusade.
Forget church/state separation: the tendency is towards theocracy.
CBC Radio One — World Report, 2003-03-11
The governor of Arkansas has approved a bill authorizing specialty license plates with anti-abortion messages. Money raised through the sale of the "choose life" plates will go to non-profit groups that counsel pregnant women and encourage adoption. The Civil Liberties Union in Arkansas is considering a legal challenge. It says the state is taking sides on a political issue and directing money to that issue.
Webmaster's comment:
Further evidence of the Christian right's stranglehold on American governments.
Chicago Sun-Times, 2003-03-05
The Bush administration has been dealt a setback in its campaign to allow prayer in our public schools. The full
9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has voted 15-9 to back the 2-1 vote by its earlier panel finding the
Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because of the words "under God."
The pledge, written in 1892, had those words added to it in 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, and I
remember a nun in our Catholic school telling us we had to say it because it was the law—but it was wrong,
because it violated the principle of separating church and state.
We started every day with classroom prayer at St. Mary's School, of course, but Sister Rosanne said there was a
difference between voluntary prayer in a private religious school and prayer in a school paid for by every taxpayer—a
distinction so obvious that Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are forced to willfully ignore it.
Ashcroft said after the ruling that his Justice Department will "spare no effort to preserve the rights of all
our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag"—a misrepresentation so blatant that it functions
as a lie. The pledge remains intact and unchallenged. The court said nothing about pledging allegiance to the flag. It
spoke only of the words "under God"—which amounted, the court said, to an endorsement of religion.
...
Our attorney general, John Ashcroft, is theoretically responsible for enforcing the separation of church and state.
He violates his oath of office daily by getting down on his knees in his government office every morning and
welcoming federal employees to join him in "voluntary" prayer on carpets paid for by the taxpayers.
His brand of religion is specifically fundamentalist evangelical. As his eyes lift from beneath lowered lids to take
informal attendance, would he be gladdened to see a Muslim, a Catholic, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Baha'i, a
Unitarian, a Scientologist, all accompanied by the chants of Hare Krishnas?
...
Because our enemies...see absolutely no difference between church and state—indeed, want to make them
the same—it is alarming to reflect that they may be having more success bringing us around to their point of
view than we are at sticking to our own traditional American beliefs about freedom of religion. When Ashcroft and his
enemies both begin their days with displays of their godliness, do we feel safer after they rise from their devotions?
The Guardian —
United Kingdom, 2003-03-05
Thoughtful, frightening analysis of the threat of imminent war.
We accept that there are legitimate casus belli: acts or situations "provoking or justifying war".
The present debate feels off-centre, and faintly unreal, because the US and the UK are going to war for a new set
of reasons (partly undisclosed) while continuing to adduce the old set of reasons (which in this case do not
cohere or even overlap). These new casus belli are a response to the accurate realisation that we have entered
a distinct phase of history. The coming assault on Iraq may perhaps be the Last War of the Ottoman Succession;
it will certainly be the first War of the Age of Proliferation - the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs). The new casus belli are also shaped by September 11.
September 11 has given to us a planet we barely recognise. In a sense it revealed what was already there, largely
unremarked, since the collapse of the Soviet Union: the unprecedented preponderance of a single power. It also
revealed the longstanding but increasingly dynamic loathing of this power in the Islamic world, where anti-Zionism
and anti-semitism are exacerbated by America's relationship with Israel - a relationship that many in the west,
this writer included, find unnatural. In addition, like all "acts of terrorism" (easily and
unsubjectively defined as organised violence against civilians), September 11 was an attack on morality: we felt
a general deficit. Who, on September 10, was expecting by Christmastime to be reading unscandalised editorials in
the Herald Tribune about the pros and cons of using torture on captured "enemy combatants"? Who
expected Britain to renounce the doctrine of nuclear no-first-use? Terrorism undermines morality. Then, too,
it undermines reason.
...
All US presidents - and all US presidential candidates - have to be religious or have to pretend to be religious.
More specifically, they have to subscribe to "born again" Christianity. Bush, with his semi-compulsory
prayer-breakfasts and so on, isn't pretending to be religious: "the loving God behind all life and all of
history"; "the Almighty's gift of freedom to the world.""My acceptance of Christ",
Bush has said (this is code for the born-again experience of personal revelation), - "that's an integral part
of my life." And of ours, too, in the New American Century.
One of the exhibits at the Umm Al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein's
own blood (he donated 24 litres over three years). Yet this is merely the most spectacular of Saddam's periodic sops
to the mullahs. He is, in reality, a career-long secularist - indeed an "infidel", according to Bin Laden.
Although there is no Bible on Capitol Hill written in the blood of George Bush, we are obliged to accept the fact that
Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive.
We hear about the successful "Texanisation" of the Republican party. And doesn't Texas sometimes seem to
resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its
weekly executions?
The present administration's embrace of the religious right also leads, by a bizarre route, to the further strengthening
of the Israel lobby. Unbelievably, born-again doctrine insists that Israel must be blindly supported, not because it is
the only semi-democracy in that crescent, but because it is due to host the second coming. Armageddon is scheduled to
take place near the hill of Megiddo (where, in recent months; an Israeli bus was suicide-bombed by another kind of believer).
The Rapture, the Tribulation, the Binding of the Antichrist: it isn't altogether clear how much of this rubbish Bush swallows
(though Reagan swallowed it whole). VS Naipaul has described the religious impulse as the inability "to contemplate
man as man", responsible to himself and uncosseted by a higher power. We may consider this a weakness; Bush,
dangerously, considers it a strength.
...
See also:
Ananova — Leeds, United Kingdom, 2003-03-03
A hundred white witches are casting spells to try and stop a war with Iraq during a month-long congress in Romania. The International Congress of White Witches is being held in Bucharest where 25 Romanian witches and 75 from other countries are meeting to cast spells. The witches say top of their agenda at the conference is the prevention of war in Iraq. They will also be casting spells to prevent earthquakes and dealing with evil spirits, daily newspaper Independentul reports.
Webmaster's comment:
Witches cast spells for peace. The pope prays for peace. Paganism or Christianity, take your pick.
Both are idle appeals to supernatural agents.
New York Times, 2003-03-01
A recent development in this famous case.
The federal appeals court that outraged much of the country last summer when it declared the Pledge of Allegiance
unconstitutional because of the words "under God" refused yesterday to reconsider that ruling.
At least until the United States Supreme Court takes up the case, which legal experts consider highly likely, children
in public schools in the nine Western states that the appeals court covers will be barred from reciting the full pledge.
...
The appeals court covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington....
The Ninth Circuit panel that rendered the pledge ruling in June issued an amended version of that decision yesterday.
Like the earlier decision, the vote was 2 to 1. The decision now stops short of declaring the law passed by Congress
in 1954 that added the words "under God" to the pledge unconstitutional. The panel focuses instead on
public school decisions that allow voluntary recitations of the words. The distinction makes the decision less sweeping.
It may now not apply by implication to reciting the pledge in other official settings or to similar phrases in other
laws and governmental statements.
...
The panel majority sided with the plaintiff, Michael A. Newdow of Sacramento, an atheist who said his daughter was
injured when forced to listen to teachers lead a pledge that includes the assertion that there is a God.
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