You don’t have to ask, she did it for religious reasons.

Many Support Ex-Principal in Gay Rights Case

PONCE DE LEON - When a high school senior told her principal that students were taunting her for being a lesbian, he told her homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents and ordered her to stay away from children.

He suspended some of her friends who expressed their outrage by wearing gay pride T-shirts and buttons at Ponce de Leon High School, according to court records. And he asked dozens of students whether they were gay or associated with gay students.

The American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the district on behalf of a girl who protested against Principal David Davis, and a federal judge reprimanded Davis for conducting a “witch hunt” against gays. Davis was demoted, and school employees must now go through sensitivity training.

And despite all that, many in this conservative Panhandle community still wonder what, exactly, Davis did wrong.

“We are a small, rural district in the Bible Belt with strong Christian beliefs and feel like homosexuality is wrong,” said Steve Griffin, Holmes County’s school superintendent, who keeps a Bible on his desk and framed Scriptures on his office walls.

Holmes County, on the Alabama line, has about 20,000 residents. There is some agriculture, but most people are employed either by prisons or schools; some commute to the Gulf Coast to work in tourism. Ponce de Leon, with fewer than 500 residents, has a cafe, a post office and an antique store.

Many in the community support Davis and feel outsiders are forcing their beliefs on them. Griffin, who kicked Davis out of the principal’s office but allowed him to continue teaching at the school, said high schoolers here aren’t exposed to the same things as kids in Atlanta or Chicago.

“I don’t think we are that different from a lot of districts, at least in the Panhandle, that have beliefs that maybe are different from societal changes,” Griffin said.

Gay rights activists said that’s no excuse for what Davis did.

The problems began last fall when Davis, who did not return phone messages from The Associated Press, admonished the senior, who is identified only as “Jane Doe” in court records and whose friends say she doesn’t want to talk about the experience.

The friends donned gay pride T-shirts and rainbow-colored clothing when they found out how Davis had treated her, and he questioned many of them about their sexuality and association with gay students. Some were suspended.

“Davis embarked on what can only be characterized as a ‘witch hunt’ to identify students who were homosexual and their supporters, further adding fuel to the fire,” U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak recounted in his ruling. “He went so far as to lift the shirts of female students to insure the letters ‘GP’ or the words ‘Gay Pride’ were not written on their bodies.”

Heather Gillman, an 11th-grader who took part in the protests, complained to her mother, Ardena, a 40-year-old corrections officer and mother of three. Ardena Gillman called the ACLU, even though she knew people would be angry.

“I just felt like I had to stand up for the kids. Heather wanted to do this, and I had to back her,” she said.

Ardena hoped to protect the students’ freedom of speech - whether it was the freedom to wear Confederate flag T-shirts to show Southern pride or the freedom to wear rainbow T-shirts to support gay rights.

Courts have repeatedly ruled that similar student protests are constitutional as long as they are not disruptive.

“I think a shirt that says ‘I support gays’ is very different from a shirt that says ‘Gays are going to hell,’” said Benjamin Stevenson, an ACLU attorney. “One can be very disruptive for a child’s self-esteem; the other supports other people and their ideas.”

Ardena Gillman also knew some of the students would need to learn to be tolerant.

“What happens when these kids get out in the real world after they leave Ponce de Leon and they have a black, homosexual supervisor at their job?” she said.

The ACLU sued in January, and Smoak ruled this summer that Davis violated Heather Gillman’s rights.

“I emphasize that Davis’s personal and religious views about homosexuality are not issues in this case. Indeed, Davis’s opinions and views are consistent with the beliefs of many in Holmes County, in Florida, and in the country,” Smoak wrote in an opinion released last month. “Where Davis went wrong was when he endeavored to silence the opinions of his dissenters.”

As Ardena Gillman suspected, the lawsuit created hard feelings in town.

A Wal-Mart worker yelled at her, accusing her of trying to “bankrupt” the school district, which was ordered to pay $325,000 in ACLU attorney fees. One of her friends has refused to talk to her because the lawsuit conflicted with the woman’s religious beliefs.

Others flatly hail Davis as a hero.

“David Davis is a fine man and good principal, and we are a gentle, peaceful, Christian, family-oriented community,” said Bill Griffin, 73 and a lifelong Ponce de Leon resident who is no relation to the district superintendent. “We aren’t out to tar and feather anyone.”

The lawsuit could reflect a division between the high school students who have grown up in an era of gay tolerance and the community’s elders, said Gary Scott, a school board member.

“But I think that’s less of an issue here than in Miami or Minnesota,” he said.

The judge’s scathing rebuke left Scott questioning how his community’s beliefs could be so different from the judge’s opinion.

“I guess I didn’t realize we were this bad,” Scott said.

Nothing like teaching your kids good Christian values. Anyone else interested in knowing why they say it’s a “cult” when it’s clearly a form of Christianity? I love how they get shunned as not being Christians simply because then Christianity might be given a bad name.

4 more in ‘cult’ cited in death

 Baltimore police have obtained warrants charging four more members of what authorities call a religious cult in the death of 2-year-old Javon Thompson, whose body was found in May in a suitcase in Philadelphia. The warrants bring the number of people charged in the boy’s death to five.

Charged with murder in warrants were Queen Antoinette, 40, Trevia Williams, 20, Marcus Cobbs, 21, and Steven Bynum, 42. All but Bynum are in jail on other charges, and the Warrant Apprehension Task Force is looking for Bynum in the New York area, said Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for the city’s Police Department.

With the most recent charges, police have charged all but two known adults associated with the tiny religious group, 1 Mind Ministries, in the boy’s death. The gruesome details of that crime were outlined in a 12-page statement of charges written over the weekend by homicide Detective Vernon Parker.

Police say the five suspects belonged to a small group of adults and children who operated for a time in East and West Baltimore. Police allege that the victim’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, 21, the first to be charged with murder, and others neglected Javon and allowed the boy to starve to death because they thought he was a demon for not saying amen after he was fed, according to police charging documents.

Javon is believed to have died in December 2006 in a West Baltimore house, according to police charging documents. The cause of death was ruled homicide by unspecified means, according to court papers.

In early February 2007, police say, the group fled to Philadelphia, taking the boy’s body in a green suitcase with wheels. They stayed at various places, settling for about a week at the home of a man the group befriended, according to police. Police found Javon’s body in a shed behind the house in May this year. He was wearing a diaper.

DNA evidence provided preliminary confirmation that the remains are those of Javon, according to a police source close to the investigation. Authorities are awaiting complete results.

In early May, three members of the group - including its alleged leader, Toni Ellsberry, also known as Queen Antoinette - were arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., on outstanding warrants connected to an unrelated Baltimore case in which they are accused of assaulting a city officer who had gone to their home to retrieve a child involved in a custody dispute. The suspects were returned to Baltimore and held on charges that they had failed to show up for a court date.

Congo children accused of sorcery

KINSHASA, Congo — When Mando Mengi was 5, his mother died and his father remarried. His stepmother, a tall, mercurial woman with two children of her own, saw Mando as a burden and gave him endless chores while the other kids did nothing.

One day, Mando refused to sweep the dirt floor of their home. His stepmother found a sinister explanation for his stubbornness: He was practicing witchcraft.

She began to withhold food and sometimes beat him, saying it would purge the evil spirits. Finally, she gave his father an ultimatum: “You’ve brought a sorcerer into this house,” Mando recalled her saying. “Either he leaves or I do.”

Mando didn’t wait for him to decide. He ran away, joining tens of thousands of children who live on the streets of this broken-down African capital — most of them, aid agencies say, rejected by families who accuse them of witchcraft.

In Congo, where belief in the power of spirits and black magic goes back centuries, boys and girls as young as 5 are bearing the brunt of witchcraft allegations that once were reserved for rural women and widows. Aid workers blame the social toll of decades of economic depression, disease and conflict, which have torn apart countless families and made daily life desperate for most of the country’s 60 million people.

With 4 million Congolese thought to have perished mostly from illnesses and hunger since a civil war began in 1998, and with eight in 10 surviving on less than a dollar per day, children are sometimes seen as encumbrances, just more mouths to feed.

[…]

Pastors offer exorcisms

Jean-Marie Kalonji, a pastor who runs the Fountain of Adoration of God Evangelical Center and advertises his deliverance services on Christian radio, claims to be Kinshasa’s expert on the subject. On a recent afternoon, a dozen people waited in the dirt courtyard of his one-room church for consultations.

“Witchcraft is a bigger problem in Congo than AIDS,” said Kalonji, a young, professorial man with eyeglasses perched on the end of his nose. He displayed a 2-inch binder crammed with loose-leaf sheets, each of them a witchcraft case, he said.

Kalonji, who claims to have performed hundreds of exorcisms, renounces the “false methods” of other pastors, which he said don’t work. He listed some of these methods in a slim paperback volume he authored three years ago titled “African Sorcery: Strategies of Deliverance,” which he sells for about $7.

Among them are burning the sorcerer, extracting flesh from his mouth, beating him with an iron rod, trampling him, making him drink a bottle of palm oil daily for a week and forcing him to stare at the sun.

Kalonji was cagey about his own technique, which he said involved a lot of prayer but no physical abuse. As for payment, he said, “If a grateful parent offers me money, I don’t refuse.”

Christians: Tips To Doing Battle With Evil Atheist

1.  Remember that they are people, just like you are.  Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, they are not some lower life form we share this planet with.

2.  More than likely, they are smarter than you are.  This can be difficult to come to grips with, but it does appear to be true and is a claim that is actually supported by the Bible (1 Corinthians 1:18-31)

3.  Statistically, they are also as moral, if not more so than you are.  While it is a good thing that they generally are highly moral,  it is a shame that we, who often times claim the moral high ground,  seem unable, or unwilling, to match our words with our lives.

4.  They will probably thump you in debate.  They are much more likely to have carefully thought through their position and understand why they believe what they do.  We are more likely simply to present some argument that the person we heard it from guaranteed would destroy the enemy.  The problem with that is that many of them have heard the same arguments many times and are easily able to counter them.

5.  Don’t under-estimate their knowledge of the Bible.  Many of them are more familiar with the Bible than the average Christian is.  And they know all of the passages that will cause you a problem, and will not hesitate to challenge you with them.

 This is is dispicable and should be condemned by everyone, especially by people who call themselves Christians. Those involved should be arrested.

Exposing Anti-Choice Abortion Clinics

Misleading ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ are appearing across America, aiming to limit or even prevent women from exploring all of their legal health care options.

According to a recent Planned Parenthood email, a 17-year-old girl mistakenly walked into a crisis pregnancy center thinking it was Planned Parenthood, which was next door. “The group took down the girl’s confidential personal information and told her to come back for her appointment, which they said would be in their ‘other office’ (the real Planned Parenthood office nearby).”

When she showed up for her nonexistent appointment, she was met by the police, who had been erroneously tipped that a minor was being forced to abort. The crisis pregnancy center staff followed up this harassment by staking out the girl’s house, phoning her father at work, and even talking to her classmates about her pregnancy, urging them to harass her.

I contacted Jennifer Jorczak of Planned Parenthood of Indiana to verify this story, and while she was unable to provide details out of respect for the patient’s privacy, she confirmed that everything in the initial action alert email was true.

This humiliating and frustrating experience seems, by all accounts, to await more American women in the near future. And the best part? It’s funded by your tax dollars.

Even here in the liberal city of Austin, Texas, the signs are everywhere: “Pregnant? Need help?”

100% of me finds them annoying too, we have so much in common..

Survey: Non-attendees find faith outside church

A new survey of U.S. adults who don’t go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say “God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists.” But just as many (72%) also say the church is “full of hypocrites.”

Indeed, 44% agree with the statement “Christians get on my nerves.”

LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, based in Nashville, conducted the survey of 1,402 “unchurched” adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

The survey defines “unchurched” as people who had not attended a religious service in a church, synagogue or mosque at any time in the past six months.More than one in five (22%) of Americans say they never go to church, the highest ever recorded by the General Social Survey, conducted every two years by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. In 2004, the percentage was 17%.

Many of the unchurched are shaky on Christian basics, says LifeWay Research director Ed Stetzer.

Just 52% agree on the essential Christian belief that “Jesus died and came back to life.”

And 61% say the God of the Bible is “no different from the gods or spiritual beings depicted by world religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.,” although Buddhist philosophy has no god and Hindus worship many.

Belief in ‘a generic god’

Non-churchgoers “lean to a generic god that fits into every imaginable religious system, even when (systems) contradict one another,” Stetzer says. “If you went back 100 years in North America, there would have been a consensus that God is the God in the Bible. We can’t assume this any longer.

“We no longer have a home-field advantage as Christians in this culture.”

Guess what? Apparently the all mighty powerful creator of the universe requires humans to form armies and carry out his will, because, you know, he’s not able to do it himself, instead he needs us puny humans to do his dirty work. Good thing nut cases like Huckabee are up to the task.

Huckabee Steps Back Into the Pulpit at Evangelical Church in N.H.

WINDHAM, N.H., Jan. 6 — A pastor from Texas was scheduled to deliver the sermon Sunday at a church here called the Crossing.

But instead this small evangelical congregation heard from a different special guest: Baptist minister and 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who delivered a sermon of more than 20 minutes on how to be part of “God’s Army” in the middle school cafeteria where the congregation meets.

“When we become believers, it’s as if we have signed up to be part of God’s Army, to be soldiers for Christ,” Huckabee told the enthusiastic audience.

Days after winning the Iowa Republican caucus, where Christian conservatives powered him to victory, Huckabee now finds himself in a state without an extensive religious base. While more than 60 percent of GOP voters were estimated to be evangelicals in the Iowa caucuses, they accounted for only about one in five New Hampshire Republican voters in 2000, the last time the state held a competitive GOP primary.

Huckabee’s campaign did not allow cameras into the church, and the candidate did not make an appeal for votes as part of his sermon. But a church official invited members to attend an event a mile away, where Huckabee held a rally with actor Chuck Norris and where free clam chowder was served.

Huckabee mixed homespun jokes into his sermon and added a more religious tone than in his political speeches, not just quoting from the Bible but citing specific verses and talking about the serious side of faith.

“When you give yourself to Christ, some relationships have to go,” he said. “It’s no longer your life; you’ve signed it over.”

Likening service to God to service in the military, Huckabee said “there is suffering in the conditioning for battle” and “you obey the orders.”

In his campaign stops in New Hampshire, Huckabee has generally focused on appealing to nonreligious voters, playing the bass guitar and emphasizing his support of small government, local control of schools and gun rights — popular causes among Granite State Republicans. Norris, who has endorsed him, has been at his side at nearly every event. His campaign has not run an ad, popular in Iowa, that dubbed him a “Christian leader.”

In case any of you religious moderates out there were wondering, this is when your money goes when you donate to your local church. Reading stories like this makes me feel like I just received a lobotomy. What the fuck is wrong with people who insist on brining back the dark ages? They were shit times and we’re glad to be out of them, stop fucking up the human race you pricks.

Vatican to train more exorcists

ROME: The Catholic Church has vowed to “fight the Devil head-on” by training hundreds of priests as exorcists.

Father Gabriele Amorth, 82, the Exorcist in Chief, announced the initiative amid church concerns about growing worldwide interest in Satanism and the occult.

Under plans being considered, each bishop would have a group of priests in his diocese who were specially trained in exorcism and on hand to take action against “extreme Godlessness”.

“Thanks be to God that we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on,” Father Amorth said.

“Now bishops are to be obliged to have a number of established exorcists for their diocese. Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a proper, trained exorcist.

“Thankfully Pope Benedict XVI believes in the existence and danger of evil, from the time he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith deals with promoting and safeguarding Catholic beliefs. It was headed by the Pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, from 1982 until his election as Pope in 2005.

The Vatican is concerned that young people are being exposed to Satanism through the media, rock music and the internet.

All priests can perform exorcisms, but in reality only a select few are ever called on to do so. The rite involves gestures and prayers to invoke the power of God and stop the “demon” influencing its victim.

 It gets better every day. Sigh.

The Crusaders

Meet the Dominionists — biblical literalists who believe God has called them to take over the U.S. government. As the far-right wing of the evangelical movement, Dominionists are pressing an agenda that makes Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation’s courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions. In Florida, when the courts ordered Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube removed, it was the Dominionists who organized round-the-clock protests and issued a fiery call for Gov. Jeb Bush to defy the law and take Schiavo into state custody. Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a “faith-based” government that will endure far longer than Bush’s presidency — all the way until Jesus comes back.

“Most people hear them talk about a ‘Christian nation’ and think, ‘Well, that sounds like a good, moral thing,’ says the Rev. Mel White, who ghostwrote Jerry Falwell’s autobiography before breaking with the evangelical movement. “What they don’t know — what even most conservative Christians who voted for Bush don’t know — is that ‘Christian nation’ means something else entirely to these Dominionist leaders. This movement is no more about following the example of Christ than Bush’s Clean Water Act is about clean water.”