Raw Story has posted some comments from an interview they did with Congressman John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. Here are the paragraphs from the story that will raise the most eyebrows:
"For the president to be at one time misleading the Congress about his intentions, and at the same time working carefully with Prime Minister Blair and many in his cabinet as the declassified memos now reveal, as far as eight months before the war started, we don't just have deception," Conyers remarked.
"This is a constitutional abuse of power, and what we want to do, is first deal with this media silence," he continued, and spoke briefly about the forum he is holding today on media bias. "We want to get to why the media approaches this with such reluctance" [it] begins to unfold something like Watergate did; it appeared in page A35 of the Washington Post as a three sentence story and of course it kept going on."
Designing Intelligent Science Education
Mon May 23, 2005 at 07:29:53 AM PDT
Whereas "Intelligent Design" is a statement of faith and all the arguments in the world cannot shake the faith of those who adhere to this political wedge strategy, and
Whereas the "Intelligent Design" folks have already demonstrated in the Southern Baptist Convention that they have the votes to force teachers to "teach that pickles have souls," and
Whereas the "Intelligent Design" folks have easily got sufficient votes in several states to force teachers to teach that the earth is flat,
Baptists Against Theocracy
Fri May 13, 2005 at 09:23:06 AM PDT
The current cover story for the Weekly Planet,
"The Man in the Middle" is about Brent Walker, Executive Director of the
Baptist Joint Committee in Washington, D.C.
It is good to see Brent Walker and the Baptist Joint Committee getting some well deserved publicity.
On Southern Baptist's Irresponsible God
Fri Apr 29, 2005 at 02:05:29 PM PDT
Southern Baptist ethicist, Ben Mitchell, describes the use of contraception as a form of abortion.
He says, the pill creates "a hostile environment in the uterus so that the embryo is expelled. That's chemical abortion, plain and simple."
Ethics Daily quotes Mitchell further:
Some pro-lifers who believe that life begins at conception say "morning after" contraception is really a form of abortion, because in some cases the pills work by preventing a fertilized ovum from implanting in the wall of the woman's uterus.
"A so-called fertilized egg is an embryo," said Ben Mitchell, a consultant on biomedical and life issues for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "An embryo is a very young human being."
"The morning-after pill is another technological fix for a sexually promiscuous and anti-natal culture," said Mitchell, an associate professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill. Primary users, he said, are "sexually active women who do not want the responsibility that goes along with having sex."
Atheism: The Forbidden Topic
Wed Apr 27, 2005 at 03:17:32 PM PDT
Mike Whitney has a daring article on the
Axis of Logic website. He says, "
Let's Let Atheists Back Into Politics."
There is a glaring error or two in Whitney's essay (The founding fathers of the American Revolution [1776] were not influenced by the French Revolution [1789]), but the experience of discrimination that prompted his article is real. He says,
Face it, atheism in America is a lonely experience. Atheists are widely distrusted and there is a palpable undercurrent of discrimination directed at them, even though it is less noticeable than the prejudice aimed at other groups. In many ways, atheists are social pariahs; America's leper colony. Just about everyone is wary of atheists, as the polls repeatedly indicate.
The fact is, atheism simply doesn't exist in America. It is the forbidden topic, like homosexuality 20 years ago. . . . Regrettably, in our "free" society, no one is even allowed to openly debate the issue.
Religious Leaders Against "Injustice Sunday"
Tue Apr 19, 2005 at 02:47:23 PM PDT
Rev.
Martin Marty, America's premier church historian, has written a scathing essay in
Sightings entitled, "
Furious with Frist" that denounced Senate majority leader Bill Frist's participation in the Family Research Council's forthcoming Sunday telecast against filibusters. He said:
Most of the international religion stories these days have to do with theocratic suppressors of freedom, would-be monopolizers of religious expressions. We've been spared such holy wars here. But Frist and company, in the name of their interpretation of American freedom, sound more like jihadists than winsome believers. It would be healing to see them on their knees apologizing to the larger public of believers.
Rev. Brent Walker, Executive Director of the Baptist Joint Committee has also spoken out in an uncharacteristically forceful manner on this issue. He said,
Tenth Anniversary in OK City
Tue Apr 19, 2005 at 06:40:41 AM PDT
Today is the tenth anniversary of the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. 168 people lost their lives in an act of domestic terrorism. MSNBC recognizes that the
radical right is still a threat, but there is no doubt that today most Americans feel more threatened by extremists in the Middle East.
MSNBC says that the Oklahoma City bombing split the radical right and that in the late 1990's the FBI cracked down on the "Common Law Court" movement. They neglected to trace links between the thinking of the "Common Law Court" movement and the congregants around Roy's Rock, and the protestors outside the Schiavo hospital room in Florida, and the participants in the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference in Washington, D.C. Those thinly veiled threats emanating from the mouths of Texas Congressmen Tom Delay and John Cornyn were addressed to somebody.
