WASHINGTON, Oct. 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX) is suing the Washington DC Office of Human Rights for failing to protect former homosexuals under its sexual orientation anti-discrimination law. "The ex-gay community is the most bullied and maligned group in America, yet they are not protected by sexual orientation non-discrimination laws," said Regina Griggs, PFOX executive director.
FOUKE, Ark. - Federal authorities conducting a child-porn investigation raided the headquarters Saturday of a ministry run by a convicted tax evader once labeled by prosecutors as a polygamist who preys on girls and women.
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Social workers interviewed children who live at the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries complex, which critics call a cult, to find out whether they were abused. The two-year investigation involves a law that prohibits the transportation of children across state lines for criminal activity, said Tom Browne, who runs the FBI office in Little Rock.
"Children living at the facility may have been sexually and physically abused," Browne said.
The raid, conducted by state and federal authorities, started an hour before sunset at the complex in tiny Fouke, in southwestern Arkansas. Armed guards regularly patrol the headquarters, but there was no resistance as agents moved in, state police said.
No one was arrested, but U.S. Attorney Bob Balfe said before the raid that he expected an arrest warrant for Alamo to be issued later. The federal investigation centered on the production of child pornography, while state police were looking into allegations of other child abuse, he said.
In a phone call to The Associated Press from a friend's house in the Los Angeles area, Tony Alamo — who was also once accused of child abuse — denied involvement in pornography.
"We don't go into pornography; nobody in the church is into that," said Alamo, 73. "Where do these allegations stem from? The anti-Christ government. The Catholics don't like me because I have cut their congregation in half. They hate true Christianity."
...
"Alamo said he thought polygamy was allowed in the Bible but said he did not practice it himself. He also said that "consent is puberty" when it comes to sex."
"Instead of this so-called civil rights bill, for example, that says you have to give preferences to minorities, I think the American people are going — once they see the 'Obamanation' — they're going to demand a tweaking of that and say, 'You have to put the majority into office,'" Barrett said.
"The Revolution, if you will, in 1776 brought the 13 colonies together against the king. And the same thing can happen now against Martin Luther King, with the 50 states," Barrett said, if Obama's elected.
The poll responses also show Obama has more work to do to quell fears among voters like Kirstie Hartle of Rome, N.Y., a registered Democrat who has never supported a Republican presidential candidate. With Clinton out of the race, Hartle said, "I'm Republican all the way now."
She said she doesn't like Obama's name and thinks he has a questionable background. She also said she thought Obama was deceitful when he broke from his church after it hurt his campaign, and she doesn't trust him to handle the Iraq war.
"It sounds to me like a Middle Eastern type of name and whether or not he's born here in the United States, he doesn't seem like, to me, somebody who is trustworthy," Hartle said in a telephone interview. "You can't trust anybody these days, so who's to say he's not a terrorist and we just don't realize it yet?"
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Members of a moderate Muslim sect were ordered by the government Monday to return to mainstream Islam or face possible imprisonment for insulting the country's predominant religion.
[...]
Indonesia's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but many in the nation of 235 million consider it offensive that the sect does not recognize Muhammad as the last prophet.
"Is it still safe for us in this country?" Ahmadiyah spokesman Syamsir Ali said in an interview with national broadcaster tvOne. "Our houses are being targeted and those who don't like us feel it is acceptable to spill our blood."
Ali said he hopes Indonesia doesn't "turn out to be like governments in the Middle East" where the movement is prohibited.
Hard-liners have attacked Ahmadiyah members and torched their mosques since the government said in April it was considering banning the faith. Several dozen religious tolerance activists were beaten at a rally in Jakarta just over a week ago while police stood by.
A spokesman for the radical Islamic Defenders' Front — which has a long record of arson, stoning and vandalism against opponents and Western targets — said the decree falls short of its demands.
"It is not enough. We will keep up the struggle until the president orders the disbandment of Ahmadiyah," he said in a telephone interview.
Earlier Monday, several thousands protesters wearing white Islamic robes and caps gathered outside the presidential palace to demand that the organization be outlawed.
The religion needs to be defended "from people who want to destroy Islam's teachings," said demonstrator Zairin, who like many Indonesian goes by a single name. The use of violence would be justified to force reluctant Ahmadiyah members to renounce their faith and "keep Islam pure," he said.
[Regarding a new decree by the Vatican which explicitly bars the ordination of women.]
The decree was published Thursday by Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, which in a headline called the ordination of women a "crime."
The congregation said it acted to "preserve the nature and validity of the sacrament" of ordination.
The decree — signed by the congregation's head, American Cardinal William Levada — said anyone trying to ordain a woman and any woman who attempts to receive the ordination would incur automatic excommunication.
FALLUJAH, Iraq — At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.
Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. "Where will you spend eternity?" it asked.
He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16."
"They are trying to convert us to Christianity," said Anad, a Sunni Muslim like most residents of this city in Anbar province. At home, he told his story, and his relatives echoed their disapproval: They'd been given the coins, too, he said.
BRYAN, Texas - A minister from a Dallas-area Baptist megachurch was caught in an Internet sex sting and charged with online solicitation of a minor, police said Friday.
Undercover officers posing as a 13-year-old girl communicated with Joe Barron, 52, of Plano for about two weeks. The online conversations were sexual in nature, police said.
On May 6, Barron suggested meeting the girl in person. He eventually made the nearly 200-mile drive to Bryan on Thursday, when he was arrested. Police said they found a web-cam and condoms in his car.
"We are disturbed and saddened by the reports we have heard and we are praying for the Barron family," he said.
Hagee is no stranger to provocative remarks. On National Public Radio in 2006, he said Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment because "New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God." He has written that the feminist movement represents "a rebellion against God's pattern for the family.
[ Michelle Duggar, of Discovery Health channel-famous Duggar family, is pregnant with NUMBER 18!]
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It's a happy Mother's Day for an Arkansas woman — she's pregnant with her 18th child. Michelle Duggar, 41, is due on New Year's Day, and the latest addition will join seven sisters and 10 brothers. There are two sets of twins.
"The success in a family is first off, a love for God, and secondly, treating each other like you want to be treated," Jim Bob Duggar said. "Our goal is for each one of our children to be best friends, and everybody working together to serve each other makes that happen."
The other Duggar children, in between Joshua and Jennifer, are Jana, 18; John-David, 18; Jill, 16; Jessa, 15; Jinger, 14; Joseph, 13; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 10; Jeremiah, 9; Jedidiah, 9; Jason, 7; James, 6; Justin, 5; Jackson, 3; and Johannah, 2.
Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshippers exchanged blows at one of Christianity's holiest shrines on Orthodox Palm Sunday, and used palm fronds to pummel police who tried to break up the brawl.
The fight came amid growing rivalry over religious rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.
It erupted when Armenian clergy kicked out a Greek priest from their midst, pushed him to the ground and kicked him, according to witnesses.
When police intervened, some worshippers hit them with the palm fronds they were holding for the religious holiday.
"Evolution is a lie, and it's being taught in schools as fact, and it's leading our kids in the wrong direction," said McLean, chatting outside the chapel. "But now people like Ken Ham are tearing evolution to pieces."
DEAR MARGO: We have one grandson to carry on the family name, and he refuses to find a wife. We've explained to him that it's the Lord's plan that we all marry and that he's cheating some poor girl out of her special day, but the boy will not listen. We've heard that Native Americans have arranged marriages. My husband is one-quarter Cherokee. How would we go about arranging a marriage for our grandson?
A federal judge ordered an anti-abortion activist to remove Web site postings that authorities said exhorted readers to kill an abortion provider by shooting her in the head...
One posting, which featured the [abortion] provider's name, photo and address, stated that "while it does not sound good to say go shoot her between the eyes, it sounds even worse to say let her alone."
In real life, Harun Yahya is a 51-year-old former interior-design student named Adnan Oktar. Since founding the BAV in 1990, Mr. Oktar has been responsible for ushering more than 250 books into print, though many observers agree he serves more as the chief overseer of a group of writers rather than as a solo author. The series includes titles such as "The Dark Spell of Darwinism" and "Why Darwinism is Incompatible with the Koran."
Oktar's brand of creationism is not only religious, but also political and even messianic, seeing most of the world's ills – terrorism and fascism among them – as stemming from Darwin's theory of evolution.
"Hitler, Mao, and Lenin were Darwinists. At the root of wild capitalism is also Darwinism. I think if we no longer believe in Darwinism, people will no longer be conditioned to believe in those things," the normally reclusive Oktar said during a recent press conference, held aboard a hired yacht cruising Istanbul's Bosphorus strait.
"Folks, there is no such thing as what you call evolution. If there was, it would be in the Holy Bible or the Koran," added Oktar, dressed in an ivory-white raw silk suit and wearing gold cufflinks and a matching gold belt buckle with Arabic inscriptions on them.
"The sweet dream of the Darwinists and the world is to ban my books," Oktar said, sipping glass after glass of sour cherry juice. "What I'm saying is true. They cannot disprove it."
Unlike fundamentalist Christian creationists, Oktar does not claim the earth was created only a few thousand years ago. Instead, he argues that fossils show that creatures from millions of years ago looked just like the creatures of today, thus disproving evolution
A megachurch canceled a memorial service for a Navy veteran 24 hours before it was to start because the deceased was gay.
Officials at the nondenominational High Point Church knew that Cecil Howard Sinclair was gay when they offered to host his service, said his sister, Kathleen Wright. But after his obituary listed his life partner as one of his survivors, she said, it was called off.
[snip]
The church's pastor, the Rev. Gary Simons, said no one knew Sinclair, who was not a church member, was gay until the day before the Thursday service, when staff members putting together his video tribute saw pictures of men "engaging in clear affection, kissing and embracing."
Simons said the church believes homosexuality is a sin, and it would have appeared to endorse that lifestyle if the service had been held there.
"We did decline to host the service — not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle," Simons told The Associated Press. "Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it — yes, we would have declined then. It's not that we didn't love the family."
From a Yahoo news article on an attempt to ban the Harry Potter books from a school library:
At Tuesday's hearing, Mallory argued in part that witchcraft is a religion practiced by some people and, therefore, the [Harry Potter] books should be banned because reading them in school violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
"I have a dream that God will be welcomed back in our schools again," Mallory said. "I think we need him."
[My comment: Interesting juxtaposition. Clearly, separation of church and state only applies to other people's churches.]
A German woman judge has refused a Moroccan-born woman permission to file for divorce by interpreting the Koran as allowing husbands to beat their wives.
"This Moroccan woman has the same right to protection from a violent husband as any German woman. Anything else would be misconceived sensitivity to the benefit of the husband and would amount to racist discrimination against the wife," said the Tageszeitung daily.
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany also condemned the decision.
"The judge should have made a decision based on the German constitution instead of the Koran," said spokeswoman Nurhan Soykan, who said that violence and mistreatment, regardless of the gender of the victim, were also grounds for divorce in the Islamic world.
A court in the western city of Frankfurt on Wednesday upheld a complaint of bias against the judge lodged by the lawyer of the 26-year-old woman, who has two children.
The woman had filed for immediate divorce on the grounds that the husband, also of Moroccan origin, regularly beat her and threatened to kill her. The claims were backed up by a police report.
But the female judge, who has not been named, made clear in a letter that the wife's bid had little chance of approval because, according to her, Islamic law allowed a man to strike his wife.
German politicians from all parties were united in disgust at the judgement.
"When the Koran takes precedence over the German Basic Law, then I can only say: Good night Germany," Ronald Pofalla, the secretary general of the conservative Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Bild.
Hans-Christian Stroebele, of the opposition Greens, said the kind of abuse suffered by the woman should be punished by German criminal law.
The lawyer for a former Baptist church leader who had spoken out against homosexuality said Thursday the minister has a constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman.
The Rev. Lonnie W. Latham had supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their "sinful, destructive lifestyle" before his Jan. 3, 2006, arrest outside the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City.
Authorities say he asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Hardline Hindu activists protested against celebrations of St
Valentine's Day in the Indian capital on Wednesday, calling them immoral and a corruption of the country's ancient civilisation.
[...]
About 150 members of the pro-Hindu political party Shiv Sena gathered in New Delhi, shouting "Down with Western culture!" and "Death to Valentine's Day!" as they waved saffron-coloured flags.
"Valentine's Day promotes obscene cards and nudity and encourages our youngsters to be publicly affectionate in parks and other places -- this is against our ancient civilisation," said Jai Bhagwan Goyal, head of Shiv Sena in the capital.
"This western creation is corrupting our young people and making them have immoral thoughts ... we are already seeing that there are more evil crimes like rape happening in India."
Tens of Shiv Sena protesters burnt Valentine's cards in Jaipur and tried to enter the city's main park to harass courting couples, but were stopped by police.
[...]
Satellite television, the internet, films and travel have led traditionally conservative middle-class Indians to adopt more liberal attitudes towards sex.
But public hugging and kissing, even in urban areas, still invite angry stares, lewd comments and even beatings.
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."
Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.
Robertson said God also told him that the U.S. only feigns friendship with Israel and that U.S. policies are pushing Israel toward "national suicide."
Robertson suggested in January 2006 that God punished then-Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon with a stroke for ceding Israeli-controlled land to the Palestinians.
The broadcaster predicted in January 2004 that
President Bush would easily win re-election. Bush won 51 percent of the vote that fall, beating Democratic Sen.
John Kerry of Massachusetts. He also predicted Bush's victory for a second term in 2005.
"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."
In May, Robertson said God told him that storms and possibly a tsunami were to crash into America's coastline in 2006. Even though the U.S. was not hit with a tsunami, Robertson on Tuesday cited last spring's heavy rains and flooding in New England as partly fulfilling the prediction.
[Atheist extremism?]
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - A man used flammable liquid to light himself on fire, apparently to protest a San Joaquin Valley school district's decision to change the names of winter and spring breaks to Christmas and Easter vacation.
The man, who was not immediately identified, on Friday also set fire to a Christmas tree, an American flag and a revolutionary flag replica, said Fire Captain Garth Milam.
Seeing the flames, Sheriff's Deputy Lance Ferguson grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran to the man.
Flames were devouring a Christmas tree next to the Liberty Bell, where public events and demonstrations are common.
Beside the tree the man stood with an American flag draped around his shoulders and a red gas can over his head.
Seeing the deputy, the man poured the liquid over his head. He quickly burst into flames when the fumes from the gas met the flames from the tree.
The deputy ordered the man to drop to the ground as he and a parole agent sprayed him with fire extinguishers.
"The man stood there like this," the deputy said with his arms across his chest and his head bent down, "Saying no, no, no."
The man suffered first degree burns on his shoulders and arms, Milam said.
Kern County Sheriff's Deputy John Leyendecker said the man had a sign that read: "(expletive) the religious establishment and KHSD."
On Thursday, the Kern High School Board of Trustees voted to use the names Christmas and Easter instead of winter and spring breaks.
Residents of a southern Somalia town who do not pray five times a day will be beheaded, an Islamic courts official said Wednesday, adding the edict will be implemented in three days.
Public places such as shops and tea houses in Bulo Burto, about 124 miles northeast of the capital, Mogadishu, should be closed during prayer time and no one should be on the streets, said Sheik Hussein Barre Rage, the chairman of the town's Islamic court.
Those who do not follow this edict "will definitely be beheaded according to Islamic law," Rage told The Associated Press by phone. "As Muslims, we should practice Islam fully, not in part, and that is what our religion enjoins us to do."
He said that the courts are announcing the edict over loudspeakers in the town.
DENVER - A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.
Some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq, said Bob Kearns, president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs. He said some residents have also believed it was a symbol of Satan. Three or four residents complained, he said.
"Somebody could put up signs that say drop bombs on Iraq. If you let one go up you have to let them all go up," he said in a telephone interview Sunday.
Lisa Jensen said she wasn't thinking of the war when she hung the wreath. She said, "Peace is way bigger than not being at war. This is a spiritual thing." [...]
Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn't say anything. Kearns fired all five committee members.
[Another "Fundies Do The Darndest Things": Christian extremist hijacks Turkish Airlines flight.]
A Turkish hijacker seeking to communicate with
Pope Benedict seized an airliner flying from Albania to Istanbul on Tuesday and diverted it to Italy before surrendering.
[...] Turkish media later identified the hijacker as Hakan Ekinci, a convert to Christianity who had written to the Pope in late August, asking for his help to avoid compulsory military service in Turkey.
Turkey's Dogan News Agency said Ekinci was born in the western Turkish province of Izmir in 1978 and had been convicted of fraud and pickpocketing. It said he traveled to Albania in May this year and did not return.
Dogan quoted from his letter: "Dear Pope, I am Hakan Ekinci. I am a Christian and I never want to serve a Muslim army. I wish you to help me as the spiritual leader of the Christian world."
However, he said Tuesday that any medical research must pass a three-part test: "Is it ethically correct? Is it biblically correct? Is it morally correct?"
Stem cell research, Falwell said, "does not pass the smell test."
"Americans just aren't gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish," - John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego
Anyone who reads the Rukhnama three times will find spiritual wealth, will become more intelligent, will recognise the divine being and will go straight to heaven