c. 1997 Religion News Service

Baptists: Keep Rogers Williams in Capitol Rotunda

(RNS) It’s not that the Baptist Joint Committee is against women’s rights.

It’s just that Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, is the pre-eminent American symbol of religious liberty, a principle the Baptists hold dear to their heart. And Williams is credited with founding the first Baptist church in America.

So the group’s executive committee has weighed in on one of those little battles that often engulf life inside the Washington beltway, adopting a resolution lauding Williams and opposing a plan to remove his statue from the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

The removal is being fiercely resisted by the courtly Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I.

At issue is a decision by the Joint Committee of the Library of Congress to banish Williams, much as he was banished from Massachusetts by the Puritans, to make room for a statue of three early crusaders for women’s rights _ the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

That 13-ton marble statue of the women has been tucked away in a downstairs corridor where its been languishing since shortly after 1921 when it was presented to Congress and briefly displayed in the Rotunda. Women’s groups have been lobbying for more than 30 years to have it restored.

In their resolution, the Baptist Joint Committee, an umbrella group of most Baptist denominations and agencies except the Southern Baptist Convention, describe Williams as”the primary architect of the lively experiment of church-state separation as the necessary corollary of religious liberty.” In addition to the Baptists, another group has now weighed in _ not so much against Williams or against the women as against the women’s statue in its current form.

The National Political Congress of Black Women, which originally supported the suffragist side now says it wants it kept out because the trio of women leaders should include a fourth _ Sojourner Truth, the former slave, abolitionist and champion of voting rights for women.

C. DeLores Tucker, chairwomen of the group, said Truth’s likeness should be chiseled onto an unfinished part of the monument.”For it to represent suffragists, it would have to have Sojourner Truth,”Tucker said.”History has been distorted enough. We don’t need it distorted again.”

WHO suggests banning human clone experiments

(RNS) The World Health Organization (WHO), an agency related to the United Nations, says attempts to clone human beings are ethically unacceptable and should be banned.”WHO considers the use of cloning for the replication of human individuals to be ethically unacceptable,”Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the United Nations agency, said in a statement released Tuesday (March 11).

A WHO group that researched medically assisted human reproduction and related ethical issues said it supports the freedom of scientific research, but it also stressed the need to prohibit”extreme forms of experimentation, such as human cloning,”Reuters reported.

The statement was released after British researchers, who successfully cloned a sheep, announced that human cloning was within the realm of possibility if scientists wanted to do it.

Nakajima said human cloning would”violate some of the basic principles which govern medically assisted procreation,”including respect for human dignity and the responsibility to protect human genetic material.”WHO would like to propose that these guiding principles should serve as a starting point for the public debate required at national and international levels to establish the necessary norms and safeguards,”Nakajima said.

But the organization emphasized that its opposition to human cloning does not mean it favors an indiscriminate ban on all cloning research or procedures. According to Nakajima, animal cloning can allow scientists to make progress in the fight against cancer and other diseases.

Lutherans look again at Christian citizenship, church and state

(RNS) The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, saying that there has been significant changes in the understanding of church-state relations and religious freedom over the past 30 years, will revisit the issue to”clarify, develop and deepen a Lutheran approach to this area for today’s context.””We haven’t, as Lutherans, done a lot with the subject since the 1960s, when significant work was done,”the Rev. John Stumme, ELCA associate director for studies said in announcing the new project.

Robert W. Tuttle, associate professor at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said one of the themes the project will undertake is that of”Christian citizenship”and what it means to be”dual citizens _ members of religion and society.” Tuttle insisted, however, that the denomination was not merely going to work out a new church-state policy for application to current political issues.”It really is a project about how we can be faithful Christians from this Lutheran tradition in civil life,”he said.

The project will explore a host of areas, some quite topical, such as clergy-penitent confidentiality and privilege, issues involving public and private education, and zoning laws.

Results of the study are not expected until some time in 1998.

Abortion debate rekindled in Ireland

(RNS) The debate on abortion has been rekindled in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Ireland after the Irish Times reported that a woman received an illegal abortion at a Dublin family planning clinic.

The woman later went to police and charged the clinic with a crime after she developed medical complications, the report said.

The report has renewed demands that Ireland toughen its already strict abortion laws, the Associated Press reported Tuesday (March 11).

Current law allows abortion in Ireland only in cases where a woman’s life is in danger because of her pregnancy but not in cases of rape, incest or for health concerns.

Five years ago, the abortion debate sharply divided the country when a 14-year-old said she was made pregnant by the father of a friend and requested permission to get an abortion in Britain.

After much public debate, citizens approved a Government-proposed referendum in November 1992 that gave women the right to abortions abroad and allowed family planning clinics to distribute information about foreign abortion clinics.

After the new report, however, abortion opponents are calling for a referendum that would put a categorical constitutional ban on abortion.

Despite the renewed debate and widespread calls for stricter measures, however, Prime Minister John Bruton said this week he had no intention of introducing a referendum or legislation that would redefine legal and illegal abortion cases, calling such a move”unhelpful.” Fianna Fail, the main opposition party, said it may support such a referendum. The issue could have an impact on upcoming parliamentary elections, which must be held by next January but are expected to take place this summer.

In an editorial, the Irish Times criticized the government for”running scared”on the abortion issue, and asked:”Will we accept indefinitely the moral evasion of simply exporting our abortion cases to Britain?”

Quote of the day: The Rev. Kenneth Himes, professor of moral theology at the Washington Theological Union

(RNS) The Rev. Kenneth Himes, a moral theologian at the Washington (D.C.) Theological Union, gave a recent speech at St. John’s University in Jamaica, N.Y., on the role of charity in Roman Catholic life and teaching. In his remarks, Himes criticized the giving patterns of the rich:”It is troubling … that not only do the rich give less proportionately than do the poor to charity, but in addition the philanthropy practiced by the affluent often goes to institutions which benefit themselves rather than those less well-off.”

MJP END RNS