c. 2007 Religion News Service

American Legion, Legal Groups To Defend Religious Symbols on Memorials

WASHINGTON (RNS) The American Legion has joined forces with two conservative legal groups in a campaign to defend religious symbols on veterans’ memorials.

Reacting to suits by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that have challenged crosses at memorials in San Diego and the Mojave Desert, the veterans organization hopes to halt future efforts that would remove religious symbols.

“We stand here today to put the ACLU and any other organization on notice that filing self-enriching lawsuits for the removal of religious symbols that are on veterans’ memorials will not be tolerated,” said American Legion Past National Commander Tom Bock at a news conference on Thursday (May 25).

In an interview, Bock said memorial religious symbols other than crosses would also be defended.

“The religious symbols on them reflect the service of that veteran regardless of that belief,” he said. “We’re a free nation. We have many, many beliefs in this nation.”

The American Legion intends to create a private database of local veterans memorials. Two other groups, the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, and the Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute, intend to help defend city and county governments that may be sued for having religious symbols on those memorials.

Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said the symbols that often appear on veterans’ memorials “end up being majority religious symbols” and the government should not be promoting them.

“It would be better if they were planning cases that would be keeping the government out of sponsoring religious symbols,” Gunn said. “The religious symbols are things that people, families, religious institutions should all be able to post, but we should not be using the government and taxpayer dollars to be erecting religious symbols that the Alliance Defense Fund and the American Legion like.”

Gunn said the ACLU is defending Jewish War Veterans in a case seeking the removal of the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial to private land in San Diego. The ACLU won a court decision that a cross at the Mojave Desert Preserve in Barstow, Calif., is unconstitutional, but that ruling has been appealed.

_ Adelle M. Banks

Church of England to Review Sexual Abuse Policies

LONDON (RNS) Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says the Church of England is launching a review into child abuse in the wake of sex scandal convictions involving a cleric, a former choirmaster and a church warden dating back decades.

All three have been jailed, and Williams told BBC radio in an interview Friday (May 25) that “I acknowledge that errors were made in the period that is being discussed.”

The church, he conceded, had “let people down in various ways.”

Williams conceded that until 1995, the church’s “practice (involving child abuse accusations) was very variable, very uneven and often not very competent or well-informed about the law or best practice”

Williams insisted that the Church of England now has a “very clear policy” when it comes to handling child abuse cases, but he stressed that “we have got to make it work _ we have got to get this into the bloodstream.”

“We don’t just want to look good,” he said. “We want to do it properly.” And if it is deemed that an independent inquiry is necessary, he pledged, the church will seek “adequate, professional independent advice.”

In the latest abuse case cited by Williams, the Rev. David Smith of Clevedon, in southwest England, was jailed after he was convicted of the sexual abuse of six boys over a 30-year period.

The other two cases saw Peter Halliday, a 61-year-old former choirmaster from Farnborough, England, sentenced to 21/2 years in prison for sexually abusing boys in the late 1980s, and Derrick Norris, a church warden in Northampton, England, jailed for 81/2 years for abusing a young girl and sexually abusing a teen-age boy.

_ Al Webb

Religious Groups Urge Reform in World Bank Transition

(RNS) As President Bush presses his search to quickly find a successor for Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank, some religious groups and aid agencies are calling for democratic reforms in the way it and other international organizations are run.

“The nature of the current leadership change at the World Bank is a timely reminder of the need for reform in how international financial institutions are governed,” William Temu, the World Council of Churches’ director of management, said after Wolfowitz resigned on May 17.

“The democratic deficit in the selection of key leaders must be redressed,” said Temu. “Future leaders should be chosen not with outdated procedures, but with rules that more closely reflect the international common good.”

Similarly, Oxfam, the London-based international anti-hunger agency, called for an end to American control over the appointment of the World Bank president.

“The United States and other rich countries must now show that they are serious about good governance by reforming the recruitment process to allow the next head of the bank to be appointed by merit and commitment to alleviate poverty, rather than being the choice of the American president,” Oxfam director Barbara Stocking said in a statement.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday (May 22), Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank offering microcredit loans to the poor, said he hoped the Wolfowitz crisis at the bank would lead to a transformation of the World Bank.

“Convert the bank into a bank for the poor, that the poor people in the world can look up to it and say, `Yes, this is for us, we can use this,”’ he told reporters at the end of a conference on development issues in Africa.

Wolfowitz, a former deputy defense secretary, took the helm of the World Bank in 2005 with a promise to combat corruption in developing countries _ the main recipients of World Bank loans. He resigned following months of bitter controversy after he gave his girlfriend _ a World Bank employee _ a raise and promotion.

The World Bank is the global community’s principal institution committed to reducing poverty in the developing world through grants and loans. It is “owned” by more than 185 member nations and provides some $20 billion a year in loans and grants for development projects.

Even before Wolfowitz took over, the World Bank and its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, were often sharply criticized by religious and aid groups for their polices in poor countries, especially on issues such as debt relief and development policies that often focused on large-scale infrastructure projects rather than ending poverty.

_ David E. Anderson

Indian Conversion Laws Come Under Government Review

CHENNAI, India (RNS) India’s National Commission for Minorities has asked several Indian states that have adopted controversial anti-conversion laws to provide data about how many people have been convicted under the new laws.

The commission is trying to assess the reasons for, and the impact of, the anti-conversion laws passed in various Indian states, including Gujarat, Rajasthan, Orissa, Chattisgarh, and Himachal Pradesh.

Religious conversion has become a volatile social and political issue in India, where pro-Hindu political parties in some states are cracking down on Christian missionaries and social workers.

The laws stipulate that a person intending to convert from one religion to another must give at least 30 days’ notice to the district magistrate, who then “shall get the matter inquired into by such agency as he may deem fit.” Failure to give notice is punishable by a fine. No notice is required if a person reverts to his original religion, however.

In the northern state of Rajasthan, which passed its law last year, officials said the bill was necessary to prohibit religious conversion “by use of force, allurement or fraudulent means,” and to check the activities of Christian missionaries in some parts of the state. Church leaders strongly condemned the move.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party holds sway in several northern and western states _ the same areas where cases of discriminatory action against minority communities have been reported.

According to reports submitted to the federal commission, the states that already passed the law have yet to provide any evidence of forcible conversions.

Earlier this month, the commission said it opposed the anti-conversion law in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, saying: “The provision of `notice and inquiry’ … is tantamount to gross interference with the individual liberties of citizens, and would allow state functionaries to interfere in a matter of personal life and religious beliefs.”

_ Achal Narayanan

Quote of the Day: Transsexual United Methodist Pastor Drew Phoenix

(RNS) “The gender I was assigned at birth has never matched my own true authentic God-given gender identity, how I know myself. Fortunately, God’s gift of medical science is enabling me to bring my physical body in alignment with my true gender.”

_ Transsexual United Methodist pastor Drew Phoenix, 48, who was reappointed pastor of a Baltimore church by the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church after undergoing a sex-change operation and taking on a new name during the last year. He was quoted by the Baltimore Sun (May 25).

KRE/CM END RNS