c. 2004 Religion News Service
Prescription Discount Plan Saves Methodists $348,728
(RNS) United Methodists who have signed up for an innovative church-sponsored drug discount program have saved $348,728 in prescription costs since the program was unveiled in March, church officials said.
The first-ever partnership between the United Methodist Church and DestinationRx allows participants to save up to 50 percent on prescriptions, medical supplies and even pet medicine at 30,000 pharmacies across the country. It is the first such program between a church and a drug company.
“One of the great satisfactions to me is to know that persons who needed help are getting help,” said the Rev. Mearle Griffith, president of the United Methodist Association of Health and Welfare Ministries, who helped broker the deal.
“Some people are now buying food who once had to make a choice between paying for groceries or paying for their prescriptions,” he told United Methodist News Service.
More than 31,000 people have enrolled in the free program, which is not restricted to the country’s 8.3 million United Methodists. Griffith said some local churches have used the program to help poor and needy families in their communities.
Since its debut, the program has financed $1.2 million in prescriptions to members.
Griffith said he has been approached by the United Church of Christ, Mennonite Church USA and Roman Catholics for information on developing similar programs. United Methodists, with an average member age of 57, are among the oldest of U.S. denominations.
Dan Jadosh, senior vice president of DestinationRx, said his company is pleased it can play a small role in bringing aid to the elderly and the 44 million Americans without health insurance.
“It’s not a situation that’s an end-all to fixing the problem, but it will provide help, at least,” he said.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Progressive National Baptist Convention Opposes Iraq War
(RNS) Delegates to the Progressive National Baptist Convention passed resolutions urging an end to the war in Iraq and supporting traditional marriage at their recent annual meeting.
“The Progressive National Baptist Convention Inc. calls for an end to the war in Iraq which we opposed from the beginning as being an unnecessary rush to disaster,” reads the resolution, approved during the Aug. 2-6 gathering in Houston.
“Over 900 lives have been lost, thousands have been wounded and tens of thousands will never recover from this American-Iraq tragedy.”
The Rev. Major Jemison, president of the denomination, said the resolution was a reaffirmation of a statement opposing the war made at its 2003 meeting.
“We basically support our troops but we are advocating that our president find a quick resolution to this war and bring our troops home,” he told Religion News Service.
Delegates to the meeting also declared that the denomination “upholds the institution of marriage according to the Scripture, which is the marriage of a man and a woman in holy wedlock.”
Within that resolution on “family development,” they also advocated “violence-free relationships” and monogamous marriages.
“We are aware that any healthy marriage has to be free of violence and has to be monogamous in nature in order for it to be healthy … and for it to be strong and vibrant for kids to be raised in,” Jemison said.
About 6,000 delegates passed other resolutions, including one calling for “immediate international intervention” to stop the killing in Sudan and one recommending pastors “display prophetic leadership by getting tested personally to remove the stigma of HIV/AIDS.”
The 2.5 million-member denomination has about 1,100 churches in the United States and hundreds of churches abroad in Cuba, the Bahamas, the United Kingdom and South Africa.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Britain Grants License for Therapeutic Cloning
LONDON (RNS) The decision by the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to grant the first license for therapeutic cloning has come under fire from pro-life groups in Britain.
The initial one-year research license was granted to the International Center for Life at Newcastle University. Their goal is to eventually create insulin-producing cells that could be transplanted into diabetic patients.
“After careful consideration of all the scientific, ethical, legal and medical aspects of the project, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority … agreed to grant an initial one-year research license to the Newcastle Center for Life,” the British regulatory agency said in a statement Wednesday (Aug. 11).
Describing the decision as “a deplorable further step down the slippery slope,” Jack Scarisbrick, national chairman of the anti-abortion group LIFE, said: “Cloning involves the manufacture of a new kind of human being _ one generated asexually and without traditional parentage _ with the express purpose of destroying it once its stem cells are removed. This is manipulation, exploitation and trivialization of human life of a frightening kind.”
The technique involves removing the nucleus of a human egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus from a human body cell. The egg is then artificially stimulated so that it divides and behaves like an ordinary embryo.
Scarisbrick argued that it was not necessary to clone embryos to overcome terrible diseases. “Stem cells taken from adults are likely to be just as good, if not better,” he said.
Helen Watt, director of the Linacre Center for Healthcare Ethics, which is supported by the Roman Catholic bishops of England and Wales, said she was “appalled but not surprised” at the news.
Another group, Comment on Reproductive Ethics, founded in 1994 by the anti-abortion campaigner Josephine Quintavalle, described the HFEA’s granting of a license as “a tragic decision which will result in further relentless destruction of early human life.”
It said that along with other pro-life groups it was taking legal advice as to whether the legality of the HFEA’s decision could be challenged in the courts.
_ Robert Nowell
California Supreme Court Voids Gay Marriages in San Francisco
(RNS) California’s Supreme Court on Thursday (Aug. 12) voided the marriages of nearly 4,000 gay couples who wed in San Francisco last spring, ruling that Mayor Gavin Newsom did not have the authority to flout state marriage laws.
The court said local officials are not permitted to ignore laws they disagree with, and sidestepped the larger question of whether it is unconstitutional to deny civil marriage rights to gay couples. That decision would have to come in a separate case, the court said.
“In actuality, the legal issue before us implicates the interest of all individuals in ensuring that public officials execute their official duties in a manner that respects the limits of the authorities granted to them as officeholders,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote for the court.
State law and a voter-approved ballot initiative both define marriage as between a man and a woman in California. Newsom argued both laws violate constitutional provisions that guarantee equal protection and non-discrimination.
Newsom’s challenge, along with a court ruling in Massachusetts that allowed gay marriages starting in May, prompted President Bush to publicly support a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
In a separate 5-2 vote, the court declared that the 4,000 marriage licenses issued between Feb. 12, when Newsom issued the first certificate, and March 11, when the court ordered a halt, are “void and of no legal effect.”
Several gay and lesbian couples had already filed suit in San Francisco County Superior Court challenging state laws that prohibit gay marriage; that case could eventually make its way to the state Supreme Court for a final ruling on gay marriage, the Associated Press reported.
“Although the road ahead may be a long one, I have complete faith that it will ultimately lead to justice for same-sex couples,” said the Rev. William Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Conservatives who filed suit to stop the marriage licenses hailed the court ruling and said it proved that Newsom’s open challenge to the law had backfired.
“Instead of helping his cause, Mayor Newsom has set back the same-sex marriage agenda and laid the foundation for the pro-marriage movement to once and for all win this battle to preserve traditional marriage,” said Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, which filed suit on behalf of the Campaign for California Families.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
New Testament Translated Into Near-Extinct Cornish
LONDON (RNS) The first translation of the New Testament from the original Greek into Cornish, the Celtic language akin to Welsh and Breton, was announced Friday (Aug. 13).
Cornish nearly died out in the 18th and 19th centuries but was revived in the 20th. There are thought to be some 400 fluent speakers of the language today, along with another 4,000 or so who have some knowledge of it.
Whereas Wales was rather grudgingly allowed the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer in Welsh under Queen Elizabeth I, Cornwall had an English liturgy and Bible imposed on it following the Reformation _ a factor which many believe encouraged the demise of the language.
Indeed, in the 1549 revolt against the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer, one of the objections of the Cornish rebels was that they did not understand English.
The launch of the Cornish New Testament took place in St. Petroc’s church, in Cornwall, the county at the southwest tip of England. A service to mark the appearance of “An Testament Nowydh” (Cornish for The New Testament) will be held in Truro Cathedral on Nov. 28, the first Sunday of Advent, with the participation of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, himself a Welsh-speaker.
The project of producing a Cornish Bible has its origins in initiatives by the ecumenical advisory group on Cornish language services set up in 1974 by the bishop of Truro, Graham Leonard, and his suffragan, Bishop Richard Rutt of St. Germans.
While the first translation into Cornish of a book of the New Testament appeared in 1936, and others sporadically from 1976 onwards, serious work began in 1996 with the aim of publishing a complete New Testament in 2004, the centenary of the publication of Henry Jenner’s “A Handbook of the Cornish Language,” regarded as the start of the modern revival.
Work is now going ahead on the Old Testament, and since 1997 several books have appeared in Cornish, including Exodus, the Psalms, Esther, Lamentations, the Song of Songs, and among the prophets Amos, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Haggai.
Several of the early Bible translations were not done from the original biblical languages and have been revised to correspond to the Greek or Hebrew.
According to project coordinator Keith Syed, the somewhat surprising experience of the translators is that “Hebrew seems to go more easily into Cornish than does Greek.” He suggests this may be because “Hebrew tends to be more concrete and to have a more straightforward syntax” whereas Greek (especially in the Epistles) “has a good deal of abstract thought which is sometimes difficult to render accurately.”
In Cornwall about a dozen church services take place in Cornish each year, including three carol services around Christmas.
The use of Cornish is not, however, confined to language enthusiasts. Viewers of a special Christmas Day program of “The Simpsons” being made for Britain will see Lisa running around shouting: “Rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn!” (“Freedom for Cornwall now!”) and “Kernow bys vykken!” (“Cornwall forever!”).
_ Robert Nowell
Quote of the Day: South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster
(RNS) “It is illogical and unhistorical to conclude that while a prayer for divine guidance is constitutionally acceptable, prayer to a divine being is not.”
_ South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster in a brief filed with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals differing with its ruling that a town council cannot pray to a specific god before meetings. McMaster, who was quoted by the Associated Press, joined the Great Falls Town Council in an appeal asking for the full court to rehear the case.
DEA/PH END RNS
