c. 2008 Religion News Service
Orthodox rabbis to draft standards on ethical kosher products
NEW YORK (RNS) As the Conservative and Reform Jewish movements work to create a seal of approval for labor practices at kosher food companies, a group of Orthodox rabbis has decided to draft their own guidelines for workplace standards.
The Rabbinical Council of America, the New York-based governing body of Orthodox rabbis, has charged a task force of a dozen business ethicists and experts with coming out with the guide by January.
In contrast to the Conservative movement’s Hekhsher Tzedek initiative, which plans to create a supplemental seal to certify kosher foods as produced through fair wages and ethical working conditions, the Orthodox guide will only expect companies to comply with existing government laws.
The guide will also provide a list of Jewish principles companies can voluntarily adopt “as a matter of corporate social responsibility,” said Rabbi Basil Herring, RCA executive vice president.
“We believe that for the most part, the kosher food industry conforms to the rules and regulations, but unfortunately there have been reported cases where at least it has been alleged that there have been violations, and we want to do whatever we can to ensure that there is compliance to the extent that we possibly can,” he said.
In Iowa, the giant Agriprocessors meatpacking plant was recently charged with thousands of child labor violations, prompting some Jews to boycott its products. Under the Orthodox proposal, Herring said, the company would be innocent until proven guilty.
Rabbi Morris Allen, head of the Hekhsher Tzedek initiative, said the news showed the Orthodox movement had begun to recognize the importance of ensuring that certified foods are ethically as well as ritually kosher.
But with 3,000 companies with factories in 80 countries currently receiving kosher certifications, it’s impractical to make rabbis responsible for workplace standards, Herring said. The RCA guide will help by requiring that companies obey existing laws at a minimum, if they want to keep their kosher certifications.
“It puts companies on notice that they have to make a commitment to be good citizens,” Herring said. “They know that having a kosher supervision approval means they have additional incentive to do the right thing and to obey the law as a matter of corporate policy.”
_ Nicole Neroulias
CAIR says anti-Muslim violence is down, but profiling is up
WASHINGTON (RNS) Anti-Muslim discrimination reached an all-time high in 2007, according to a report released Wednesday (Sept. 24) by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The District of Columbia and just nine other states account for 80 percent of the civil rights complaints. California leads with one in five complaints, followed by Washington, D.C., and Illinois. The prime factors for discrimination are an individual’s ethnicity, religion or “Muslim name,” according the report.
The report said incidents of due-process issues, physical violence, denials of service or access, and verbal harassment decreased last year, but passenger profiling reports increased by 340 percent. Claims of workplace discrimination increased by 18 percent, the report said.
CAIR recently got involved in a case of religious accommodation for workers at JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plants, and has produced a pamphlet entitled “An Employer’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practices” for distribution.
Corey Saylor, CAIR’s national legislative director and author of the report, said the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes _ defined as any crime against property or person where the victim is selected because of a perceived faith _ decreased in 2007.
“We are cautiously optimistic,” said Saylor. “We hope the wave of anti-Muslim hate crimes we’ve seen through the years is starting to level off.”
Given the results of this year’s report, Saylor recommended asking elected officials and other public officials to condemn anti-Muslim bias.
“When authority figures are sending positive messages about Islam,” he said, “we find that people are less inclined to go out and commit anti-Muslim discrimination.”
_ Ashley Gipson
Falwell hopes 10,500 Liberty students help tip election
(RNS) Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. is spearheading an on-campus voter registration drive that he hopes is decisive in putting the toss-up state of Virginia into the winner’s column on Election Day.
“Wouldn’t it be something if Liberty votes were enough to change which presidential candidate won Virginia and maybe even the presidency itself?” he said in a statement published Sept. 10 in the online Liberty Journal.
Falwell, whose late father founded the Lynchburg, Va., school in 1971, announced the registration drive at a convocation. The school includes 10,500 students who are eligible to vote.
Falwell, who supports Sen. John McCain’s White House bid, canceled classes on Election Day and is providing buses to get students to and from the polls in the emerging battleground state.
Falwell said about 20 of the 26 Virginia college towns, including Lynchburg, permit college students to register to vote locally.
The university’s voting students as a whole amount to a larger number of voters than the margin of some Virginia elections, the Associated Press reported. For example, Republican George Allen lost his Senate seat to Democrat Jim Webb by about 9,300 votes in 2006.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Pearson’s `gospel of inclusion’ finds new home in Unitarian church
(RNS) Bishop Carlton Pearson, who has been publicly criticized for teaching that all people will go to heaven, has folded his Oklahoma church into a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Pearson’s New Dimensions Worship Center began meeting at the All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Okla., in June, and held its last service there on Sept. 7, the Tulsa World reported.
Pearson said he and his family would make All Souls their home church, and he encouraged New Dimensions members to worship there as well.
After leading what once was a prominent charismatic church, Pearson said he chose All Souls because of its inclusive atmosphere, accepting gays, blacks, and people of all religious beliefs or none.
“I wanted a place where my people could find safe harbor,” he told the Tulsa newspaper. “They’re already outcasts in the evangelical charismatic community.”
Senior Minister Marlin Lavanhar of All Souls said the addition of several hundred people with a black Pentecostal worship style has enlivened his mostly white congregation.
“The `amens’ and the `right ons’ pull something out of you when you preach,” Lavanhar told the Tulsa World. “There’s a lot of laughter and tears. We’ve never been so free in worship.”
Within the last decade, Pearson lost the bulk of his congregation after embracing a universalist theology. He was denounced by the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops and his church’s buses were not allowed access to his alma mater, Oral Roberts University.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Don’t overlook the poor in Wall Street bailout, clerics say
NEW YORK (RNS) Religious leaders are warning that the global financial crisis threatens progress made against poverty and world hunger, and urged political leaders not to ignore the poor while debating how to solve the current international financial panic.
“It’s a teachable moment to move the agenda of hunger and inequality in the world,” said Lorraine Dickerson, an anti-hunger advocate with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “It’s a moral imperative.”
Dickerson was one of some 75 religious leaders and representatives who attended a Wednesday (Sept. 24) interfaith consultation on global hunger. The summit parallels a meeting at the United Nations to evaluate progress on a set of development goals adopted by the U.N. in 2000.
While the religious leaders maintained a sense of hope about progress that has been made in fighting poverty, they also expressed frustration about what they saw as a disproportionate amount of money being proposed to bail out U.S. financial institutions.
“The U.S. government can come up with $700 billion for the financial system, but religious communities have been working for decades to stop hunger and poverty for pennies,” said Rev. David Beckmann, the president of the Washington-based anti-hunger group Bread for the World.
World Bank figures indicate that the number of poor people in the world has dropped from 1.9 billion in 1981 to 1.4 billion in 2005. That is proof that one of the key U.N. Millennium Development Goals _ halving extreme poverty from 1990 levels by the year 2015 _ is a possibility, he said.
However, Beckmann added that that success is “now being undercut by higher prices, particularly of food and oil.”
The religious leaders said they must now pressure governments and remind their own religious constituents of the moral imperative to keep fighting poverty amid the worsening global economy.
“Religious leaders don’t have much political power, but we do have moral influence,” said Sister J. Lora Dambroski, the president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
_ Chris Herlinger
Muslims allow guide dogs in British mosques
LONDON (RNS) British Muslim authorities have issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that allows guide dogs to enter mosques, even though Islam traditionally teaches that dogs are unclean animals.
The ruling by the Islamic Sharia Council stipulates, however, that dogs are not allowed into the prayer room and should be left in a foyer or ante-room.
The ruling arose from a request by Mohammed Abraar Khatri, an 18-year-old blind student from Leicester. The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the Muslim Council of Britain worked together to find a solution.
At the Bilal Jamia mosque where Khatri worships, a special rest area has been set up in the entrance to accommodate his guide dog, Vargo, while he is praying.
“I believe that in all new mosques such facilities for disabled people will be an essential part of their design,” said Mohammad Shahid Raza, director of the Imams and Mosques Council UK.
_ Robert Nowell
Archbishop condemns proposal to sterilize the poor
NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Roman Catholic Archbishop Alfred Hughes has denounced a lawmaker’s proposal to pay poor people to undergo sterilization as “an egregious affront to those targeted and blatantly anti-life.”
“Our lawmakers would do better to focus on policies that promote education and achievement to counteract poverty and the bigotry of low expectations, ” Hughes said in a statement Thursday (Sept. 25).
Hughes spoke out in response to a proposal by state Rep. John Labruzzo, a Republican from suburban Metairie, to combat poverty by offering poor women and men $1,000 to undergo reproductive sterilization and vasectomies. In addition, the lawmaker said he is considering whether to propose tax incentives for college-educated people to have more children.
Hughes appears to be the first major local clergyman to take a public stand on the issue, which Labruzzo broached Tuesday. Archdiocesan spokeswoman Sarah Comiskey said the Catholic Church would oppose Labruzzo’s plan in Baton Rouge if he turns it into legislation.
Hughes based his opposition on two elements of Labruzzo’s proposal: the technique of direct sterilization and the underlying purpose of manipulating the birth rate to reduce certain populations as a matter of public policy.
Catholic teaching holds that tubal ligation and vasectomy are wrong, because they rob sexuality of one of its main purposes, the transmission of life.
More broadly, the plan “would also constitute a form of eugenics that the church and this country have always condemned,” Hughes said.
Nepal names 6-year-old as `living goddess’
CHENNAI, India (RNS) A 6-year-old girl has been named by Nepal’s new Maoist-led government as a “living goddess,” or Kumari, in a town near the capital of Kathmandu.
For centuries, the chief priest of the Nepali monarchy appointed the Kumaris in several towns in the Kathmandu valley. However, with the abolition of the monarchy and the country becoming a republic last May, that position has also disappeared.
Officials at the state-run trust overseeing cultural affairs appointed 6-year-old Shreeya Bajracharya as the new Kumari of the temple town of Bhaktapur. “The government authorized us to appoint the Kumari, and we have done that for the first time,” said Deepak Bahadur Pandey, a senior official of the trust.
Shreeya, who is described as “pretty and nice,” was “enthroned” Sunday (Sept. 28) amid prayers by Buddhist priests, and will be worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike until she reaches puberty.
Devotees worship a Kumari for protection; they also believe that her blessings can cure illness. The Kumaris, who are regarded as incarnations of the goddess Kali, always wear red and have a “third eye” on their foreheads.
Shreeya replaces her controversial predecessor, 11-year-old Sajani Shakya, who retired prematurely earlier this year after nine years in the divine role. Sajani was in the news last year when she was nearly sacked from her position for traveling to the United States to promote a documentary about the Kumaris.
Sajani retired at the request of her family. Her father said at that time that her slightly early retirement had nothing to do with last year’s controversy about her U.S. visit.
_ Achal Narayanan
Watchdog group files `Pulpit Freedom Sunday’ complaints with IRS
(RNS) A Washington-based watchdog group has filed six complaints with the Internal Revenue Service after dozens of clergy participated in a challenge to rules that ban politicking from the pulpit.
At least 31 pastors took part in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” (Sept. 28), according to the initiative’s organizers at the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian law firm based in Arizona.
“These pastors flagrantly violated the law and now must deal with the consequences,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Pastors endorsed Sen. John McCain for president in five of the six churches, Lynn said.
Gary McCaleb, senior counsel with ADF, said: “It’s not a matter of separation of church and state when you’ve got the IRS in the pew. That’s oppression of free speech.”
McCaleb said 31 pastors who agreed to participate in the plan preached on Sunday. The ADF has asked the pastors, most of whom are evangelical, to send their sermons to the law firm, which plans a court challenge of the IRS rules against partisan politicking by tax exempt organizations.
Asked if all the participating pastors had endorsed a candidate for president, McCaleb said, “I think some had a pretty direct statement.” He said the goal was to find a group of pastors who supported an “exercise of faith” that could lead to a Supreme Court case.
Americans United’s complaints were filed against: Calvary Chapel on the King’s Highway, Philadelphia; Bethlehem First Baptist Church, Bethlehem, Ga.; Fairview Baptist Church, Edmond, Okla.; Warroad Community Church, Warroad, Minn; New Life Church in West Bend, Wis., and First Southern Baptist Church, Buena Park, Calif.
_ Adelle M. Banks
London home of Muhammad novel publisher attacked
LONDON (RNS) Scotland Yard has placed armed guards around the British publisher of a novel about Muhammad and his young wife Aisha that has angered some Muslims.
Police believe Muslim extremists may have been behind an attack Saturday (Sept. 27) on the London home of publisher Martin Rynja, in which gasoline was poured through the letterbox.
A fire erupted, but firefighters quickly extinguished it after battering down the front door. Little damage was reported, and there were no injuries.
Rynja heads the publishing house Gibson Square, which is scheduled to release “The Jewel of Medina,” by American author Sherry Jones, within coming weeks.
Rynja has described the volume as a “moving love story,” but some critics have termed it “softcore porn.” Anjem Choudary, a former member of the group al-Mujaharoun, told journalists that the novel “is an attack on the honor of Muhammad.”
“People should be aware of the consequences they might face when producing material like this,” Choudary said. “They should know the depths of feeling it might provoke.”
The case echoes that of novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book, “The Satanic Verses,” led to death threats from some Muslim leaders.
Rynja defended his decision to publish the novel, saying “I was completely bowled over by the novel and the moving love story it portrays.”
“I immediately felt that it was imperative to publish it,” he added. “In an open society there has to be open access to literary works, regardless of fear.”
_ Al Webb
Quote of the Week: Conscientious objector Pfc. Michael Barnes
(RNS) “I can no longer justify spending my short time in this world participating in or supporting war. … I must try to save souls, not help take them.”
_ Pfc. Michael Barnes, who was granted conscientious objector status by a federal judge on Monday (Sept. 22). Barnes was quoted by The Associated Press.
KRE/LF END RNS
