Today's Cultural Warfare Update
Jun. 24th, 2005 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdMore pharmacists are joining the "refuse to dispense" movement - and it's spreading to other drugs, too, such as painkillers;
Bush speaks to SBC - repledges support for anti-marriage amendment;
MSNBC talks about the fundamentalist-fueled "reparative therapy"/"ex-gay" push from the social right;
Ohio local effort to remove gay-community newspaper from library;
Kelo vs. New London - full texts of a terrible decision;
Focus on the Family: judicial compromise will fall apart at the next Supreme Court nomination;
Christian Coalition board member attacks new liberal Christian group as "disgusting";
FotF, AFA condemn Uniting American Families Act, which would aid gay and lesbian couples with immigration, as another attempt at "redefining marriage";
FotF attacks medical marijuana, calling San Francisco medical marijuana dispensaries "fronts" for drug dealing;
FotF action item against Howard Stern's show on E! - they're not ordering new episodes, but will continue airing old ones - they want all the shows off the air;
Kansas Senator Sam Brownback holds Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights subcommittee meeting on Roe v. Wade with specific and stated attempt to push for overturning it;
Another FotF attack on a liberal Christian group; "A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... pushing the homosexual agenda, pushing for abortion rights -- those things have nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
FotF newsbrief: House of Representatives passes flag "desecration" amendment - Senate to consider after Independence Day;
Today's Family News in Focus;
Rolling Stone on the abstinence "purity" movement amoungst the young-adult Christian right, and some of the inevitable weirdness that falls out of that - "Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife and the Lord," "masturbands," and so on.
----- 1 -----
AMA: Physicians Charge Pharmacists With Interference in Medical Care
By Peggy Peck, Senior Editor, MedPage Today
June 20, 2005
http://www.medpagetoday.com/tbindex.cfm?tbid=1215&topicid=88

CHICAGO, June 20-The American Medical Association's policy-making body voted today to press for state laws that would allow physicians to dispense medications when there is no nearby pharmacist willing to dispense the prescribed drugs.
The new AMA policy is an attempt to overcome what doctors say is a stampede of pharamacists who say they cannot in good conscience dispense certain medications. The issue of conscientious refusal was first raised when some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraception pill, called Plan B. Additionally some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills.
But AMA delegates say the conscience-based refusals have now spread to psychotropic drugs and pain medications.
The new AMA policy states that doctors should be allowed to dispense medications when there is no "willing pharmacist available within a 30 mile radius." That change would require change in state laws regulating both doctors and pharmacists.
The AMA House of Delegates' action went beyond initiatives that had been discussed at reference committee hearings.
The doctors say that many pharmacists compound their refusal to fill prescriptions by not returning the unfilled prescriptions to patients, thereby stymieing efforts to turn to other pharmacists.
"It's not just contraceptives," said Mary Frank, M.D., a family physician from Mill Valley, Calif., during a discussion of the issue. "It's pain medications and psychotropics. And not only are the patients not getting prescriptions filled, but pharmacists are refusing to return the prescriptions and they are lecturing the patients about the drugs."
[more at URL]
----- 2 -----
Bush calls for gay-marriage amendment
President reassures religious conservatives at Baptist meeting
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8303545/
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 2:01 p.m. ET June 21, 2005
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Reviving a major plank of his re-election campaign, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Tuesday.
The president’s address to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention — the fourth year in a row he has spoken to the conservative evangelical gathering — was crafted to rally the social religious conservatives who make up a crucial part of Bush’s governing coalition. He restated his commitment to issues dear to conservatives’ hearts, notably his opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and research on human embryonic stem cells — a stance he calls the “culture of life.”
“We will continue to build a culture of life in America, and America will be better off for it,” Bush said by satellite hookup from the White House.
Bush’s remarks were similar to those he made last year, when he said he would work to uphold marriage as he sought to solidify his religious conservative base ahead of the November election. He thanked the 11,077 “messengers” who made the trek to Nashville this year for defending “the values that carry a moral society, for ... defending the family and the sacred institution of marriage.”
But the message has extra resonance this year. The president’s ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is being challenged in Congress, even by some in his own Republican Party, and the likelihood of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s imminent retirement promises a free-swinging ideological battle in the Senate.
[More at URL]
----- 3 -----
'Healed' by God
Conservative Christians hold conference to 'cure' gays
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 2:34 p.m. ET June 23, 2005
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - When activists for gay and lesbian causes gather outside a church near Seattle this weekend, they will have many critical things to say about how conservative Christian institutions have treated them.
Inside Northshore Baptist Church, where Focus on the Family will be preaching that homosexuality can be “healed” by the power of God’s love, Christian counselors will be making much the same point.
In addition to “powerful stories of ex-gay men and women,” people attending the Love Won Out conference will hear “a challenge to the church,” said Dr. Bill Maier, a child and family psychologist who is one of the event’s main speakers. Another is the Rev. Nancy Heche, the mother of Anne Heche, the actress who famously married a man after living a widely publicized lesbian life with comedian Ellen DeGeneres.
“Leaders of Love Won Out are very forthright in stating that the church has often fallen short when it comes to the homosexual community,” Maier, vice president and resident psychologist of Focus on the Family, said in an interview.
To be sure, Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs-based ministry run by James Dobson, perhaps the most influential evangelical figure in the nation today, would agree with detractors of Love Won Out about very little else. At the one-day event, which is held a handful of times a year, ministers, psychologists and counselors who say they have left homosexuality behind them make the case for “reparative therapy” — the hypothesis that homosexuality is not innate and can be “repaired.”
The latest conference sets up shop Saturday in suburban Bothell, Wash. — amid Seattle’s annual Gay Pride Festival, which drew more than 120,000 people last year. Needless to say, gay rights activists plan protests, and they will follow up July 9 with their own Love Welcomes All event.
[More at URL]
----- 4 -----
*At One Suburban Library, Gay Paper Rankles Some *
By Mark Fitzgerald
Editor and Publisher: America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry
Published: June 23, 2005 9:00 PM ET
http://209.11.49.220/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000967697
*CHICAGO* Potential advertisers get mad at Gay People's Chronicle when it rejects graphics or text that violate its standards of decency. But the Cleveland-based free-distribution weekly, which circulates throughout Ohio, tells them it has a reason for standing firm.
"One of the things we do say to them is, these papers go to libraries, and we don't want anything in there that would not be appropriate for a library," Managing Editor Patti Harris said in a telephone interview.
That's why Harris was surprised to learn Thursday that a small group of residents in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington, Ohio, went to the local library's Board of Trustees last week to demand that it stop permitting free distribution of Gay People's Chronicle in the building's lobby.
According to an account in the Upper Arlington News by reporter Katy Waters, a handful of people led by resident Mark Bloom said the Chronicle and another free-distribution gay paper, Outlook Weekly, were "smut" with offensive ads that should not be in a library environment.
"This is the first we're hearing of any complaints at all," the Chronicle's Harris said. The 20-year newspaper considers itself a "very legitimate news source" with strict standards for what advertising is acceptable, she said.
"We don't have anything pornographic, or anywhere near that," she added. "I mean, this paper ends up on my mother's coffee table. If they want to target the Gay People's Chronicle as content-offensive, they're going to have to look pretty hard to find it. Unless the word 'gay' offends them, and then there's nothing I can do about it."
[More at URL]
----- 5 -----
Link to Kelo vs. New London decision that said gifts to private corporations can constitute "public use" and thereby justify property seizure, full texts:
http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZD.html
[Ed. Note: I'm including this not just because I think it's a blindingly wrongheaded decision - c.f. cases like this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/60minutes/main575343.shtml
...now having the green light to go ahead and the violence done to personal property rights, but also because:
1. The Republican theocons now have a great new argument in their judicial appointments, and
2. The political ramifications of local governments being able to seize properties at will should be, well, obvious. All you have to do is look at the historical patterns of "urban renewal" to see how this kind of thing will go.]
----- 6 -----
An 'Extraordinary' Muddle
by Candi Cushman, associate editor, Citizen Magazine
Focus on the Family
SUMMARY: The days of the judicial-filibuster compromise
are numbered.
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/commentary/a0036963.cfm
The scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill these days is that the
McCain compromise will vanish as soon as a Supreme Court
nomination appears.
That's because the so-called compromise has that one huge
loophole: It allows Democrats to filibuster (and thereby
block an up-or-down vote on) any nominee they define as an
"extraordinary" circumstance.
And if Democrats' recent behavior is any indication,
"extraordinary" will be used as a ruse for discriminating
against judges who give even the slightest hint of holding
pro-life views or having faith in God.
"Any agreement that opens filibusters to individual
interpretation of what 'extraordinary' is -- especially
when 'extraordinary' in the past has been defined by
Justices Miguel Estrada . . . Pricilla Owen and Janice
Rogers Brown -- is something that I will be very suspect
of," Majority Leader Bill Frist told Citizen.
"It's like having a large barn door through which you
could drive either a very small carriage . . . or a
tractor-trailer."
Many senators are betting on the tractor-trailer.
"I can imagine them defining anybody going onto the
Supreme Court as an 'extraordinary circumstance,' " Sen.
George Allen, R-Va., told Citizen. "Ultimately, we're
going to have to push the constitutional option."
That option, which was stopped short by the Senate
compromise deal, would change Senate rules to force a
fair, up-or-down vote on all court nominees.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., shared a similar view.
If "you don't rule with the Roe v. Wade crowd strictly and
abortion-on-demand at any time during pregnancy, you are
in big trouble if you are being nominated for a judge up
here," he said.
[More at URL]
----- 7 -----
THE CHRISTIAN LEFT IS GETTING ORGANIZED
A new political group seeks to counter the Christian right.
Focus on the Family
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0036956.cfm
SUMMARY: A new political group seeks to counter the
Christian right.
The Christian Alliance for Progress is aligned with the
political left and its leaders make it clear the goal is
to counteract the strong conservative and pro-life views
of most Christian organizations.
The Rev. Timothy Simpson, the new group's director of
religious affairs, said the religious right has been
successful in using the language of faith to promote what
he called a "divisive agenda."
"We understand the Gospel in very different ways," he
said, "and believe even further that the demands of the
Gospel in areas of public policy are quite different from
the direction that's being taken by the religious right."
Simpson said that different direction includes a stand in
favor of abortion.
"I'm not willing to extend rights to a fetus that would
trump the rights of a desperate woman," he said. "I don't
think our organization is either."
Billy McCormack, senior pastor of University Worship
Center in Shreveport, La., and a charter board member of
the Christian Coalition, is disgusted with the new
alliance.
"They're trying to legitimize their baselessness with a
cloak of religion," he said. "It's not progress at all.
It's an invitation to a downwards moral and spiritual
decline."
[More at URL]
----- 8 -----
Act Would Give Marriage Rights to Foreign Same-Sex Couples
by Bill Wilson, Washington, D.C., correspondent
SUMMARY: Pro-family groups see it as another move toward
redefining marriage to include gays.
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0036954.cfm
Rep. Jerrold Nadler has introduced legislation that would
give same-sex couples who are not U.S. citizens
marriage-like rights to help them remain together.
The New York Democrat said it isn't fair to split
homosexual couples if one of their visas runs out and
forcing a move back to their country of origin, so he
introduced the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA).
"The UAFA will help to ensure that the U.S. immigration
and naturalization code conforms to this fundamental
constitutional principal," he said, "by treating a gay or
lesbian permanent partnership the same as a civil marriage
between a man and a woman for visa and immigration
purposes."
Chris Labonte, legislative director for the pro-gay Human
Rights Campaign called U.S. immigration law
"discriminatory."
"Most of us here today who have worked on these issues
know countless stories of couples and families that have
been torn apart or forced to leave this country," he said,
"due to unfair and inequitable immigration laws that
discriminate against bi-national same-sex couples and
their families."
But the Rev. Don Wildmon, chairman of the American Family
Association, said the bill, which is not expected to pass,
is just another attempt to legalize same-sex marriage.
"The liberals are going to try anything and everything
they can," he said. "This is simply just another avenue to
try to do that."
----- 9 -----
Agents Raid Medical Marijuana Clubs
Focus on the Family
Newsbriefs
[Received in email; no URL]
Just two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of
federal jurisdiction over medical marijuana, federal
agents visited three San Francisco medical marijuana
dispensaries as well several other growing sites and
residences as part of an investigation into marijuana
trafficking in the city, the New York Times reported.
"The investigation led the authorities to these sites,"
said one law enforcement official. "It involves
large-scale marijuana trafficking and includes other
illicit drugs and money laundering."
Advocates of medical marijuana were upset by what appeared
to be a federal crackdown on the use of the drug by those
with chronic illnesses.
"This is an affront to patients and should not be
happening," said Kris Hermes of Americans for Safe Access.
But law enforcement agents said the investigation into the
criminal activity began long before the Supreme Court
decision because the city had seen an increase in clubs
that presented themselves as havens for those who wanted
to smoke marijuana for medical reasons. The 40-plus clubs
in operation are largely unregulated and many residents
have complained the operations are little more than fronts
for drug dealers.
----- 10 -----
Howard Stern's TV Show Nearing an End
Focus on the Family
[Received in email; no URL]
E! Entertainment Television announced Wednesday it will no
longer air new episodes of the TV version of shock-jock
Howard Stern's radio show -- the last new program will
appear on the network July 8.
Though reruns of "The Howard Stern Show" will appear
periodically, network President Ted Harbert said, "It is
time for our late-night programming to evolve."
Stern's radio show will move to Sirius Satellite Radio in
January.
TAKE ACTION: If you'd like to encourage E! to completely
drop Stern from its network, you can send a message here:
http://www.eonline.com/Help/index.html
----- 11 -----
Brownback Sets Sights on Roe
by Pete Winn, associate editor
Focus on the Family
http://www.family.org/cforum/feature/a0036950.cfm
SUMMARY: Kansas senator to hold hearings on whether the
Supreme Court's infamous 1973 abortion ruling may have
been bad law after all.
U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback believes a hearing he's holding
Thursday on Capitol Hill could eventually lead to the
overturning of the Supreme Court's infamous Roe v. Wade
decision.
Brownback, R-Kan., will convene the Senate Judiciary
Committee's Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights
subcommittee to examine the consequences of Roe v. Wade
and Doe v. Bolton, the other 1970s-era Supreme Court
decision that helped give America abortion on demand.
"A number of legal scholars both from the left and the
right believe that Roe v. Wade is badly decided law, so
we're going to start going at the core issue of Roe and
this decision," Brownback told CitizenLink. "I believe
you'll see Roe v. Wade overturned."
Norma McCorvey (the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade) and Sandra
Cano ("Jane Doe" of Doe v. Bolton) are expected to be
witnesses at the hearing. Though they were used three
decades ago by pro-abortion attorneys to advance the
leftist agenda, both women have become pro-life -- and
denounced the very decisions now identified by their
pseudonyms.
Also expected to testify: Dr. Ken Edelin, associate dean
of the Boston University School of Medicine; Teresa
Collett, professor of law at the University of St. Thomas
Law School in Minneapolis; M. Edward Whelan, president of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.;
R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics and
associate dean for research and faculty development at the
University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wis.; and
Karen O'Connor,
professor of government at American University,
Washington, D.C.
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family
Action, said it's about time such a hearing was scheduled.
"It's a dirty little secret of the legal profession that
(Justice) Harry Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade was not
very rich in constitutional underpinnings," Hausknecht
explained. "It looked for a result and struggled to obtain
that any way it could."
The real question, though, is can Roe v. Wade really be
overturned?
"All an overturning of Roe v. Wade would do," Hausknecht
said, "is put the whole issue back in the 50 state
legislatures -- where it belongs, anyway. That's something
that most conservatives are comfortable with.
"Ultimately, I want to see abortion gone from all 50
states, but it's important to eliminate this as a federal
'constitutional right' -- which has been the effect of Roe
v. Wade."
It's no surprise that conservative jurists tend to think
Roe is bad law. Indeed, three of the high court's sitting
justices -- Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Antonin
Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas -- have all said they
think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.
[More at URL]
----- 12 -----
Faith with a Liberal Twist Hits the Political Trail
Focus on the Family
Newsbriefs
[Received in email; No URL]
A group of left-leaning Christian leaders have started a
grassroots movement to "reclaim Christianity and transform
American politics," Religion News reported.
The Christian Alliance for Progress held a launch event
Wednesday morning at the National Press Club's First
Amendment Lounge in Washington, D.C. The group announced
plans to pursue a laundry list of issues, including
economic justice, responsible environmental stewardship,
"equality" for gays and lesbians, seeking peace instead of
war and achieving health care for all Americans.
"The religious right has been extremely successful at
taking control of the language of our faith and using it
to promote an extreme and divisive political agenda," said
the Rev. Timothy Simpson, the group's director of
religious affairs. "This is fueling incredible
polarization in our politics.
"We think that most Americans, especially people of faith,
are ready to hear from Christians who are tolerant, and
who understand the many ways that our faiths impact our
views of public life."
Peter Brandt, senior director of issues response at Focus
on the Family Action, said this attempt to dress the
liberal agenda in the fabric of faith is a ploy that
doesn't sit well with conservatives.
"A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf," he said.
"Pushing the homosexual agenda, pushing for abortion
rights -- those things have nothing to do with the Gospel
of Jesus Christ."
----- 13 -----
Flag-Burning Amendment Passes House
Focus on the Family
Newsbriefs
[Received in email; no URL]
A proposed constitutional amendment that would make it
illegal to desecrate the American flag passed the House on
Wednesday by a vote of 286 to 130 -- eight more votes than
needed for approval.
If passed, the amendment would simply read: "The Congress
shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of
the flag of the United States."
A 1989 Supreme Court decision ruled that flag-burning was
a protected right of free speech, but many supporters of
the amendment, such as U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham,
R-Calif., have seen patriotism deepen in the country since
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Ask the men and women who stood on top the (World) Trade
Center," Cunningham said. "Ask them and they will tell
you, 'Pass this amendment.' "
In order for the language of the Constitution to be
changed in any way, the amendment must be approved by both
the House and the Senate then be approved by 38 states
within seven years. The Senate will consider the measure
after the July 4th holiday.
----- 14 -----
Family News in Focus
Friday, June 24, 2005
Focus on the Family
http://www.oneplace.com/Ministries/Family_News_in_Focus/
* Bill is introduced in Congress designed to give tax-credits to families who work from home and don't send kids to daycare
1. "Single parents are even harder hit" than most families by cost of living increases. "Comprehensive tax reform for parents who choose to work from home." Upset about tax breaks for costs of child care, so trying to give similar tax credits for staying at home. Family Research Council "first step towards equalising the tax code for at-home working families."
* Episcopal conservatives against a gay clergy is supported in high Anglican councils
3. Anglican Consultive Council censures Episcopal Church USA for allowing gay clergy. Episcopal Church now banned from serving on several church councils (the ACC and its subcommittees) - both EC USA and Anglican Church of Canada. "It gives us some hope that [we've] been heard." EC USA downplays decision, noting they weren't scheduled to sit on any such councils anyway. Father Don Armstrong, Angligan Communion Institute: "Liberals, though they will try to spin this as people are beginning to listen and change their mind and we just need more listening - liberals need to understand that in fact they're the ones that need to listen." Frust(?): "These are issues that are about the gospel of Christ, who is Jesus Christ? What is the authority of scripture? Sexuality is simply the presenting symptom of a much deeper disease." "A disease everybody except US Episcopals are beginning to take seriously."
* Study shows friendships between women are more enduring than those of men, and devastating if it falls apart
7. "Friendships for women are intense experience." "As Christians, all the ladies agree that the conflict has deeper meaning" [than for men?] "God has wired women for friendships." "When women enter into friendships with other women, is it a power such as the world has never seen."
* 16 Democrat Senators pen letter to President complaining about head of Corporation for Public Broadcasting wanting to bring greater political balance to public television
5. "Greater editorial balance at PBS television." Complaining about Ken Tomlinson's actions against PBS. "You and I both know that public television is never going to turn right wing. What we're simply seeking here is balance." Accuracy in Media: "The liberal Democrats are obviously upset that he's threatening the liberal dominance and control over public television." "Why should he step down or resign for doing his job?"
* Southern Baptist Convention has joined Focus on the Family and American Family Association in ending boycott against Disney
4. Claiming victory and running away.
* House has voted "for" the American flag, but what lies ahead in Senate?
2. Supporters hopeful. Citizens Flag Alliance: "We've been at this for more than 10 years now... we have a group of 186 organisations who all believe in one thing, that is to return to the people their right to protect their flag."
* Ad campaign in support of President's choices in event of a Supreme Court vacancy gets underway - to the tune of $18 million
6. "Progress for America" ad campaign for the upcoming Supreme Court nominations. "Pre-empt and blunt the expected all-out Democratic attack." "They have no idea that the future of this country is going to be determined maybe in the next few months."
----- 15 -----
The Young & the Sexless
A new generation of young men and women is embracing celibate life
By JEFF SHARLET
Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7418688/?pageid=rs.News&pageregion=single1&rnd=1119561057312&has-player=false
What if the true face of the Christian right in America is not that of Dr. James Dobson or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; not that of an aging, comb-over preacher orange with pancake makeup, smiling orca rows of ungodly white teeth on The O'Reilly Factor or Hardball? Nor that of spittle-flecked Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas, roaring that God hates fags? What if the true face of the Christian right is, instead, that of a twenty-four-year-old religious-studies graduate student at New York University?
Matt Dunbar is a handsome young man, though his face is still ruddy with acne. He has rounded cheeks, a soul patch beneath his lips and soft eyes that hold yours like he trusts you. He's not a prude. He will say the word "fuck," but he will never, not even in the wedding bed he hopes God has prepared for his future, embody it as a verb. He will make Christian love. What most of us call sex he calls communion, and he believes it can happen only within marriage.
Chastity is a new organizing principle of the Christian right, built on the notion that virgins are among God's last loyal defenders, knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom. Sex outside of marriage is, in the words of D. James Kennedy, pastor of the influential Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, "an uprising against God." But if sex is the perfect enemy of the blessed lifestyle, it is also the Holy Grail for those who wait: "A symphony of the soul for married couples," according to John Hagee, author of What Every Man Wants in a Woman.
"Abstinence," says Dunbar, "is countercultural," a kind of rebellion, he says, against materialism, consumerism and "the idea that anything can be bought and sold." It is a spiritual war against the world, against "sensuality," according to one virginity manual popular with men like Dunbar. This elevation of virginity -- especially for men -- as a way of understanding yourself and your place in the world is new. It's also very old. First-century Christians took the idea so seriously that many left their wives for "house monasteries," threatening the very structure of the family. The early church responded by institutionalizing virginity through a priestly caste set apart from the world, a condition that continues to this day within Roman Catholicism. Now, though, the Protestants of the Christian right are reclaiming that two-tiered system, only they're projecting it onto individual lives, making every young man and woman part of an elite virgin corps.
"The world hasn't yet seen what God can do with an army of young men free of sexual fevers," write the authors of Every Young Man's Battle, one volume in a hugely popular series of "purity" manuals. "You can remain pure so that you might qualify for such an army."
It's a never-ending war, and not one that can be fought alone. Which is why virgins like Dunbar tend to travel in packs, to church and to Bible studies but also to parties and even to bars. Dunbar and his friends help one another stay "pure," which they consider "authentic." He lives with three close friends in a warehouse apartment in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn hipster neighborhood of artists and slackers. Two of his roommates are virgins; the other, a Mormon named Edd Lewis, is a "recycled virgin." He's had sex but won't again until he's married.
[...]
When I first meet Power, he's working a gutter-punk look, a thick, dark beard and layers of ratty hoodies and buttons advertising deeply obscure bands. Faith, to him, is an ascetic discipline, its purity polished by constant self-criticism. "I can get aroused looking at a stoplight," he says, his giant eyes leaving mine and following a woman down Broadway. They snap back to me and he says, "Anything can be inappropriate. If I look at some woman and undress her with my eyes, that's just as bad as going down on her."
After church one day, Dunbar, Power and I sit on a bench and lean back in the sun and watch Sunday morning stroll by. "Cleavage everywhere," notes Dunbar, not disapprovingly. Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter.
[...]
One spring Sunday, the church meets in a theater on Upper Broadway. (It's since moved to a larger venue. Only three years old, the congregation is growing so fast it doesn't want to commit to real estate.) The lobby is packed and loud right up to the beginning of the service, with well-scrubbed men and women greeting one another with chaste sideways hugs. Body to body, chest to chest, says Power, is just too enticing.
[...]
Since then, the Christian right has steadily reinvented itself by co-opting the language of the sexual revolution. Pastor Nelson Searcy, a roly-poly thirty-three-year-old Jimmy Buffett fan who moved from California, "called" by God as a pastor to New York, preaches not in a suit or a collar but in a hipster's bowling shirt, and he references his Bible as often as he shows trailer clips from contemporary movies like The Stepford Wives and The Notebook. But the message remains the same: a laundry list of fundamentalist prohibitions rephrased in PowerPoint alliteration. The three proper passions -- God's presence, God's people and God's plan - combined with purity equals power. Power is the objective, the strength to stay "pure" in a world full of sexed-up heathens.
[...]
Food, in fact, is the opposite of sex among most Christian virgins. Food, after all, belongs to the material world. Sex, on the other hand, is supernatural. They read the biblical Song of Solomon -- lovers rhapsodizing over each other, he obsessed with her breasts like "two fawns" and her "rounded thighs like jewels"; she with his legs like "alabaster columns" and his lips like lilies, "dripping sweet-smelling myrrh" -- not as erotica but as a metaphor for the love between man and God. Sex that is just two bodies in motion strikes them as empty, even if love is involved. Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife and the Lord. Without that, it's just fucking.
Suckers for romance," leslee Unruh, the founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, describes men like Dunbar and Power. She means that as praise, because she considers virgins revolutionaries. "We want authenticity," she says. "We want what's real." Unruh launched Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1997. She had been a self-declared "chastity" educator since the early Eighties, but it wasn't until the Clinton years that the Christian right fully discovered sex as a weapon in the culture wars, and Unruh began working with conservative politicians.
Abstinence Clearinghouse acts as a nexus for activists and as their voice in Washington, claiming as "our friends" a who's who of the GOP's hard-right edge, Karl Rove, Sen. Rick Santorum, Sen. Sam Brownback and a slew of officials with unrecognizable names and a great deal of money to work with, abstinence crusaders in the departments of Health and Human Services and of Education. Abstinence Clearinghouse brings these people together with activists at conferences, "purity balls" and abstinence teas. It sponsors "Faces of Abstinence" around the country, good-looking young men and women who work the Christian lecture circuit spreading the no-sex gospel.
The Clearinghouse has been working with the federal Centers for Disease Control, in part to establish a "gold standard" for abstinence-only sex-education programs in public schools. Meanwhile, this year the Bush administration is backing the movement with $167 million in public funds. By statute, these programs are secular, but Unruh considers herself broad-minded enough to work within those guidelines. If religion is to be kept out of the schools, she says, "shame and conscience" are important tools in its place. But romance, more than anything else, guides her understanding of sexuality. This is what she finds romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a "purity" ring, which will be returned on her wedding day and handed to his daughter's new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.
Therein lies the paradox of the virginity movement. It is at once an attempt to transcend cultural influences through the timelessness of Scripture and a painfully specific response to the sexual revolution. The "women's lib" movement, Dunbar believes, preached a message of self-satisfaction: "Do what you want." It is, in his view and that of many in the virginity movement, a product of the same cultural mindset that produced America's booming porn industry. Both are based on instant gratification: women obsessed with winning the privileges of men rather than learning to enjoy the pleasures of Christian submission, men demanding the fast-food sexuality of explicit imagery.
But it's not just feminism that's to blame. It's also what the Christian right sees as an effeminized church. "Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men," writes John Eldredge, the author of a best-selling manhood guide called Wild at Heart. He thinks that church life in America has pacified Christian men and made them weak. Women who are frustrated with their girlie-man husbands and boyfriends seize power, and the men retreat to the safe haven of porn instead of whipping the ladies back into line. What women really want, he says, "is to be fought for." And men, he claims, are "hard-wired" by God for battle; Jesus wants them to be warriors in the vein of Braveheart and Gladiator.
[...]
The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don't stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at the Journey, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he'd slept with forty women before he re-virgined with the help of the series.
"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.) "Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly," they report. They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves. They recommend memorizing the locations of sexy billboards so that you can look away and switching your TV to ESPN or Fox News if a tempting commercial comes on the screen. And there's always Scripture. The authors hold up the books of Joshua and Ezekiel as armor against non-Christian women. "Mixture," they write, "can destroy a people."
The books' implicit disdain for non-Christian women - in Every Young Man's Battle, one name for a sexually active unmarried woman is "Betty Jo 'B.J.' Blowers" -- is matched by their reverence for the virtue of Christian womanhood. There are books that address the temptations faced by Christian women, but the Every Man series more often presents the decadence of the world as a result of men's failure to be guardians and servants of female purity.
[More at URL]
Bush speaks to SBC - repledges support for anti-marriage amendment;
MSNBC talks about the fundamentalist-fueled "reparative therapy"/"ex-gay" push from the social right;
Ohio local effort to remove gay-community newspaper from library;
Kelo vs. New London - full texts of a terrible decision;
Focus on the Family: judicial compromise will fall apart at the next Supreme Court nomination;
Christian Coalition board member attacks new liberal Christian group as "disgusting";
FotF, AFA condemn Uniting American Families Act, which would aid gay and lesbian couples with immigration, as another attempt at "redefining marriage";
FotF attacks medical marijuana, calling San Francisco medical marijuana dispensaries "fronts" for drug dealing;
FotF action item against Howard Stern's show on E! - they're not ordering new episodes, but will continue airing old ones - they want all the shows off the air;
Kansas Senator Sam Brownback holds Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights subcommittee meeting on Roe v. Wade with specific and stated attempt to push for overturning it;
Another FotF attack on a liberal Christian group; "A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf... pushing the homosexual agenda, pushing for abortion rights -- those things have nothing to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
FotF newsbrief: House of Representatives passes flag "desecration" amendment - Senate to consider after Independence Day;
Today's Family News in Focus;
Rolling Stone on the abstinence "purity" movement amoungst the young-adult Christian right, and some of the inevitable weirdness that falls out of that - "Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife and the Lord," "masturbands," and so on.
----- 1 -----
AMA: Physicians Charge Pharmacists With Interference in Medical Care
By Peggy Peck, Senior Editor, MedPage Today
June 20, 2005
http://www.medpagetoday.com/tbindex.cfm?tbid=1215&topicid=88

CHICAGO, June 20-The American Medical Association's policy-making body voted today to press for state laws that would allow physicians to dispense medications when there is no nearby pharmacist willing to dispense the prescribed drugs.
The new AMA policy is an attempt to overcome what doctors say is a stampede of pharamacists who say they cannot in good conscience dispense certain medications. The issue of conscientious refusal was first raised when some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for the emergency contraception pill, called Plan B. Additionally some pharmacists refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills.
But AMA delegates say the conscience-based refusals have now spread to psychotropic drugs and pain medications.
The new AMA policy states that doctors should be allowed to dispense medications when there is no "willing pharmacist available within a 30 mile radius." That change would require change in state laws regulating both doctors and pharmacists.
The AMA House of Delegates' action went beyond initiatives that had been discussed at reference committee hearings.
The doctors say that many pharmacists compound their refusal to fill prescriptions by not returning the unfilled prescriptions to patients, thereby stymieing efforts to turn to other pharmacists.
"It's not just contraceptives," said Mary Frank, M.D., a family physician from Mill Valley, Calif., during a discussion of the issue. "It's pain medications and psychotropics. And not only are the patients not getting prescriptions filled, but pharmacists are refusing to return the prescriptions and they are lecturing the patients about the drugs."
[more at URL]
----- 2 -----
Bush calls for gay-marriage amendment
President reassures religious conservatives at Baptist meeting
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8303545/
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 2:01 p.m. ET June 21, 2005
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Reviving a major plank of his re-election campaign, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Tuesday.
The president’s address to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention — the fourth year in a row he has spoken to the conservative evangelical gathering — was crafted to rally the social religious conservatives who make up a crucial part of Bush’s governing coalition. He restated his commitment to issues dear to conservatives’ hearts, notably his opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and research on human embryonic stem cells — a stance he calls the “culture of life.”
“We will continue to build a culture of life in America, and America will be better off for it,” Bush said by satellite hookup from the White House.
Bush’s remarks were similar to those he made last year, when he said he would work to uphold marriage as he sought to solidify his religious conservative base ahead of the November election. He thanked the 11,077 “messengers” who made the trek to Nashville this year for defending “the values that carry a moral society, for ... defending the family and the sacred institution of marriage.”
But the message has extra resonance this year. The president’s ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is being challenged in Congress, even by some in his own Republican Party, and the likelihood of Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s imminent retirement promises a free-swinging ideological battle in the Senate.
[More at URL]
----- 3 -----
'Healed' by God
Conservative Christians hold conference to 'cure' gays
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 2:34 p.m. ET June 23, 2005
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - When activists for gay and lesbian causes gather outside a church near Seattle this weekend, they will have many critical things to say about how conservative Christian institutions have treated them.
Inside Northshore Baptist Church, where Focus on the Family will be preaching that homosexuality can be “healed” by the power of God’s love, Christian counselors will be making much the same point.
In addition to “powerful stories of ex-gay men and women,” people attending the Love Won Out conference will hear “a challenge to the church,” said Dr. Bill Maier, a child and family psychologist who is one of the event’s main speakers. Another is the Rev. Nancy Heche, the mother of Anne Heche, the actress who famously married a man after living a widely publicized lesbian life with comedian Ellen DeGeneres.
“Leaders of Love Won Out are very forthright in stating that the church has often fallen short when it comes to the homosexual community,” Maier, vice president and resident psychologist of Focus on the Family, said in an interview.
To be sure, Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs-based ministry run by James Dobson, perhaps the most influential evangelical figure in the nation today, would agree with detractors of Love Won Out about very little else. At the one-day event, which is held a handful of times a year, ministers, psychologists and counselors who say they have left homosexuality behind them make the case for “reparative therapy” — the hypothesis that homosexuality is not innate and can be “repaired.”
The latest conference sets up shop Saturday in suburban Bothell, Wash. — amid Seattle’s annual Gay Pride Festival, which drew more than 120,000 people last year. Needless to say, gay rights activists plan protests, and they will follow up July 9 with their own Love Welcomes All event.
[More at URL]
----- 4 -----
*At One Suburban Library, Gay Paper Rankles Some *
By Mark Fitzgerald
Editor and Publisher: America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry
Published: June 23, 2005 9:00 PM ET
http://209.11.49.220/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000967697
*CHICAGO* Potential advertisers get mad at Gay People's Chronicle when it rejects graphics or text that violate its standards of decency. But the Cleveland-based free-distribution weekly, which circulates throughout Ohio, tells them it has a reason for standing firm.
"One of the things we do say to them is, these papers go to libraries, and we don't want anything in there that would not be appropriate for a library," Managing Editor Patti Harris said in a telephone interview.
That's why Harris was surprised to learn Thursday that a small group of residents in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington, Ohio, went to the local library's Board of Trustees last week to demand that it stop permitting free distribution of Gay People's Chronicle in the building's lobby.
According to an account in the Upper Arlington News by reporter Katy Waters, a handful of people led by resident Mark Bloom said the Chronicle and another free-distribution gay paper, Outlook Weekly, were "smut" with offensive ads that should not be in a library environment.
"This is the first we're hearing of any complaints at all," the Chronicle's Harris said. The 20-year newspaper considers itself a "very legitimate news source" with strict standards for what advertising is acceptable, she said.
"We don't have anything pornographic, or anywhere near that," she added. "I mean, this paper ends up on my mother's coffee table. If they want to target the Gay People's Chronicle as content-offensive, they're going to have to look pretty hard to find it. Unless the word 'gay' offends them, and then there's nothing I can do about it."
[More at URL]
----- 5 -----
Link to Kelo vs. New London decision that said gifts to private corporations can constitute "public use" and thereby justify property seizure, full texts:
http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-108.ZD.html
[Ed. Note: I'm including this not just because I think it's a blindingly wrongheaded decision - c.f. cases like this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/60minutes/main575343.shtml
...now having the green light to go ahead and the violence done to personal property rights, but also because:
1. The Republican theocons now have a great new argument in their judicial appointments, and
2. The political ramifications of local governments being able to seize properties at will should be, well, obvious. All you have to do is look at the historical patterns of "urban renewal" to see how this kind of thing will go.]
----- 6 -----
An 'Extraordinary' Muddle
by Candi Cushman, associate editor, Citizen Magazine
Focus on the Family
SUMMARY: The days of the judicial-filibuster compromise
are numbered.
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/commentary/a0036963.cfm
The scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill these days is that the
McCain compromise will vanish as soon as a Supreme Court
nomination appears.
That's because the so-called compromise has that one huge
loophole: It allows Democrats to filibuster (and thereby
block an up-or-down vote on) any nominee they define as an
"extraordinary" circumstance.
And if Democrats' recent behavior is any indication,
"extraordinary" will be used as a ruse for discriminating
against judges who give even the slightest hint of holding
pro-life views or having faith in God.
"Any agreement that opens filibusters to individual
interpretation of what 'extraordinary' is -- especially
when 'extraordinary' in the past has been defined by
Justices Miguel Estrada . . . Pricilla Owen and Janice
Rogers Brown -- is something that I will be very suspect
of," Majority Leader Bill Frist told Citizen.
"It's like having a large barn door through which you
could drive either a very small carriage . . . or a
tractor-trailer."
Many senators are betting on the tractor-trailer.
"I can imagine them defining anybody going onto the
Supreme Court as an 'extraordinary circumstance,' " Sen.
George Allen, R-Va., told Citizen. "Ultimately, we're
going to have to push the constitutional option."
That option, which was stopped short by the Senate
compromise deal, would change Senate rules to force a
fair, up-or-down vote on all court nominees.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., shared a similar view.
If "you don't rule with the Roe v. Wade crowd strictly and
abortion-on-demand at any time during pregnancy, you are
in big trouble if you are being nominated for a judge up
here," he said.
[More at URL]
----- 7 -----
THE CHRISTIAN LEFT IS GETTING ORGANIZED
A new political group seeks to counter the Christian right.
Focus on the Family
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0036956.cfm
SUMMARY: A new political group seeks to counter the
Christian right.
The Christian Alliance for Progress is aligned with the
political left and its leaders make it clear the goal is
to counteract the strong conservative and pro-life views
of most Christian organizations.
The Rev. Timothy Simpson, the new group's director of
religious affairs, said the religious right has been
successful in using the language of faith to promote what
he called a "divisive agenda."
"We understand the Gospel in very different ways," he
said, "and believe even further that the demands of the
Gospel in areas of public policy are quite different from
the direction that's being taken by the religious right."
Simpson said that different direction includes a stand in
favor of abortion.
"I'm not willing to extend rights to a fetus that would
trump the rights of a desperate woman," he said. "I don't
think our organization is either."
Billy McCormack, senior pastor of University Worship
Center in Shreveport, La., and a charter board member of
the Christian Coalition, is disgusted with the new
alliance.
"They're trying to legitimize their baselessness with a
cloak of religion," he said. "It's not progress at all.
It's an invitation to a downwards moral and spiritual
decline."
[More at URL]
----- 8 -----
Act Would Give Marriage Rights to Foreign Same-Sex Couples
by Bill Wilson, Washington, D.C., correspondent
SUMMARY: Pro-family groups see it as another move toward
redefining marriage to include gays.
http://www.family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0036954.cfm
Rep. Jerrold Nadler has introduced legislation that would
give same-sex couples who are not U.S. citizens
marriage-like rights to help them remain together.
The New York Democrat said it isn't fair to split
homosexual couples if one of their visas runs out and
forcing a move back to their country of origin, so he
introduced the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA).
"The UAFA will help to ensure that the U.S. immigration
and naturalization code conforms to this fundamental
constitutional principal," he said, "by treating a gay or
lesbian permanent partnership the same as a civil marriage
between a man and a woman for visa and immigration
purposes."
Chris Labonte, legislative director for the pro-gay Human
Rights Campaign called U.S. immigration law
"discriminatory."
"Most of us here today who have worked on these issues
know countless stories of couples and families that have
been torn apart or forced to leave this country," he said,
"due to unfair and inequitable immigration laws that
discriminate against bi-national same-sex couples and
their families."
But the Rev. Don Wildmon, chairman of the American Family
Association, said the bill, which is not expected to pass,
is just another attempt to legalize same-sex marriage.
"The liberals are going to try anything and everything
they can," he said. "This is simply just another avenue to
try to do that."
----- 9 -----
Agents Raid Medical Marijuana Clubs
Focus on the Family
Newsbriefs
[Received in email; no URL]
Just two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of
federal jurisdiction over medical marijuana, federal
agents visited three San Francisco medical marijuana
dispensaries as well several other growing sites and
residences as part of an investigation into marijuana
trafficking in the city, the New York Times reported.
"The investigation led the authorities to these sites,"
said one law enforcement official. "It involves
large-scale marijuana trafficking and includes other
illicit drugs and money laundering."
Advocates of medical marijuana were upset by what appeared
to be a federal crackdown on the use of the drug by those
with chronic illnesses.
"This is an affront to patients and should not be
happening," said Kris Hermes of Americans for Safe Access.
But law enforcement agents said the investigation into the
criminal activity began long before the Supreme Court
decision because the city had seen an increase in clubs
that presented themselves as havens for those who wanted
to smoke marijuana for medical reasons. The 40-plus clubs
in operation are largely unregulated and many residents
have complained the operations are little more than fronts
for drug dealers.
----- 10 -----
Howard Stern's TV Show Nearing an End
Focus on the Family
[Received in email; no URL]
E! Entertainment Television announced Wednesday it will no
longer air new episodes of the TV version of shock-jock
Howard Stern's radio show -- the last new program will
appear on the network July 8.
Though reruns of "The Howard Stern Show" will appear
periodically, network President Ted Harbert said, "It is
time for our late-night programming to evolve."
Stern's radio show will move to Sirius Satellite Radio in
January.
TAKE ACTION: If you'd like to encourage E! to completely
drop Stern from its network, you can send a message here:
http://www.eonline.com/Help/index.html
----- 11 -----
Brownback Sets Sights on Roe
by Pete Winn, associate editor
Focus on the Family
http://www.family.org/cforum/feature/a0036950.cfm
SUMMARY: Kansas senator to hold hearings on whether the
Supreme Court's infamous 1973 abortion ruling may have
been bad law after all.
U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback believes a hearing he's holding
Thursday on Capitol Hill could eventually lead to the
overturning of the Supreme Court's infamous Roe v. Wade
decision.
Brownback, R-Kan., will convene the Senate Judiciary
Committee's Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights
subcommittee to examine the consequences of Roe v. Wade
and Doe v. Bolton, the other 1970s-era Supreme Court
decision that helped give America abortion on demand.
"A number of legal scholars both from the left and the
right believe that Roe v. Wade is badly decided law, so
we're going to start going at the core issue of Roe and
this decision," Brownback told CitizenLink. "I believe
you'll see Roe v. Wade overturned."
Norma McCorvey (the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade) and Sandra
Cano ("Jane Doe" of Doe v. Bolton) are expected to be
witnesses at the hearing. Though they were used three
decades ago by pro-abortion attorneys to advance the
leftist agenda, both women have become pro-life -- and
denounced the very decisions now identified by their
pseudonyms.
Also expected to testify: Dr. Ken Edelin, associate dean
of the Boston University School of Medicine; Teresa
Collett, professor of law at the University of St. Thomas
Law School in Minneapolis; M. Edward Whelan, president of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.;
R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics and
associate dean for research and faculty development at the
University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wis.; and
Karen O'Connor,
professor of government at American University,
Washington, D.C.
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family
Action, said it's about time such a hearing was scheduled.
"It's a dirty little secret of the legal profession that
(Justice) Harry Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade was not
very rich in constitutional underpinnings," Hausknecht
explained. "It looked for a result and struggled to obtain
that any way it could."
The real question, though, is can Roe v. Wade really be
overturned?
"All an overturning of Roe v. Wade would do," Hausknecht
said, "is put the whole issue back in the 50 state
legislatures -- where it belongs, anyway. That's something
that most conservatives are comfortable with.
"Ultimately, I want to see abortion gone from all 50
states, but it's important to eliminate this as a federal
'constitutional right' -- which has been the effect of Roe
v. Wade."
It's no surprise that conservative jurists tend to think
Roe is bad law. Indeed, three of the high court's sitting
justices -- Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Antonin
Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas -- have all said they
think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.
[More at URL]
----- 12 -----
Faith with a Liberal Twist Hits the Political Trail
Focus on the Family
Newsbriefs
[Received in email; No URL]
A group of left-leaning Christian leaders have started a
grassroots movement to "reclaim Christianity and transform
American politics," Religion News reported.
The Christian Alliance for Progress held a launch event
Wednesday morning at the National Press Club's First
Amendment Lounge in Washington, D.C. The group announced
plans to pursue a laundry list of issues, including
economic justice, responsible environmental stewardship,
"equality" for gays and lesbians, seeking peace instead of
war and achieving health care for all Americans.
"The religious right has been extremely successful at
taking control of the language of our faith and using it
to promote an extreme and divisive political agenda," said
the Rev. Timothy Simpson, the group's director of
religious affairs. "This is fueling incredible
polarization in our politics.
"We think that most Americans, especially people of faith,
are ready to hear from Christians who are tolerant, and
who understand the many ways that our faiths impact our
views of public life."
Peter Brandt, senior director of issues response at Focus
on the Family Action, said this attempt to dress the
liberal agenda in the fabric of faith is a ploy that
doesn't sit well with conservatives.
"A wolf in sheep's clothing is still a wolf," he said.
"Pushing the homosexual agenda, pushing for abortion
rights -- those things have nothing to do with the Gospel
of Jesus Christ."
----- 13 -----
Flag-Burning Amendment Passes House
Focus on the Family
Newsbriefs
[Received in email; no URL]
A proposed constitutional amendment that would make it
illegal to desecrate the American flag passed the House on
Wednesday by a vote of 286 to 130 -- eight more votes than
needed for approval.
If passed, the amendment would simply read: "The Congress
shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of
the flag of the United States."
A 1989 Supreme Court decision ruled that flag-burning was
a protected right of free speech, but many supporters of
the amendment, such as U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham,
R-Calif., have seen patriotism deepen in the country since
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Ask the men and women who stood on top the (World) Trade
Center," Cunningham said. "Ask them and they will tell
you, 'Pass this amendment.' "
In order for the language of the Constitution to be
changed in any way, the amendment must be approved by both
the House and the Senate then be approved by 38 states
within seven years. The Senate will consider the measure
after the July 4th holiday.
----- 14 -----
Family News in Focus
Friday, June 24, 2005
Focus on the Family
http://www.oneplace.com/Ministries/Family_News_in_Focus/
* Bill is introduced in Congress designed to give tax-credits to families who work from home and don't send kids to daycare
1. "Single parents are even harder hit" than most families by cost of living increases. "Comprehensive tax reform for parents who choose to work from home." Upset about tax breaks for costs of child care, so trying to give similar tax credits for staying at home. Family Research Council "first step towards equalising the tax code for at-home working families."
* Episcopal conservatives against a gay clergy is supported in high Anglican councils
3. Anglican Consultive Council censures Episcopal Church USA for allowing gay clergy. Episcopal Church now banned from serving on several church councils (the ACC and its subcommittees) - both EC USA and Anglican Church of Canada. "It gives us some hope that [we've] been heard." EC USA downplays decision, noting they weren't scheduled to sit on any such councils anyway. Father Don Armstrong, Angligan Communion Institute: "Liberals, though they will try to spin this as people are beginning to listen and change their mind and we just need more listening - liberals need to understand that in fact they're the ones that need to listen." Frust(?): "These are issues that are about the gospel of Christ, who is Jesus Christ? What is the authority of scripture? Sexuality is simply the presenting symptom of a much deeper disease." "A disease everybody except US Episcopals are beginning to take seriously."
* Study shows friendships between women are more enduring than those of men, and devastating if it falls apart
7. "Friendships for women are intense experience." "As Christians, all the ladies agree that the conflict has deeper meaning" [than for men?] "God has wired women for friendships." "When women enter into friendships with other women, is it a power such as the world has never seen."
* 16 Democrat Senators pen letter to President complaining about head of Corporation for Public Broadcasting wanting to bring greater political balance to public television
5. "Greater editorial balance at PBS television." Complaining about Ken Tomlinson's actions against PBS. "You and I both know that public television is never going to turn right wing. What we're simply seeking here is balance." Accuracy in Media: "The liberal Democrats are obviously upset that he's threatening the liberal dominance and control over public television." "Why should he step down or resign for doing his job?"
* Southern Baptist Convention has joined Focus on the Family and American Family Association in ending boycott against Disney
4. Claiming victory and running away.
* House has voted "for" the American flag, but what lies ahead in Senate?
2. Supporters hopeful. Citizens Flag Alliance: "We've been at this for more than 10 years now... we have a group of 186 organisations who all believe in one thing, that is to return to the people their right to protect their flag."
* Ad campaign in support of President's choices in event of a Supreme Court vacancy gets underway - to the tune of $18 million
6. "Progress for America" ad campaign for the upcoming Supreme Court nominations. "Pre-empt and blunt the expected all-out Democratic attack." "They have no idea that the future of this country is going to be determined maybe in the next few months."
----- 15 -----
The Young & the Sexless
A new generation of young men and women is embracing celibate life
By JEFF SHARLET
Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7418688/?pageid=rs.News&pageregion=single1&rnd=1119561057312&has-player=false
What if the true face of the Christian right in America is not that of Dr. James Dobson or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; not that of an aging, comb-over preacher orange with pancake makeup, smiling orca rows of ungodly white teeth on The O'Reilly Factor or Hardball? Nor that of spittle-flecked Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kansas, roaring that God hates fags? What if the true face of the Christian right is, instead, that of a twenty-four-year-old religious-studies graduate student at New York University?
Matt Dunbar is a handsome young man, though his face is still ruddy with acne. He has rounded cheeks, a soul patch beneath his lips and soft eyes that hold yours like he trusts you. He's not a prude. He will say the word "fuck," but he will never, not even in the wedding bed he hopes God has prepared for his future, embody it as a verb. He will make Christian love. What most of us call sex he calls communion, and he believes it can happen only within marriage.
Chastity is a new organizing principle of the Christian right, built on the notion that virgins are among God's last loyal defenders, knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom. Sex outside of marriage is, in the words of D. James Kennedy, pastor of the influential Coral Ridge Ministries in Florida, "an uprising against God." But if sex is the perfect enemy of the blessed lifestyle, it is also the Holy Grail for those who wait: "A symphony of the soul for married couples," according to John Hagee, author of What Every Man Wants in a Woman.
"Abstinence," says Dunbar, "is countercultural," a kind of rebellion, he says, against materialism, consumerism and "the idea that anything can be bought and sold." It is a spiritual war against the world, against "sensuality," according to one virginity manual popular with men like Dunbar. This elevation of virginity -- especially for men -- as a way of understanding yourself and your place in the world is new. It's also very old. First-century Christians took the idea so seriously that many left their wives for "house monasteries," threatening the very structure of the family. The early church responded by institutionalizing virginity through a priestly caste set apart from the world, a condition that continues to this day within Roman Catholicism. Now, though, the Protestants of the Christian right are reclaiming that two-tiered system, only they're projecting it onto individual lives, making every young man and woman part of an elite virgin corps.
"The world hasn't yet seen what God can do with an army of young men free of sexual fevers," write the authors of Every Young Man's Battle, one volume in a hugely popular series of "purity" manuals. "You can remain pure so that you might qualify for such an army."
It's a never-ending war, and not one that can be fought alone. Which is why virgins like Dunbar tend to travel in packs, to church and to Bible studies but also to parties and even to bars. Dunbar and his friends help one another stay "pure," which they consider "authentic." He lives with three close friends in a warehouse apartment in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn hipster neighborhood of artists and slackers. Two of his roommates are virgins; the other, a Mormon named Edd Lewis, is a "recycled virgin." He's had sex but won't again until he's married.
[...]
When I first meet Power, he's working a gutter-punk look, a thick, dark beard and layers of ratty hoodies and buttons advertising deeply obscure bands. Faith, to him, is an ascetic discipline, its purity polished by constant self-criticism. "I can get aroused looking at a stoplight," he says, his giant eyes leaving mine and following a woman down Broadway. They snap back to me and he says, "Anything can be inappropriate. If I look at some woman and undress her with my eyes, that's just as bad as going down on her."
After church one day, Dunbar, Power and I sit on a bench and lean back in the sun and watch Sunday morning stroll by. "Cleavage everywhere," notes Dunbar, not disapprovingly. Power holds up his right hand. Wrapped around his wrist, in a figure eight, is a black plastic bracelet. "This," he says, "is a 'masturband.' " One of their friends at college -- Pepperdine University -- came up with the idea. As long as you stay pure -- resist jerking off -- you can wear your masturband. Give in, and off it goes, a scarlet letter in reverse. No masturband? No one wants to shake your hand. "It started with just four of us," says Dunbar. "Then there were, like, twenty guys wearing them. And girls too. The more people that wore them, the more people knew, the more reason you had to refrain." Dunbar even told his mother. He lasted the longest. "Eight and a half months," he says. I notice he's not wearing one now. He's not embarrassed. Sexuality, he believes, is not a private matter.
[...]
One spring Sunday, the church meets in a theater on Upper Broadway. (It's since moved to a larger venue. Only three years old, the congregation is growing so fast it doesn't want to commit to real estate.) The lobby is packed and loud right up to the beginning of the service, with well-scrubbed men and women greeting one another with chaste sideways hugs. Body to body, chest to chest, says Power, is just too enticing.
[...]
Since then, the Christian right has steadily reinvented itself by co-opting the language of the sexual revolution. Pastor Nelson Searcy, a roly-poly thirty-three-year-old Jimmy Buffett fan who moved from California, "called" by God as a pastor to New York, preaches not in a suit or a collar but in a hipster's bowling shirt, and he references his Bible as often as he shows trailer clips from contemporary movies like The Stepford Wives and The Notebook. But the message remains the same: a laundry list of fundamentalist prohibitions rephrased in PowerPoint alliteration. The three proper passions -- God's presence, God's people and God's plan - combined with purity equals power. Power is the objective, the strength to stay "pure" in a world full of sexed-up heathens.
[...]
Food, in fact, is the opposite of sex among most Christian virgins. Food, after all, belongs to the material world. Sex, on the other hand, is supernatural. They read the biblical Song of Solomon -- lovers rhapsodizing over each other, he obsessed with her breasts like "two fawns" and her "rounded thighs like jewels"; she with his legs like "alabaster columns" and his lips like lilies, "dripping sweet-smelling myrrh" -- not as erotica but as a metaphor for the love between man and God. Sex that is just two bodies in motion strikes them as empty, even if love is involved. Every encounter must be a kind of threesome: man, wife and the Lord. Without that, it's just fucking.
Suckers for romance," leslee Unruh, the founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, describes men like Dunbar and Power. She means that as praise, because she considers virgins revolutionaries. "We want authenticity," she says. "We want what's real." Unruh launched Abstinence Clearinghouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1997. She had been a self-declared "chastity" educator since the early Eighties, but it wasn't until the Clinton years that the Christian right fully discovered sex as a weapon in the culture wars, and Unruh began working with conservative politicians.
Abstinence Clearinghouse acts as a nexus for activists and as their voice in Washington, claiming as "our friends" a who's who of the GOP's hard-right edge, Karl Rove, Sen. Rick Santorum, Sen. Sam Brownback and a slew of officials with unrecognizable names and a great deal of money to work with, abstinence crusaders in the departments of Health and Human Services and of Education. Abstinence Clearinghouse brings these people together with activists at conferences, "purity balls" and abstinence teas. It sponsors "Faces of Abstinence" around the country, good-looking young men and women who work the Christian lecture circuit spreading the no-sex gospel.
The Clearinghouse has been working with the federal Centers for Disease Control, in part to establish a "gold standard" for abstinence-only sex-education programs in public schools. Meanwhile, this year the Bush administration is backing the movement with $167 million in public funds. By statute, these programs are secular, but Unruh considers herself broad-minded enough to work within those guidelines. If religion is to be kept out of the schools, she says, "shame and conscience" are important tools in its place. But romance, more than anything else, guides her understanding of sexuality. This is what she finds romantic: a father who gives his teenage daughter a "purity" ring, which will be returned on her wedding day and handed to his daughter's new husband, her virginity passed from man to man like a baton.
Therein lies the paradox of the virginity movement. It is at once an attempt to transcend cultural influences through the timelessness of Scripture and a painfully specific response to the sexual revolution. The "women's lib" movement, Dunbar believes, preached a message of self-satisfaction: "Do what you want." It is, in his view and that of many in the virginity movement, a product of the same cultural mindset that produced America's booming porn industry. Both are based on instant gratification: women obsessed with winning the privileges of men rather than learning to enjoy the pleasures of Christian submission, men demanding the fast-food sexuality of explicit imagery.
But it's not just feminism that's to blame. It's also what the Christian right sees as an effeminized church. "Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some terrible things to men," writes John Eldredge, the author of a best-selling manhood guide called Wild at Heart. He thinks that church life in America has pacified Christian men and made them weak. Women who are frustrated with their girlie-man husbands and boyfriends seize power, and the men retreat to the safe haven of porn instead of whipping the ladies back into line. What women really want, he says, "is to be fought for." And men, he claims, are "hard-wired" by God for battle; Jesus wants them to be warriors in the vein of Braveheart and Gladiator.
[...]
The Every Man premise is that men are sexual beasts, so sinful by nature that, without God in their lives, they don't stand a chance of resisting temptation in the form of premarital sex, masturbation and straying eyes. I first heard about the Every Man books from a volunteer at the Journey, a twenty-five-year-old man who said he'd slept with forty women before he re-virgined with the help of the series.
"Your goal is sexual purity," write Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker. "You are sexually pure when no sexual gratification comes from anyone or anything but your wife." To achieve this, they argue, men must go to a kind of war. Citing Dobson, they note the "fact" that men experience a buildup of sperm demanding "release" approximately every seventy-two hours. For single men, wet dreams, if purged of sexual imagery, can act as "God's natural release valve." (Arterburn and Stoeker believe you can actually train yourself to remove the lust from such dreams.) "Your life is under a withering barrage of machine-gun sexuality that rakes the landscape mercilessly," they report. They encourage making lists of "areas of weakness." They seem particularly concerned with shorts: "nubile sweat-soaked girls in tight nylon shorts"; "female joggers in tight nylon shorts"; "young mothers in shorts, leaning over to pull children out of car seats." To avoid these temptations, men must train themselves to "bounce" their eyes off female curves. They recommend memorizing the locations of sexy billboards so that you can look away and switching your TV to ESPN or Fox News if a tempting commercial comes on the screen. And there's always Scripture. The authors hold up the books of Joshua and Ezekiel as armor against non-Christian women. "Mixture," they write, "can destroy a people."
The books' implicit disdain for non-Christian women - in Every Young Man's Battle, one name for a sexually active unmarried woman is "Betty Jo 'B.J.' Blowers" -- is matched by their reverence for the virtue of Christian womanhood. There are books that address the temptations faced by Christian women, but the Every Man series more often presents the decadence of the world as a result of men's failure to be guardians and servants of female purity.
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