By Staff, World News Magazine
PORTLAND, Ore. – Liberal groups in Portland, Ore., are taking an evangelical children’s camp to task for talking to the city’s youngest residents about Jesus.
The camps, which operate like a traveling Vacation Bible School, have endured protests, negative advertisements in local newspapers, and accusations of being a fundamentalist sect.
Child Evangelism Fellowship’s Camp Good News focuses for a week or two in different cities each year. During the school year, the group rents public school buildings to host weekly after-school activities.
CEF recently won a Supreme Court case that allowed it equal access to public schools, but the groups arrival in Portland sparked unexpected anger and protests.
Protect Portland Children formed to protest the camps.
It heavily promotes a book called The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.
It claims CES is a fundamentalist sect, teaches shame to children, and harms them psychologically with a doctrine of sin.
Mississippi Pro-lifers Sue Police for Harassment
JACKSON, Miss – Life Legal Defense Association (LLDF) filed suit July 23 against the Jackson, Miss., Police Department, for allegedly violating the First Amendment rights pro-life activists outside the state’s only abortion facility.
LLDF, a non-profit law firm representing Pro-Life Mississippi, says the police frequently threatened activists with arrest without legal basis.
The police have interpreted a statute to mean that anyone sitting or standing on the sidewalk creates an obstruction, even though the activists leave about 4 feet of space on the sidewalks said Allison Aranda, senior staff counsel at LLDF.
“The Jackson Police Department has routinely harassed pro-life citizens, who have been peacefully exercising their legal right to oppose abortion in the public square and offer information about life-affirming alternatives to women seeking abortion,” LLDF president Dana Cody said.
The city can’t provide comment on the pending suit, a city spokesperson told The Clarion-Ledger.
Conservatives Cheer Obama Nominee for Religious Liberty Post
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Barack Obama got rare commendations from conservatives on July 21 when he announced his nominee for a long-vacant State Department post charged with advocating for religious minorities around the world.
If confirmed, Rabbi David Saperstein will be the first non-Christian appointed as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. He has worked for 30 years with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which he currently leads.
Saperstein teaches law at Georgetown University and serves as one of Obama’s faith-based advisors.
The State Department position has been vacant since Obama’s previous nominee, Suzan Johnson Cook, resigned in October.
Conservatives have clamored for a new ambassador as conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia took brutal, religiously based turns for the worse.
Latest Pro-life Efforts Target Abortion Tourism
Pro-life abortion restrictions taking hold across the country are having unintended consequences in a few states with less regulation: women traveling across state lines to kill their babies.
Half of the abortions performed in Kansas, more than a third of those in North Dakota, and almost a quarter in Tennessee are considered “out of state,” according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Overall abortion rates in all three states decreased between 2008 and 2011– 35 percent in Kansas, 14 percent in North Dakota, and 15 percent in Tennessee.
But pro-life activists hope to see those numbers drop even further with new laws designed to cut down on abortion tourism.
Atheist Group Court Victory Could Prove Good for Churches
WASHINGTON, D.C. – An atheist group reached a settlement earlier this month with the Internal Revenue Service over stronger enforcement of policies against “church politicking,” and at least one religious freedom group is thrilled, claiming the IRS investigation could be “a good thing” in the long run.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has been campaigning to overturn the portion of the tax code that prohibits nonprofit organizations from “intervening in political campaigns as a condition of their tax-exempt status.”
To bring an end to what the ADF believes is an unconstitutional restriction on churches, it has organized the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday since 2008, for which it encourages pastors to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech — including political speech —f rom the pulpit and send copies of their sermons to the IRS.
Once the IRS attempts to take away a church’s tax-exempt status, ADF will represent the church free of charge and seek to declare the law unconstitutional, said Eric Stanley, senior counsel with ADF.
China’s Crackdown on the Cross Spreads
Three months after Chinese officials ripped down the gigantic Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou, the number of churches facing persecution—whether that means demolition, cross removal, or threatening notices—in Zhejiang province has reached into the hundreds, according to Texas-based Christian human rights group ChinaAid.
Every few days, news of cross removals and confrontations between church members and police streams out of the region. ChinaAid has compiled many of the reports into a list that is maintained on its websitewww.chinaaid.org.
The government claims the demolitions are part of a three-year campaign to deal with “illegal structures” in Zhejiang, but authorities have only focused their attention on churches.
Many fear the recent crackdown is the beginning of a nationwide campaign to slow the rapid growth of Christianity in the country.
The past few weeks saw a number of clashes.
On July 21, fourteen members of Salvation Church in Pingyang County were injured as more than 100 government officials broke through a human wall the congregants had formed around their church.