AU Students

It may strike you as out-of-season that media outlets have been reporting on the Salvation Army this week. After all, the month of February is drawing to a close, D.C.’s 40-plus inches of snow is beginning to melt and winter is waning.

We should have at least 10 months to hold onto our pocket change before next
December rolls around and the volunteers of the Salvation Army are back in the limelight — wearing their red velour Santa hats, ringing those infamous gold
bells and erecting kettles in front of shopping malls to collect seasonal donations.

Today’s Washington Post reports that the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington has stopped running its foster-care program to avoid having to license same-sex couples.

Back in November, the Archdiocese threatened to drop contracts with the D.C. government to provide social services if the D.C. Council approved a same-sex marriage bill. Thankfully, their threats did not faze the council, which approved the measure in December.

The one-year anniversary today of the unveiling of President Barack Obama’s version of the “faith-based” initiative has pushed the issue back into the spotlight. Unfortunately, the news is not good.

Speaking at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast, Obama boasted that he had “turned the faith-based initiative around.”

I was surprised to read that statement, because everything I see indicates that we’re still fighting the same old battles over faith-based funding that erupted during the Bush years.

It’s only a week away from Thanksgiving; the trees have all turned from green to vibrant shades of reds, yellows and browns and a crisp chill in the air puts me on pins and needles as I wait for the season’s first snow. As we reach mid November, the end of the calendar year always sneaks up on me — Christmas is right around the corner and that means it’ll be New Year’s Eve before we know it.

I just got back from New York City, where I spoke at an interesting event sponsored by our friends at the Center for Inquiry.

On Tuesday night, a three-person panel discussed the issue “Church and State in the Obama Era” at All Souls Church, a Unitarian-Universalist congregation. I wouldn’t call this event a debate; it was more of a discussion of where we stand under Obama – as I put it (taking off from the title of an old Clint Eastwood Western), “The Good, the Bad and the Uncertain.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page takes a potshot at Americans United and Barry Lynn today.

That’s not surprising. The Journal’s news department is staffed by lots of skilled and professional reporters who have done some crackerjack reporting on the Religious Right over the years. Fortunately, there’s a wall of separation between those folks and the editorial page staff.

The latter is, as the saying goes, to the right of Attila the Hun.

Is Americans United for Separation of Church and State “one of the most dangerous organizations in America”?

Mat Staver seems to think so.

Staver, dean of the late Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University Law School and president of Liberty Counsel, went on a tiresome tirade about AU in today’s edition of One News Now, the wacky Wildmon family’s “news service.”

What could have provoked Staver’s ire?

When I was a kid, our church decided it would be nice to have a social hall.

It was a pretty ambitious goal. We were a medium-sized congregation serving mostly blue-collar families in an economically depressed area. But the people sitting in the pews believed in the project and gave extra to support it. Kids like me even chipped in nickels and dimes.

Americans United tends to stick to domestic church-state issues. We find that defending the church-state wall from attacks in this country is more than enough to keep us busy.

On Tuesday I had the opportunity to take my cousin Sam, visiting from London, to a luncheon at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. A political studies student at Leeds University, he was interested to learn about the impact of religion on our national politics.