When Dunkerton High School in Iowa invited a Christian rock band called Junkyard Prophet to perform during a school assembly this past Thursday, they never expected to get a hate filled sermon as part of the deal. But that’s exactly what happened.

According to the Lacrosse Tribune, the message was supposed “to be about bullying and making good choices,” such as being non-violent and against drugs and alcohol. “Instead, junior and senior high students at Dunkerton High School and faculty members said they were assaulted by the group’s extreme opinions on homosexuality and images of aborted fetuses,” along with messages against strong independent women.

After the band performed their music, they separated the boys, girls, and faculty in the building, which should have been an immediate red flag. According to witnesses, the band talked to the boys about the band’s Ten Commandments and talked about musicians that have died of drug overdose. The discussion with the girls was much different. The band told them “to save themselves for their husbands and assume a submissive role in the household. The leader in that effort also forced the young ladies to chant a manta of sorts about remaining pure” and would not allow any of them to leave the room.

One parent, Jennifer Littlefield, told the Tribune about a phone call she received from her daughter after the assembly. “They told my daughter, the girls, that they were going to have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren’t virgins. I couldn’t even understand her, she was crying so hard. They told these kids that anyone who was gay was going to die at the age of 42. It just blows me away that no one stopped this.”

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/11/christian-rock-band-preaches-hate-of-lgbt-community-during-school-assembly-tells-girls-to-be-submissive-to-husbands/

NASA’s explanation is that computer specialist David Coppedge lost his status as “team lead” after his co-workers complained of harassment and was let go when the project he was working on ended. According to Caltech, Coppedge was just one of 246 JPL employees terminated last year due to budget cuts.

Coppedge, however, says “he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work.”

“The question is whether the plaintiff was fired simply because he was wasting people’s time and bothering them in ways that would have led him to being fired regardless of whether it was about religion,” professor of First Amendment law Eugene Volokh told the Associated Press, “or whether he was treated worse based on the religiosity of his beliefs.”

According to the Associated Press, Coppedge “is active in the intelligent design sphere and runs a website that interprets scientific discoveries through the lens of intelligent design. His father authored an anti-evolution book and founded a Christian outreach group. He is also a board member for Illustra Media, a company that produces video documentaries examining the scientific evidence for intelligent design. The company produces the videos that Coppedge was handing out to co-workers.”

Despite this background, his lawsuit asserts that he was not attempting to proselytize, but that his attempts to share his beliefs — combined with his support for California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 and his request that the lab’s annual holiday party be relabeled a “Christmas party” — gave him a reputation for being a conservative Christian, and that led to his demotion.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/11/nasa-faces-trial-over-alleged-discrimination-against-intelligent-design-proponent/

John Lovell is a lobbyist who makes a lot of money from making sure you can’t smoke a joint. That’s his job. He’s a lobbyist for the police unions in Sacramento, and he is a driving force behind grabbing Federal dollars to shut down the California marijuana industry. I’ll get to the evidence on this important story in a bit, but first, some context.

At some point in the distant past, the war on drugs might have been popular. But not anymore — the polling is clear, but beyond that, the last three Presidents have used illegal drugs. So why do we still put hundreds of thousands of people in steel cages for pot-related offenses? Well, there are many reasons, but one of them is, of course, money in politics. Corruption. Whatever you want to call it, it’s why you can’t smoke a joint without committing a crime, though of course you can ingest any number of pills or drinks completely within the law.

Some of the groups who want to keep the drug illegal are police unions that want more members to pay more dues. One of the primary sources for cash for more policing activities are Federal grants for penalizing illegal drug use, which help pay for overtime, additional police officers, and equipment for the force. That’s what Lovell does, he gets those grants. He also fights against democratic mechanisms to legalize drugs.

In 2010, California considered Prop 19, a measure to legalize marijuana and tax it as alcohol. The proposition gained more votes than Meg Whitman, the former eBay executive and Republican gubernatorial nominee that year, but failed to pass. Opponents of the initiative ran ads, organized rallies, and spread conspiracy theories about billionaire George Soros to confuse voters.
Lovell managed the opposition campaign against Prop 19. He told Time Magazine that he was pushing against the initiative because, “the last thing we need is yet another mind-altering substance to be legalized.”

http://www.truth-out.org/why-cant-you-smoke-pot-because-lobbyists-are-getting-rich-war-drugs/1331480883

Hollywood Scoop reports that actress and pop singer Miley Cyrus has infuriated her fans and Christians everywhere. Known as a Christian, she tweeted a quote from theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss:

You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded, because the elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the things that matter for evolution) weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in stars. So forget Jesus. Stars died so you can live."

Angry Christians who believe that God created the earth sent hateful tweets back, to which she responded, ""How can people take the love out of science and bring hate into religion so easily?" "It makes me sad to think the world is this way. Like Einstein says, 'Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.'"

http://www.goddiscussion.com/93645/pop-singer-actress-miley-cyrus-angers-christians-for-embracing-science/

John D. Rockefeller once said that he always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity. Billy Graham’s cultists sure take that to heart!

As Midwesterners try to dig out from the devastating tornadoes of last week, Billy Graham’s Rapid Response Team sees in the shredded homes, flattened trees, and devastated lives not a disaster, but an opportunity.

Opportunity to gain converts, that is.

Mere hours after tornadoes cut swaths of death and destruction across Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Alabama, Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse team — which does actual work, like helping cut up downed trees — had arrived, with the “Rapid Response Team” in tow. Their job? To proselytize to traumatized people while they’re vulnerable. Like con men showing up at funerals seeking wealthy widows, they’re after the easy marks.

"We are seeing where they are in their struggles, we are letting them know that we care about them, and that Jesus loves them. We want to help them get through the struggle – we are there to pray for them, to minister to them, and help them if they need to contact a church or other support networks in the area . . .”

[T]he response chaplains generally get is that people start looking at life from a different perspective – an eternal one."Where they were previously caught up in the business of daily life, living life day by day with no thought of eternity – now they have been faced with the fragility of life, and how life can be turned in a moment," Stiles commented.

Stiles continued, "A lot of the times we go in expecting people to be angry, and asking why God allowed this, or why didn’t God stop this – but we really don’t get that a lot . . . We are finding people who are searching.

"It gives us an opportunity to explain how much God loves them, how much God cares and has a plan for their life. It allows them to loosen the grip on this life and look to the promises the Lord has made to them."

http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/03/09/billy-grahams-proselytizing-vultures-swoop-in-after-tornadoes/

The military chaplaincy has a diversity problem and it just got worse. The chaplaincy is currently 98% Christian, 90% Protestant, and 66% “evangelistic” Christian (the denominations that may engage in a more political expression of their religion). The same denominations in the general military population are 70%, 50%, and 19% respectively. This mismatch in the diversity in the chaplaincy is a problem on its face that the military should address with aggressive training and recruitment initiatives.

Contrary to that approach, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board with the input of the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces, which accepts only current military chaplain endorsers, have updated regulations to include a new barrier to potential chaplain endorsers. Department of Defense Instruction 1304.28, the regulation governing chaplain accessions, was revised in January 2012 to include a new provision prohibiting new endorsers from using a currently serving chaplain as their first chaplain candidate. Candidates for Wiccan, pagan, Hindu, and humanist chaplains who have approached MAAF, and possibly others, have been currently-serving and fully-qualified chaplains and would have been ineligible if this new barrier had been in place.

A representative from the Armed Forces Chaplains Board indicated to MAAF that the change was intended to increase the authenticity of new endorsers and their candidates. If a chaplain were to convert, then they should focus on that conversion experience. The regulations now implement a veto authority for the military over endorser decisions and who can represent what religious community. This creates Establishment clause questions especially since the barrier is applied exclusively to new endorsers and not the “in-crowd” of current endorsers.

A lawyer working on chaplaincy and endorsement suggested the change was intended to increase the quality of endorsers. However, the change focuses exclusively on new endorsers, doing resolve the challenges of endorsers and endorsements (this link is not related to the lawyer referenced). Recommendations 3 and 4 below would go much further to improve the quality of current chaplains and their endorsers by providing for more consistent application of chaplaincy standards.

http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/03/09/98-christian-military-chaplaincy-reinforces-barriers-to-diversity/

Alexander Bede Walsh, of Church Lane, Abbots Bromley, carried out the attacks while working at children's homes and churches between the 1970s and 1990s.

Walsh, 58, was found guilty of two serious sexual offences and 19 counts of indecent assault at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court.

He was convicted of offences against boys aged between eight and 16.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17310911#TWEET98326

Pat Robertson favors legalizing marijuana, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times. Robertson called our nation's current drug policies "completely out of control," saying "Prisons are being overcrowded with juvenile offenders having to do with drugs. And the penalties, the maximums, some of them could get 10 years for possession of a joint of marijuana. It makes no sense at all."

He's right: America's prisons are full of nonviolent drug offenders, put there by a failed 40-year war on drugs. Our prisons are also full of people serving unreasonably long sentences who no longer pose real dangers to society. Our love of incarceration doesn't make sense – not from a racial justice or fiscal perspective, and, at least according to Robertson, not from a Christian perspective either.

Other Christian groups have also begun to speak out about what they feel is the religious imperative of ending mass incarceration, especially in the face of stark racial disparities. Last year, I wrote about working with Prison Fellowship to reform our broken justice system and how Catholic GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is calling for fewer prisons. The United Methodist Church's (UMC) General Board of Church and Society has taken a stark stance against the private companies that profit from mass incarceration. As Bill Mefford, director of civil and human rights for the UMC's General Board of Church and Society, wrote on our blog, there is "a renewed passion among United Methodists to end mass incarceration and to make the U.S. criminal justice system truly just and fair." And last month, Black faith communities across the nation came together at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference to discuss mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow.

Robertson's comments have snapped into focus the reality that ending mass incarceration is something the American Christian community can rally around. There are Christians who believe it is a moral imperative to address mass incarceration, especially in the face of such stark racial disparities. According to Neill Franklin, a Christian who leads Law Enforcement Against Prohibition: "If you follow the teaching of Christ, you know that Christ is a compassionate man. And he would not condone the imprisoning of people for nonviolent offenses." Robertson, Franklin, and many others demonstrate that fighting one of the largest human rights atrocities in the world, overincarceration in the U.S., can be an issue around which churches across the country galvanize.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/ending-mass-incarceration-christian-imperative