Veteran Catholic teacher Molly Shumate stared at the Cincinnati Archdiocese contract for next school year and thought of her son. She remembered when a nervous Zachery Shumate, a teenager at the time, approached her and revealed his homosexuality. His revelation prompted the first-grade teacher to give him a hug, telling her boy she would always love and support him.

So when the new teachers' contract – strictly forbidding public support of homosexuality – was handed to her earlier this year, she was torn.

The employment contract – exclusively obtained and reported by The Enquirer in March – continues to divide huge sections of the region's Catholics. The "morality" clauses – though not unique among Catholic schools nationwide – were a first for the 19-county Archdiocese school system.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2014/05/09/catholic-teacher-backs-gay-son-quitting-protest-controversial-contract/8898181/

As justice William Brennan said in his incisive dissent to the majority ruling in the 1983 Marsh v. Chambers case that ruled that ceremonial prayer to open the legislative sessions was constitutional, the trouble with prayer is that you have no control over what the prayer giver will say even if you prescribe what prayers are acceptable, which you are not allowed to do anyway since that would be tantamount to having an official government prayer.

And we see that Brennan was indeed prophetic because of what happened yesterday at the supposedly ‘nonpolitical, nonpartisan’ National Day of Prayer, one of those occasions that public figures love and pander to, where they can show their piety publicly. It is supposed to be an occasion for bland pious utterances that anyone can get behind such as extolling America’s uniqueness and greatness, which is a surefire crowd pleaser.

But James Dobson, founder of the extremist Christian group Focus on the Family, threw a wrench in the works and took the occasion to attack president Obama on the issue of abortion, saying, “President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president. He didn’t make any bones about it. This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense he is the abortion president.”
This caused one congresswoman Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Calif.) to walk out in protest, pointing her finger at Dobson and saying, “This is inappropriate”.

But what is truly inappropriate is having such an occasion at all and Hahn shares the blame because she herself is co-chair of the weekly congressional prayer breakfast and thus an active promoter of this kind of nonsense.
It is probably a good thing that people like Dobson use these occasions as political events. Maybe that will make people realize that you cannot contain extemporaneous prayer within boundaries and the best thing is to avoid having governmental prayer events altogether.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2014/05/02/this-is-the-problem-with-ceremonial-prayer/

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.

“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”

He then noted that he loves talking to lawyers, because he is a lawyer who went to “a secular law school,” so he knows that “in the law, [talking about God] just isn’t politically correct.” He claimed that this is why America has “lost its way,” and that he would be publishing a pamphlet “this week, maybe next” that contained copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby proving that all the people “who found this nation — black, white, all people, all religions, all faiths” knew that America was “about God.”

--snip--

He later said that “you can’t be happy unless you follow God’s law, and if you follow God’s law, you can’t help but be happy.”

“It’s all about God,” he continued. “We’ve made ‘life’ a decision taken by man,” he said, and “taken ‘liberty,’ and converted it to ‘licentiousness. We’ve taken ‘pursuit of happiness,’ and reduced it to materialism.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/02/alabamas-chief-justice-buddha-didnt-create-us-so-first-amendment-only-protects-christians/

Polls show that atheists remain the most distrusted and despised minority in America. A University of Minnesota study found that 40 percent of Americans believe atheists “do not agree with my vision of American society.” With such widely held prejudice, there’s little wonder 46 percent of Americans are unwilling to vote for an atheist in a presidential election. It’s also why atheist politicians have, for the most part, kept their atheism a secret until long after leaving office.

Take Barney Frank (D-MA). In 1987, while serving in the U.S. Congress, Frank stepped out of the close to announce he was gay. But he kept his atheism a secret until he had long retired from public life. Pete Stark (D-CA) was one of the longest serving congressional members in U.S. history, representing California’s 13th congressional district from 1973 to 2013. It wasn’t until 2007 before Stark, in an interview with the Secular Coalition of America, acknowledged he was openly atheist, which made him the first congressman in U.S. history to declare his atheism while still in office.

If the U.S. congress proportionately represented the will of the American people, there’d be no less than 50 atheists serving in the federal legislative branch of government. Instead there are none. Not a single open-shirted atheist walks among the 535 members on Capitol Hill today.

James Woods is hoping to change that scorecard as he fights to become not only the representative of Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, but also the first elected member of Congress running unabashedly as an atheist.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/watershed-moment-atheism-america-first-major-party-candidate-congress-campaign-atheist

A so-called “historian” who Glenn Beck hired to teach at his online university insisted this week that women had originally been denied the right to vote “to keep the family together,” and for the good of “the entire culture and society.”

On the Thursday broadcast of Wallbuilders Live, David Barton explained that biblical principles — and not sexism — were behind not allowing women to vote prior to 1920.

“So family government precedes civil government and you watch that as colonists came to America, they voted by families,” he said. “And you have to remember back then, husband and wife, I mean the two were considered one. That is the biblical precept… That is a family, that is voting. And so the head of the family is traditionally considered to be the husband and even biblically still continues to be so.”

Barton argued that in the time since the women’s suffrage movement succeeded in the United States, “we’ve moved into more of a family anarchy kind of thing.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/01/christian-historian-allowing-women-to-vote-hurts-the-entire-culture-and-society/