NATION - United States, various

National Catholic Reporter, March 16, 2001

Cleveland voucher case goes to Supreme Court

Objecting to an appellate court's decision to not consider their case, advocates of a school voucher program in Cleveland said March 1 they will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the program is constitutional. Members of the Washington-based Institute for Justice said they plan to file their request with the Supreme Court within the next 90 days, the Associated Press reported.

Their request stems from a decision Feb. 28 by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to decline full-court consideration of the organization's challenge to the court's ruling last December. That 2-1 decision found Cleveland's voucher program improperly used public tax funds to educate children at religious schools.

The 3-year-old voucher program provides up to $2,500 in tuition vouchers to needy students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

Critics such as the Ohio Federation of Teachers and Americans United for Separation of Church and State insist public funds should not have been used for the vouchers, but the program's supporters said the vouchers offer low-income parents an alternative to public schools.

Holy Cross College bans sect from campus

The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., has barred the Boston Church of Christ from its campus, saying it feared the sect was a dangerous cult. It was the first time Holy Cross has banned a religious organization in its 158-year history.

After students complained to the chaplain's office about heavy-handed tactics and coercion, the school joined the ranks of 35 other colleges that have banned the group. "Any group which utilizes disparagement, harassment, intimidation, fear-based tactics or pressure explicitly violates ... the principles of religious freedom and free inquiry which this college prizes," wrote the director of the Office of the College Chaplains, Katherine McElaney in a campus-wide e-mail.

The Boston Church of Christ is affiliated with the International Churches of Christ and is sometimes known as "the Boston Movement." Founder Kip McKean launched the group in Lexington, Mass., in 1979.

The original 30 members strove to be "Christ's true church" by strictly interpreting the Bible in a manner akin to Protestant fundamentalism. By the mid-1990s, the group had a presence on every continent with 50,000 members and 103 congregations, according to the Christian Research Journal.

Along the way, however, the group departed from mainline fundamentalism by appointing "disciplers" to have authority over the personal life of each new member. This practice, coupled with allegations of harassment and threats of reprisal for those who might leave the group, led to notoriety and expulsion from multiple campuses.

Methodist school to include same-sex partners benefits

Joining a fraction of the nation's institutions of higher learning, Southern Methodist University has decided to extend medical benefits to same-sex partners of its employees. The Dallas-based school will offer the partners reduced tuition rates as well as medical and dental benefits starting in next January, the Associated Press reported.

The school expects that 19 of its 1,900 employees will use the benefits, costing the university $80,000 to $100,000 each year. The university's vice president for business and finance told The Dallas Morning News. "This is necessary to ensure that [the university] recruits and retains the best people."

Some 150 of the nation's 3,300 institutions of higher education have similar policies, including Emory University in Atlanta and Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. According to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for the fights of homosexuals, only one other Texas school -- Rice University -- does so.

National Council criticizes U.S. policy on Colombia

The National Council of Churches is criticizing the so-called "Plan Colombia" aimed at drying up drug exports from the Latin American nation. Instead of spending $1.3 billion to build up Colombia's military apparatus and for aerial fumigation of coca fields, the United States should allocate the money for development assistance and support for a negotiated peace process, the council's executive board said in a resolution adopted Feb. 27.

The resolution came as President Bush met with Colombian President Andres Pastrana. The Colombian leader pressed Bush for economic aid, including opening American borders to more trade from Colombia. "We have serious concerns that current U.S. policy is resulting in increasing violence in Colombia, and drawing the United States deeper into Colombia's civil war," said the Rev. Bob Edgar, the council's general secretary.

The resolution was adopted in the wake of two meetings between National Council of Churches officials and leaders of Colombia's Protestant churches in which the Colombian church officials called on the National Council of Churches to speak out against the $1.3 billion plan.

In the resolution, the executive board expressed its concern about what it called the "threat that illegal drugs and drug violence pose to children and communities in the United States" but also said the U.S. program is "unlikely to reduce the flow of drugs into the United States, but is rather more likely to displace drug production in Colombia to remote areas or to neighboring countries."