Worth Noting

Humanist, July, 1999 by Marian Hetherly

* This year's National Day of Prayer, celebrated May 6, came under renewed criticism from advocates of church-state separation that one fundamentalist Christian group is increasingly dominating the day. Although the congressionally mandated observance was intended as an interfaith expression of "civil religion," Americans United for Separation of Church and State insist that the National Day of Prayer Task Force--affiliated with religious broadcaster James Dobson and other religious-right leaders--is dominating the day with a campaign of misinformation aimed at excluding minority faiths, distorting U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and falsifying U.S. history.

* Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan is spending $50 million in his home base of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to establish the Ave Maria School of Law, which the April 22, 1999, New York Law Journal reports "will combine legal advocacy and Catholic morality." The school has already attracted some influential religious right-wingers--former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, House Judiciary Chair Henry Hyde, New York Archbishop Cardinal John O'Connor, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia--and plans to open in 2000 with about forty students and seven or eight teachers.

* Wal-Mart, which provides millions of dollars to right-wing causes and operates the second largest pharmacy system in the United States, is prohibiting its 2,435 stores from stocking, ordering, or dispensing the "morning-after" contraceptive Preven. The National Organization for Women has organized a letterwriting campaign against the retail giant and says researchers have estimated that Preven, if widely used, could prevent an estimated 50 percent of all unintended pregnancies.

* Congress has been asked to investigate reports that a global electronic communications surveillance system known as ECHELON is being operated by the National Security Agency and may be engaged in the illegal interception of private satellite, microwave, cellular, and fiber-optic communications worldwide. NSA computers reportedly then sort through conversations, faxes, and e-mails using keywords that determine whether intelligence agencies transcribe and forward the communications for further investigation.

* The first substantive bill to finally emerge from the post-impeachment Congress was the Education Flexibility Partnership Act, signed by President Clinton on April 29. The so-called EdFlex legislation expands to the entire United States a program established in 1994 that allows states to waive certain federal education requirements in order to create their own programs to improve school and student performance.

* Bills have been introduced in Congress that would make criminals out of most anyone who helps a teenager travel to another state for an abortion. The bills make it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion unless she has already fulfilled the requirements of her home state's parental consent or notification law.

* Florida's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act is being challenged after a judge ruled that Boca Raton officials could remove or destroy religious symbols and monuments erected at gravesites in the city's municipal cemetery. Judge Kenneth Ryskamp ruled that the symbols were not essential to or required by the Christian, Catholic, and Jewish faiths of seven families who have sued, arguing that the cemetery gave them permission to erect crosses and Stars of David a decade ago.

* Michigan Democrat John Conyers has introduced House Resolution 906 to guarantee that all convicted felons who have paid their debt to society and are no longer incarcerated regain the right to vote in federal elections. The bill would abolish one of the last remaining criminal disenfranchisement laws, enacted nearly 100 years ago to deny African Americans the right to vote. The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch estimate that "in states that disenfranchise ex-felons, 40 percent of the next generation of black men is likely to lose permanently the right to vote."

* The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has launched a toll-free hotline for reporting incidents of discriminatory police stops and is distributing "Bust Cards" that tell people what to do if they are stopped by police. The hot-line, 1-877-2-END-DWB (877-236-3392), will collect people's stories of discrimination and ask callers to join the ACLU's class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of minority motorists stopped as a result of racial profiling.

* Critics are blasting the Republican right wing's introduction of the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Accountability and Rehabilitation Act of 1999 for trying to take advantage of the Littleton, Colorado, shooting tragedy in order to expand the prison system and cut rehabilitation programs. The National Organization for Women, for example, says the legislation would dismantle crucial protections against placing incarcerated children with hardened adult inmates, allow juvenile offenders as young as fourteen (lowered from age sixteen) to be tried and convicted as adults under a wider array of offenses, and eliminate legal options once a lower court has convicted a young person.