National Pagan News

June 21 Set for 2007 National Prayer Day for Native Sacred Places

WASHINGTON June 19, 2007, Indian Country Today- Observances and ceremonies will be held across the country June 21 to mark the 2007 National Day of Prayer to Protect Native American Sacred Places. The exact times and days for public commemorations are listed below.

Some of the gatherings highlighted are educational forums, not religious ceremonies, and are open to the general public. Others are ceremonial and may be conducted in private. In addition to those listed below, there will be commemorations and prayers offered at sacred places that are under threat at this time.

Among the endangered places listed in the pages of this statement are sacred places that are being desecrated and damaged now, such as Hickory Ground in Alabama; San Francisco Peaks in Arizona; and Wakarusa Wetlands in Kansas.

There are other holy places which are being threatened with injury or destruction: Bear Butte in South Dakota; Little Creek Mountain in Tennessee; the Medicine Lake Highlands in northern California; Ocmulgee Old Fields in Georgia; the Petroglyphs in New Mexico; and Snoqualmie Falls in Washington.

''Native and non-Native people nationwide are gathering to honor sacred places, with a special emphasis on those that are endangered by actions that can be avoided,'' said Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. She is president of The Morning Star Institute, which organizes the National Prayer Days.
(June 19, 2007, Indian Country Today)
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See also from The Pluralism Project (Harvard U.) Native Americans and Sacred Land

Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission

WASHINGTON, June 13, 2007 — In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations that the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.

The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
(June 14, 2007, The New York Times)
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Here's another take:

Orwellian Civil Rights at Justice Dept.

From the June 14, 2007 Progress Report

The Bush administration has recast the Justice Department's role in civil rights "by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race." The Department "has transferred or demoted some experienced civil rights litigators" while bringing in "graduates of religious-affiliated law schools...who favor the new priorities."

Subscribe at www.americanprogressaction.org

Green Views:
Pagan Commentary
on the News

By Lowell McFarland

While the instant target of this pernicious Religious Right assault is seemingly fellow Protestants, we believe that this is part of a strategy, much wider than just the religious right, begun after the disastrous 1970's defeat in Vietnam, to blame moderates for all ills, and systematically scheme to control and defeat them.

For instance, support or anger at political issues, and foreign and domestic policies, are also a major factor in these concerted actions.

Pagans, as moderates, have also been at the effect of these control freak actions and are easily driven back into the shadows with the littlest public adverse commentary.

Like mainline moderate Protestant
groups, we Pagans also easily fall victim to a few naysayers or some noisy arguments by a few. All of which blunts positive movment.

Loch Sloy!
Tuan Today
"Tuan MacCarrill/MacParthalon,
Forever the Celtic story!"
Lowell McFarland
lowell@optonline.net

Lowell McFarland is a regular contributor to Pagan Institute Report

"To amend the Revised Statutes of the United States to eliminate the chilling effect on the constitutionally protected expression of religion by State and local officials that results from the threat that potential litigants may seek damages and attorney's fee."

Press Release
from from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS
On Complacency

November 4, 2004

Triumphant evangelicals seek passage of conservative social agenda

By Adelle M. Banks
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON - After a generation of involvement on the political scene, religious conservatives say they may finally have come into their own.

With the re-election of President Bush and a galvanized grass-roots movement, evangelical Christian leaders are confidently predicting the advance of their social agenda.

"I think before there was a perception problem," said Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the now-defunct Moral Majority in 1979 and now chairs the Washington-based Free Congress Foundation. "The view was that we really didn't have the troops to make a difference."

But Bush was returned to office Tuesday on the wings of evangelicals. Three out of four white voters who described themselves as evangelicals or born-again Christians voted for Bush, according to an exit poll of more than 13,000 voters conducted for the Associated Press and the television networks. That represented about one-fifth of all voters.

"Before our strength was a question mark," said Weyrich. "Now it's an exclamation point."

Religious conservatives have a wish list of items they hope Bush and a Republican-dominated Congress will address, including legislative bans on same-sex marriage, continuing efforts to limit abortion and appointment of judges who do not meet their definition of "activist."

Overcoming past stages of political apathy, evangelicals are now energized, their leaders say - not just at the voting booth, but for future action to let the political powers know they have certain expectations.

"I think that the voters spoke with a clear voice yesterday on ... the issue of marriage, which speaks more broadly to the issue of judicial activism," said Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, in a Nov. 3 interview.

"I think if they do not hear that voice on the Hill, they're deaf."

Corwin Smidt, director of the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, said evangelicals already have the ear of Republicans but now Democrats may begin to pay more attention to them.

"There's going to be some listening done," said Smidt, a political science professor. "Evangelicals probably have greater access now to decision makers."

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the influence demonstrated by "people of faith" at the polls goes beyond white evangelicals to black evangelicals, Roman Catholics and observant Jews.

"There is a cultural struggle going on for the moral high ground in this culture, and we conservative, traditional-values people of faith - in all of our denominational manifestations - made a significant, strategic advance in this election," said Land.

While many pundits predicted high voter turnout would benefit Democrats, evangelicals showed they, too, could mobilize. For his part, Land traveled along with an "iVoteValues.com" tractor-trailer as part of his ministry's nationwide voter education campaign.

He said he hopes Bush will now give some issues of religious conservatives - namely passage of the proposed Marriage Protection Amendment - the same level of attention in his second term that the president gave prescription drug benefits in his first.

Evangelicals may even expand to issues beyond questions of life and marriage, said the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. He cited climate change as a growing concern.

"It's an important way in which the Republican Party could reach out across the political divide and say, 'We care about the environment,'" Cizik said.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA, and co-founder of the Moral Majority, wouldn't predict demands for political payback from the Bush administration. He did say [evangelical Christian] complacency is not an option.

"I know after eight years of Ronald Reagan that many seemed to become apathetic and fell asleep; I don't think that's happening now," he told Religion News Service. "I just do not think for a moment anybody ... from our camp (is) going to rush the president and say, 'We did this. Now you do that.' It just doesn't work that way."

Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, CO, said the gay marriage issue renewed energy that had dissipated in the evangelical movement. Evangelicals are now determined to work for passage of the marriage amendment and election of "a true conservative" as the next justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, she said.

"This is a spike in the chart of evangelical passion and involvement," she said.

Michael Cromartie, director of the Evangelicals in Civic Life project at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, said evangelicals may not win every political battle ahead, but there is no question they will loom large in the Republican Party for years to come.

"They're not taking over the party," he said, "but they are major players in the party. They're major players at the table of Republican discourse."
______________________
(RNS Correspondents Itir Yakar and Wangui Njuguna contributed to this report

The preceding articles were sent by Presbyterian News from the Religious News Service and reposted relative to 17 USC Section 107.

Green View:
On Complacency

By Lowell McFarland

Complacency may not be an option with
evangelical Christians but it appears to be
the option of choice for Pagans. As a
religion, Pagans seem to be alone in this
disunited complacency among all other
religions in America. Most all other
moderate religious leaders and religions
are now congressing to assess this
stunning extremist religious takeover.

While the majority of evangelical Christian
ministers were subtly, or not so subtly,
preaching that "...God has finally sent
America a president..." and distributing
millions of pamphlets boasting of Bush's
evangelical religiosity, Pagans were
preaching that we should not get
political.

Even now, as evangelical Christian leaders
are engraving their wish lists to get all the
political paybacks they worked for,
Pagans are asking that their members
be nice and don't argue or to take their
political comments off-list.

Evangelical Christians, once a small,
disorganized and powerless group, publicly
announced their grandiose takeover
intentions, organized, ORGANIZED,
ORGANIZED, and then organized more,
and FINALLY SUCCEEDED grandly.

In a classic case of extremists allying
themselves against complacent
(wishy-washy?) disunited, tolerant and
enlightened groups, religious extremists
allied themselves with economic
extremists (very rich people and
corporations who were war, health and
energy profiteering) and a variety of
racists, misogynists, and jingoists, to
take control of America.

In the same time, Pagans seemed to find
every excuse NOT to organize, NOT to
congress, NOT to enlist national Pagan
spokespeople, NOT to become politically
active, NOT to alert their members to the
obvious activities of evangelical Christians
and their religious/political agenda and
NOT to fundraise to pay for standard and
growing needs of the Pagan community.

While religious leaders from most all of
America's religions have regularly visited
the White House, and achieved results as
well as their photographs with the
Presidents, we do not know of any Pagan
leaders who have visited the White House
in the last 100 years!

Back then environmentalists John Muir
and J. Horace McFarland visited Presidents
Taft, Roosevelt and Wilson in the first 1900's. Muir and McFarland's interaction with the American presidents brought America our National Park Service and many other environmental firsts--which are now lauded worldwide.

As Pagans, our history shows that we fared
badly under various forms of enforced,
virulent state-monotheism, especially when we stayed complacent or tribally disunited in the face of looming control-freak behavior by religious extremists who took control of the government.

We are proud of the many, many Pagans who fought and voted for tolerance and better lives for all.

In contrast to apolitical American Pagans,
European Pagans have organized and become very political when needed: British Pagans fought the government, got Stonehenge opened again and can now conduct sacred rites at Stonehenge and several other ancient Pagan megaliths; European Pagans joined with others to defeat Christian efforts to include a statement declaring "Christian roots" to Europe in the new European Union
Constitution; European Pagans spearheaded successful efforts to make the 2004 Olympics as Pagan as possible in their ancient Pagan home in Greece; Brittany/Bretagne French Pagans joined others to defeat French laws that made French parents name all children with French Christian names; Irish Pagans
are fighting their government to better
preserve the ancient Pagan sites and
megaliths; Hellenic Greek Pagans are fighting their government (and the Orthodox Christian Church) to allow them to conduct Pagan rites at ancient Greek Pagan sites; Pagans in other
European countries are fighting their
governments for official recognition and
religious aboriginal acknowledgement.

Obviously, because we American Pagans did not even try to effect the agenda, the agenda of America, and perhaps the agenda for many American Pagans, will be set by others, probably by organized and gloating evangelical Christians.

Obviously still, the lessons learned from these last two presidential elections are that being complacent or wishy-washy is not beneficial to either presidential candidates nor Pagans.

We now need to form overdue Pagan national organizations and join our tribes when necessary, so that we can continue the good fight.

NOTE: Moderate Christians, members of other religions, Atheists and secularists, are very concerned about the apparent intrusive action of fundamentalists in this election and are convening their national leaders to discuss all of the ramifications.

Loch Sloy!

Tuan Today

"Tuan MacCarrill/MacParthalon,
forever the Celtic story!"
Lowell McFarland <lowell@optonline.net>

Orwellian Civil Rights at Justice Dept.

American Legion Supports Bill Ending Legal Fee Awards for First Amendment Cases

American Legion Supports Bill Ending Legal Fee Awards
for First Amendment Cases