Tag: politics

In red-state Oklahoma, marijuana ballot question splits people of faith

June 6, 2018

Clergy on both sides of State Question 788, which would permit the distribution of medical marijuana, call it a moral issue.

By Bobby Ross Jr. | For Religion News Service

OKLAHOMA CITY — As Presbyterian minister Bobby Griffith sees it, legalizing medical marijuana in Oklahoma could help arthritis sufferers with chronic pain and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The 41-year-old husband and father has a personal reason, too, for supporting State Question 788 — a pro-marijuana initiative that the Bible Belt state’s voters will decide June 26.

“For myself, I would be interested in a prescription for it to see if it works better than my anxiety and depression medications,” said Griffith, co-pastor of a Presbyterian church near downtown Oklahoma City and a member of the national group Clergy for a New Drug Policy.

As Griffith characterizes it, the Oklahoma ballot measure’s potential to improve health outcomes and reduce dependence on addictive opioid painkillers makes it a “moral issue.”

Religious opponents counter that backing the issue would be immoral. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., an ordained Southern Baptist pastor, blasts the ballot measure as a “recreational marijuana vote disguised as medical marijuana.”

“The moral issue to me is really a family issue,” Lankford, who directed a Baptist youth camp before his 2010 election to Congress, told Religion News Service.

“The best thing for our state is not to get more parents and grandparents to smoke marijuana,” added the senator, who filmed a commercial urging voters to reject State Question 788. “To have our communities more drug-addicted and distracted, that doesn’t help our families. It doesn’t make us more prosperous. It doesn’t make our schools more successful.”

About 30 states have passed medical marijuana laws, starting with California in 1996, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Oklahoma would be the first to do so without listing qualifying conditions. That, assert critics, would allow doctors to issue two-year marijuana licenses to patients for any reason. The Oklahoma State Medical Association cites a lack of “evidence-based studies” to support medical marijuana.

“It’s trying to trick the people of Oklahoma into buying into it,” said the Rev. Paul Abner, an Assembly of God pastor who leads an anti-marijuana coalition called Oklahoma Faith Leaders.

Read the full story.

Religion News Service is a national wire service whose media partners include The Associated Press, USA Today and the Washington Post.

 

‘Jesus loves me and my guns’: Faith and firearms touted at the NRA’s prayer breakfast

May 12, 2018

By Bobby Ross Jr. | For The Washington Post

DALLAS — Midway through his 15-minute testimony at the National Rifle Association’s annual prayer breakfast Sunday, retired major league first baseman Adam LaRoche took off his sweater.

Underneath, LaRoche — who hit 255 home runs in a 12-year career — sported a black T-shirt with a message that drew cheers from the firearms-friendly crowd of about 1,300.

“Jesus loves me and my guns,” it said.

“Don’t get me wrong: Jesus is all about love, grace, mercy,” said LaRoche, 38, an evangelical best known for walking away from a reported $13 million contact with the Chicago White Sox in 2016 after the team asked him to bring his son into the clubhouse less often.

But that doesn’t mean Jesus “was a pacifist and always carried a white lamb around and tiptoed through life avoiding controversy,” he added. He pointed to Scriptures such as Matthew 10:34, where Jesus said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

The event came two days after President Trump made international headlines with a splashy, campaign-style speech Friday at the NRA’s 147th annual meeting. More than 80,000 attendees assembled from Thursday through Sunday.

The smaller Sunday-morning gathering — a $40-a-plate affair advertised as “a time of inspiration and encouragement” — took place mostly out of the media spotlight.

Despite the prayer breakfast’s lower profile, the Christian crowd that filled a ballroom at the Omni Hotel in downtown Dallas represented “such a nucleus of the NRA,” said Donna Hyde, a 68-year-old grandmother and matriarch of three generations of lifetime NRA members. She wore buttons with messages such as “I’m the NRA, I Voted.”

“It’s about God, country and the protection of our freedoms,” said Hyde, of Mabank, Tex., about 55 miles southeast of Dallas. “We don’t think we can be good Americans without this core value of Christian faith in Christ that gives us our freedoms of everything, and that’s what the NRA is.”

Read the full story.

This story appears in the Acts of Faith section of The Washington Post. Among other major papers picking up the story: the Salt Lake Tribune and The Virginian-Pilot.

Related: Texas hero risked life to save others

Pompeo’s Kansas church asks God to ‘give him strength’ in Senate confirmation process

April 17, 2018

“Mike has enemies because of his faith who may try to paint him in a poor light and make it difficult for him to reach the Secretary of State position,” the pastor of nominee Mike Pompeo wrote to his congregation.

By Bobby Ross Jr. | For Religion News Service

WICHITA, Kan. — Under fire from Muslim, Jewish and human rights groups for a record of anti-Muslim remarks, Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo is receiving spiritual support from his home church in Kansas.

Eastminster Presbyterian Church, where Pompeo is a member and former deacon and Sunday school teacher, prayed Sunday (April 15) that God would “give him strength” in his uncertain confirmation process.

“This morning, we want to pray for our dear brother Mike Pompeo as he goes through the confirmation process,” the Rev. Warren Snyder, Eastminster Presbyterian’s assistant pastor, said as members bowed their heads.

“We ask that you would be glorified in his life, that you would be lifted up, that you would strengthen him and his wife (Susan) and his son (Nick) as he goes through this process,” Snyder prayed to God. “Give him strength. Help him to stand.”

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee began hearings Thursday on whether to confirm Pompeo — the outgoing CIA director nominated by President Trump to replace Rex Tillerson in the top diplomatic post.

In advance of Pompeo’s testimony before the Senate panel, the Rev. Stan Van Den Berg, the Wichita church’s senior pastor, issued a call to prayer Wednesday. He cited a request from Susan Pompeo for “specific prayer during this very important and stressful time.”

Read the full story.

Religion News Service is a national wire service whose media partners include The Associated Press, USA Today and the Washington Post.

‘Dear Jesus, send some angels’: Faith and prayer inside Southwest Flight 1380

April 1, 2018

By Bobby Ross Jr. | GetReligion

Several years ago, I was flying home from a reporting trip when the pilot came on the loudspeaker and reported trouble with the controls that direct the plane.

He said we needed to make an emergency landing, and rescue vehicles would be waiting as a precaution. But he stressed that the flashing lights on the ground shouldn’t alarm anyone because he didn’t expect any problem landing the plane.

That statement would have provided more comfort if I hadn’t kept asking myself: If the plane were going to crash, would he be so candid as to say so?

“Attention, passengers, I fully expect that we are all about to die. Please buckle your seat belts and get your affairs in order.”

For an anxious flyer such as myself, that experience was scary enough.

But I can’t even imagine what the passengers of Southwest Flight 1380 endured this week. As you no doubt heard, one passenger was killed and seven others wounded Tuesday after an engine exploded.

However, as I noted Wednesday, devout Christian pilot Tammie Jo Shults is being praised for her “nerves of steel” in calmly maneuvering the plane to the ground and avoiding a much worse catastrophe.

Since I wrote that post, I’ve come across more faith-filled news coverage that needs to be highlighted.

Read the full column.

• • •

All of my GetReligion columns (March 2018):

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When adoption agencies can turn away gay prospective parents, what happens to the kids?

March 23, 2018

Those who study the issue say it’s hard to tell exactly how such rules governing adoption affect the numbers of children placed in “forever” homes. 

By Bobby Ross Jr. | For Religion News Service

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma lawmakers may soon sanction private adoption agencies turning away same-sex couples and other prospective parents who don’t meet their religious criteria, a possibility cheered by the Roman Catholic Church and many evangelical Christians and lambasted as discriminatory by gay rights groups.

It’s a conflict playing out across the nation, and both sides say that if the other wins, the number of children placed in loving homes will fall.

Seven states have passed laws — including Alabama, South Dakota and Texas last year — like the one proposed in Oklahoma. A bill with comparable language also has been introduced in Congress, according to The Associated Press. At least two other states — Georgia and Kansas — are debating similar legislation. At the same time, some local governments are withholding support from agencies that won’t serve gay prospective parents.

The LGBT community says the Oklahoma measure would result in fewer adoptions as prospective gay parents are turned away by agencies. Conservative Christians say failing to protect the right of adoption agencies to follow their faith would result in fewer adoptions, because those agencies would close before they act against their beliefs.

Those who study the issue say it’s hard to tell exactly how such rules governing adoption affect the numbers of children placed in “forever” homes. Still, the assertions from both sides on the matter have been definitive.

Passage of Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 1140 would “result in a disastrous reduction in adoption and foster placements and put 9,000 young people — currently in the system — in jeopardy,” said Troy Stevenson, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, as the LGBT advocacy organization launched a statewide media campaign this month against the bill.

The numbers may not be there to back him up.

“I don’t know of any empirical evidence on the topic,” said Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass.

“In general, any barriers to adoption are likely to decrease numbers of homes for kids in need,” Bartholet added in an email. “But, of course, it’s possible that religious agencies would shut down rather than put their religious principles aside.”

Read the full story.

Religion News Service is a national wire service whose media partners include The Associated Press, USA Today and the Washington Post.

Related: Under new Texas law, faith-based adoption agencies win protections (reporting from Abilene, Texas)

Texas city council members censure colleague over anti-Islam Facebook post

February 18, 2018

By Bobby Ross Jr. | For Religion News Service

PLANO, Texas — The city council of heavily Republican Plano has voted to censure one of its members for an anti-Islam Facebook post — a post for which he has apologized but over which he refuses to resign.

The 7-1 vote Sunday was a decisive repudiation of the kind of exclusionary rhetoric that President Trump himself has employed. Only embattled council member Tom Harrison dissented in the vote that came during a special council meeting called to address his Tuesday re-post from a Facebook group called Joined Hands Across America For Trump.

It featured a student in a hijab and these words: “Share if you think Trump should ban Islam in American schools.”

As word of the councilman’s action quickly spread in this affluent city of 286,000 about 20 miles north of Dallas, the city’s first black mayor called for his immediate resignation.

Harrison took the post down on Wednesday, but residents had already begun taking sides over whether he deserved to continue in office.

“My message to everyone within the Islamic community is: This is their home. They’re welcome just like everyone else is,” Mayor Harry LaRosiliere, a Republican elected in 2013 who has been critical of Trump, said at a news conference.

All of that happened within the last week, and on Sunday roughly 500 people showed up at city hall for a special council meeting called to discuss the future of Harrison, 73.

After an hour behind closed doors, the council took their censure vote in public session.

“Six years ago or 10 years ago, I would have given him the benefit of the doubt,” said Plano resident Gans Subramanian, a Hindu immigrant from India who attended the meeting. “But in the current political context, we are all very, very careful about things. … If you have a councilman make an incorrect statement like that, it breaks the trust in the community.”

The mayor said the censure serves as a public admonishment of Harrison. The council does not have the power to remove him. That would require a recall petition and referendum decided by voters, city officials said.

“I am not xenophobic. I am not a bigot. I am not a racist,” Harrison said in public session after listening to a half-dozen of his colleagues either demand that he resign or encourage him to come to that decision on his own. 

Read the full story.

Religion News Service is a national wire service whose media partners include The Associated Press, USA Today and the Washington Post.

 

Trump + Gillibrand + faith: ‘Why is religion only talked about when reporters profile Republicans?’

December 1, 2017

By Bobby Ross Jr. | GetReligion

Did you happen to hear where Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was last week when President Trump posted a tweet about her that the president’s critics labeled “sexually suggestive and demeaning?”

Yep, that’s right: The New York Democrat was at a bipartisan Bible study.

So what are the odds that the New York Times political writers who profiled Gillibrand in Sunday’s newspaper — in a lengthy A-section piece tied to the president’s kerfuffle with the senator — delved into her faith?

Hint: The Times makes passing reference to the aforementioned Bible study.

But any actual consideration of Gillibrand’s faith? Not so much. (Interestingly enough, the profile does point to the senator’s propensity to curse “freely in public venues.”)

In case you somehow missed Trump’s tweet and Gillibrand’s response, here they are:

I first became aware of Gillibrand’s participation in the regular Bible study when I did a Religion News Service profile of Sen. James Lankford earlier this year. I asked the Oklahoma Republican’s team for the names of Democrats involved in the study. They put me in touch with Gillibrand’s office.

I visited with Gillibrand about Lankford and her own faith, and a portion of that interview ended up in my story:

Read the full column.

• • •

All of my GetReligion columns (December 2017):

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