A religious right front group that is against same sex marriage is going to air a commercial that not only has actors giving fake personal stories but the stories have nothing to do with same sex marriage. The group, the National Organization for Marriage, instead is smearing gays by using made up problems. The Human Rights Campaign found the audition tapes and responds to the fake ad.
Category: Groups
This past week the results of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey was published and on first blush it seemed like believers have lost more ground since the last survey in 2001. But as Austin Cline points out in his blog, caution is needed in reading too much into the latest results.
On Wednesday, February 25th, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling on a Utah monument case that involved the city of Pleasant Grove and religious group which tried to donate a monument to their Seven Aphorisms to be placed near an existing one with the Christian 10 Commandments. Unlike most cases like this, it was considered on Free Speech grounds rather than on religious establishment grounds. The court ruled that a government can pick and choose what gifts to receive and in doing so seemed to open them up to establishment challenges in the future.
During the campaign President Barack Obama promised to change how the federal government gave money to religious groups. While he did change the title of the office created under President Bush, he has yet to remove the rules and regulations that allowed religious groups to discriminate when getting federal grant money.
It would seem that the US Constitution doesn’t allow a religious test to be elected in this country. In fact that prohibition is written in clear language in Article Six. It is why the group, the Secular Coalition for America is taking the time to release a video of the attempts at a religious test during the recently concluded 2008 election campaign and calling for the all secularists to stand up and call for an end to it.
A friend of mine sent out an e-mail about attending a recent HumanLight celebration in the Philadelphia area. It was hosted by another friend who had been a member of my local Humanist group here in Ohio. HumanLight is a positive secular humanist take on the winter holiday season so full of theistic religious symbolism. My friend Martha Knox was interviewed for Tuesday the 23rd on Morning Edition on NPR about the celebration.