May 5th was the so-called National Day of Prayer. It is an ad hoc “day” sponsored by the religious right front group Focus on the Family to misinform us all about the erroneous claims that fundamentalist Christians are being persecuted in the United States. President Bush made a public spectacle of the “event” but President Obama only continued the proclamation part. That is a good sign, but there are other reasons to drop the National Day of Prayer.
Secular Left Posts
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.
Once again, President Obama gave support to the secular focus of our republic, where people of many religions and no religion can live and be free. At his stop in Turkey, another country founded on seperation of church and state, the President made his comments during a press conference.
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.