I shared with the pastor that I often find myself working two sides of the issue. I go into more liberal churches trying to show people that true love and compassion are found within the boundaries of Scripture, and I go into more conservative churches trying to soften people’s hearts to show love and compassion for those dealing with same-sex attractions.

Some days I feel like a gay activist, and some days I feel like a hardened fundamentalist—neither of which I am! But at the end of the day, my efforts on both sides are to help churches become safe places for people struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction and places that might have some impact in reaching the gay community.

No matter the culture of the particular church I am in, I am always asked the question: “How can we be a church that ministers to struggling people and helps bridge the gap between the gay community and the church?” The answer to that question is not a simple one, but it is the same no matter the flavor of the church. As much as I dislike alliterations in sermons, here are four keys:

Pastor

In order for a church to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, the senior pastor must have a heart for reaching all hurting people, no matter the potential controversy. I have never seen the culture of a church change contrary to the heart of the pastor. This may not be the way it is ”supposed” to be, but it is a reality. A church will not grow beyond the passion and desire of its chief shepherd.

Pulpit

For a church to effectively minister to strugglers and reach gay persons, the topic of homosexuality must be addressed from the pulpit. A pastor may have a wonderful heart for ministry and outreach, but if he never talks about it from the pulpit, his heart and vision will not impact the local church.

I have heard many excuses for not talking about homosexuality from the pulpit, but I have never heard a legitimate one. Yes, it is controversial. Yes, it may offend some people. Yes, it is complicated. But the reality is that even the most conservative church is impacted by homosexuality, and to ignore it publicly is to insinuate that the church does not care.

Sexual brokenness affects the church on many levels. Divorce, adultery, pornography, promiscuity and homosexual behavior are as prevalent within the church as they are in the world. The effectiveness of the local church will continue to be diminished if these hard issues are not discussed from the pulpit.

Pew

By this, I mean the attitude of the church body. I often ask congregations to imagine what an openly homosexual person would encounter on any given Sunday if they wandered through the doors of their church. How would people in their pew respond? Would a very masculine woman or a very effeminate man be greeted warmly, hugged or welcomed? Would they receive smiles and invitations to lunch? Or would they feel awkward and unwelcome? Would people avert their eyes to simply avoid any connection?

Until the church body has a heart for hurting, lonely, broken, lost people in general, the church will never be part of the solution. I know people who lead ministries who are afraid to invite struggling people to attend their own church for fear of how those people will be received. That is heartbreaking. The pews of our churches must reflect the reality of the grace that saved each person sitting there, or people in need of grace will flee.

Potluck

Potluck refers to the community and fellowship of the church body. Is your church a place where people are real and vulnerable and loving and accepting? I don’t imagine anyone will be comfortable sharing their struggle with homosexuality if small-group prayer requests are limited to the health of distant relatives in faraway states. Do people share heart issues within the “community” structure of your church (be it Sunday School, small groups, or whatever)? Or are requests limited to safe issues like health or jobs or “other people”? If the church membership does not feel safe to be real, will new people feel safe to be real?

So…

When people ask me what their church can do, I often sense that they want me to outline a program. But a program will not work if the pastor is ambivalent. A program will not work if real-world issues are not addressed from the pulpit. A program will not work if the pews are filled with hard, judgmental, grace-less people. And a program will not work if community and fellowship are limited to surface issues and covered dish suppers. Programs are worthless if the heart and culture of the church have not changed. We, the church, must be a place of real, vulnerable, gracious, compassionate and merciful life, founded unapologetically on the life-giving, freeing, relevant and perfect Truth of the Word of God.

Where is your church? Pastors, where are you? Church members, where are you? What do you want to be? How do you want to impact the world with the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ?

We have the hope that the world is looking for. Will they find it when they come looking?

Mike Goeke is the associate pastor of counseling at Stonegate Fellowship Church in Midland, Texas. He can be reached at mikegoeke@stonegatefellowship.com. Information on the SBC Task Force on Ministry to Homosexuals can be found at www.sbcthewayout.com.

After a year of political wrangling, Congress agreed to a sweeping overhaul of an intelligence-gathering law to help protect Americans from future attacks on U.S. soil and to grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies that admirably cooperated with the government in monitoring phone calls with terrorist networks. The break in the political deadlock July 9 came just weeks before critical authorizations to monitor terrorist communications were set to expire.

A hearty applause is fitting for all those who encouraged their congressman and senators to support the bill.

The update to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) enables our intelligence agencies to track communications placed into or out of the United States with known or suspected terrorists. This intelligence-gathering authorization, signed into law by President Bush one day after the smoke cleared on Capitol Hill, peels back much of the red tape in monitoring terrorist networks. It requires, for example, that the special FISA court approve warrants for programs in general to intercept communications rather than individual communications. Equally important, it sends a strong message that the U.S. government will reward, not reprimand, companies that assist the government in its efforts to identify terrorist suspects.

What had held up the modification of the law was refusal by a handful of senators to protect telecom companies—the very groups that helped to protect all Americans—from roughly 40 lawsuits totaling in the billions of dollars slapped upon them for their patriotic service. Mounting grassroots pressure, along with a compromise provision to require more judicial and congressional oversight, led to inclusion of these protections in the bill passed by a more than 2-to-1 margin in both the House and Senate.

The only real losers amid this victory are trial lawyers wishing to line their pockets and Islamic extremists who pursue our destruction and relish in merciless killings in the name of their god, Allah.

In these unsettled times, our intelligence agencies must not be hamstrung from using technological tools to preserve our liberty and promote its acceptance abroad. The enemy we face today is unlike our foes in wars of generations past. Ours is an enemy that knows no rules and has no regard for human life. Guided by a radical interpretation of Islam, these extremists consider the slaying of those who do not submit to their religion as not only acceptable political practice but also dutiful religious service.

To meet this force with anything less than the greatest possible resistance would be an empty honorarium to those who have sacrificed before us to make us free. Many in Washington, gratefully, seem to see it that way, too.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to monitor issues of public policy in America, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). If you would like to help us continue our efforts, please click here.

Roughly speaking, the conservative view could be summarized as the traditional God-and-country position: “We’ve been taking God out of this country, and we need to put Him back in—where He’s always been before we headed down this godless road.” At the other end of the spectrum is the liberal view, which we could basically summarize in this way: “Separation of church and state means that God shouldn’t have anything to do with American politics and public life, so we need to take God out of this country—and keep it that way.”

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, condemns any belief that is not subject to rational, evidence-based reasoning. Thus our religious traditions are “intellectually defunct and politically ruinous,” he maintains, and religion is “nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.” It is not enough for Harris simply to denounce religious faith as irrational, however. Citing religious war as the inevitable consequence when opposing belief systems clash, he calls for an end not just to religious extremism, but to “the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God” as “one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”

Harris would argue for more than simply taking God out of public debate in America; he calls for the literal marginalization of those who stubbornly persist in believing in God: It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil….Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.”

Do you think Sam Harris is a lone voice crying in the wilderness of liberal extremism? His book has become a best seller, garnering accolades and winning awards such as the prestigious 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In the New York Times, reviewer Natalie Angier commended Harris’s depiction of “major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as socially sanctioned forms of lunacy.” Further, she hailed his willingness to write “what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America.”

What’s God got to do with America? The voices in today’s heated arguments provide wildly opposing answers. From the standpoint of the past, the answer to this question is unequivocally, “Quite a lot.” Any study of American history necessarily involves understanding what Americans thought God had to do with them. From the perspective of the present, the answer also would seem to be, “God has a lot to do with America,” because that is the majority opinion according to numerous polls. Seven of every ten Americans say they want the influence of religion in our society to grow. It’s well documented that a majority of these individuals are referring to a religion centered on “God” as traditionally understood in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

If trends hold, America’s future will continue to involve “God” prominently and publicly because more people are becoming more religious or “spiritual.”

But these realities don’t address the question of what God really does have to do with America—why, how, and in what forms and ways? And how can we answer such a question when Americans differ so widely on their views of God (or no god), how their views influence their private and public lives, and how they feel others’ views about God ought to impinge on personal and public areas of their lives?

We can’t afford to get sidetracked in yet another screeching-to-the-choir wrangle that will only leave opponents more embittered and hostile to each other, with increasing numbers in the middle deciding, “This whole God thing is just a personal matter, and anyway, nobody really knows for sure.”

If we allow confusion or frustration to deflect our best efforts, we will miss what the underlying crisis truly is—a titanic clash of the worldviews masquerading as a political correctness debate about whether I have the right to impose my religious views on you, or whether you have the right to tell me what I can and can’t say or do when I step into the public square. Underneath this debate are critical assumptions that will radically shape the future of this country for good or for ill, and it is high time we learn how to respond to them in ways that will cut through our cultural impasse and lead us to a better future for all Americans.

This article is excerpted from Richard Land’s book The Divided States of America? What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match! (Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2007). If you would like to purchase a copy of this book, please visit www.familybookstore.net or check your local bookstore.

Doctors used preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a controversial screening method, to determine which of the 11 embryos created by means of in vitro fertilization (IVF) had the gene that would have resulted in a female child having a 50 to 85 percent chance of developing breast cancer, according to The Times of London.

Six of the embryos tested positive for the gene and were rejected. Two embryos without the gene were implanted, producing a pregnancy of 14 weeks as of June 29, and two others were frozen, The Times reported.

The 27-year-old mother, who desires to remain unnamed, and her 28-year-old husband are fertile, but they chose IVF and PGD because of the prevalence of breast cancer on one side of the family. The husband had tested positive for the gene, known as BRCA-1.

“For the past three generations, every single woman in my husband’s family has had breast cancer, as early as 27 and 29,” the mother said, according to The Times. “We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down.”

R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said July 1 on his weblog the development again sadly shows some lives are considered unworthy of life.

“The laboratory is now a dangerous place for human embryos,” Mohler wrote. “They can be destroyed for stem cell research, frozen pending sale and rejected after genetic testing. This points to a very sad reality—there is now a search and destroy mission targeting human embryos considered unworthy and unwanted.

“Where does this stop? The designation of any trait—even the negative designation—creates a designer baby. Someone has decided that some trait is unacceptable.

“In this case it was a gene linked to cancer,” he wrote. “What next? We already know that the vast majority of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are now aborted. How long before there is a preimplantation screen for that syndrome? Couples are now screening embryos for gender. How long before athletic ability or earning potential is linked to a gene? Blond hair? Blue eyes?”

Paul Serhal, the couple’s fertility doctor, said of the development, “Women now have the option of having this treatment to avoid the potential guilty feeling of passing on this genetic abnormality to a child. This gives us the chance to eradicate this problem in families.”

Unfortunately, it also provides the opportunity to eradicate members of families.

NEA endorsement of Obama ironic, pro-lifer says

The National Education Association’s recent endorsement of Democrat Barack Obama for president is sadly ironic, says a pro-life leader.

Nearly 10,000 members voted July 4 to back the U.S. senator from Illinois during the NEA’s Representative Assembly, which is convened yearly during the organization’s convention.

The “tragic irony” of the endorsement “is not lost on millions of pro-lifers across the country,” said Karen Cross, the National Right to Life Committee’s political director. “The NEA has chosen to back a presidential candidate who wants to continue a policy of abortion on demand, which has resulted in nearly 50 million missing students in classrooms from coast to coast since 1973.

“Barack Obama’s extremist pro-abortion agenda is a poison pill for our nation’s classrooms,” he said. “It borders on the incomprehensible that our nation’s educators would get behind a candidate whose agenda will result in more and more missing children.”

Obama has strongly supported abortion rights, even voting against a ban on partial-birth abortion as a member of the Illinois legislature. Partial-birth abortion is a procedure in which a nearly totally delivered child is killed typically in at least the fifth month of pregnancy.

The Democrats’ presumptive nominee has said the first thing would do as president would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would repeal abortion restrictions permitted under Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court opinion legalizing abortion.

Brazil rejects liberalization of abortion ban

An attempt to liberalize Brazil’s prohibition on abortion went down to a resounding defeat July 9.

The Justice and Constitution Committee of Brazil’s lower house of Congress defeated the legislation 57-4, according to LifeNews.com. The bill would have legalized abortion through the 12th week of pregnancy, LifeNews reported. It also would have allowed abortion through the 20th week in cases of rape or incest, as well as when the mother’s life is threatened or the child is unlikely to serve birth.

Brazil’s law permits abortion only when the mother’s life is directly endangered or when she has been victimized by sexual abuse, according to LifeNews.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to protect the sanctity of human life. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. If your church is interested in purchasing materials on the sanctity of human life, please visit our online bookstore and erlc.com.

In presenting his case, the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo of Argentina, charged Omar Hassan al-Bashir with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. During the last five years, al-Bashier oversaw and promoted a campaign substantially focused on destroying the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups in Darfur, according to Moreno-Ocampo’s evidence.

Darfur, in the western region of Sudan, has been the scene of a grave humanitarian crisis since 2003, when government-sponsored militias, known as Janjaweed, began what President Bush has described as “genocide” in response to rebel attacks on government bases.

The crisis in Darfur is based on ethnic differences, with the Arab Muslim militias raping, kidnapping, bombing and murdering African Muslims. It has been estimated more than 400,000 people have died and nearly 2.5 million have been displaced in refugee camps in the area.

Speaking of al-Bashir, the prosecutor said in a written release from the International Criminal Court (ICC), “He used the whole state apparatus, he used the army, he enrolled the Militia/Janjaweed. They all report to him, they all obey him. His control is absolute.

“His motives were largely political. His alibi was a ‘counterinsurgency.’ His intent was genocide,” Moreno-Ocampo said. “In the camps al-Bashir’s forces kill the men and rape the women. He wants to end the history of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people. I don’t have the luxury to look away.”

ICC judges will review the prosecutor’s charges against al-Bashir to decide if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe he committed such crimes and to determine the means of a court appearance by him.

Sudan’s regime quickly denied the charges. “We will resist this,” said Rabie Atti, a Sudanese spokesman, according to The New York Times. “Everybody in Sudan—the government, the people, even the opposition parties—are against this.”

The United States is not a member of the ICC, which consists of 106 countries and was formally established in 2002. The Bush administration has opposed ICC membership because of concerns about its impact on U.S. sovereignty.

A Southern Baptist public policy leader applauded Moreno-Ocampo’s action.

“While I have concerns about the jurisdictional authority of the International Criminal Court, I certainly commend the prosecutor for his determination to hold President al-Bashir accountable for his shameful role in the ongoing tragedy of Darfur,” said Barrett Duke, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s vice president for public policy and research. “While President al-Bashir promises many things to resolve this horrific situation, he follows through on practically none of them.

“With every passing day the suffering of the people in Darfur increases,” Duke said. “It is past time for President al-Bashir and his regime to feel the full force of outrage that exists in most of the rest of the world over the atrocities committed under his rule.”

Messengers to the 2006 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) approved a resolution describing the conflict in Darfur as “genocide” and urging the disbanding of the government-supported militias in Darfur, international trials for “perpetrators of the atrocities” in the region and multi-national aid to the area.

Messengers to the 2000 and 2001 SBC meetings adopted resolutions calling for the Bush administration and Congress to pressure the Sudanese regime to halt the “atrocities and ongoing violations of religious freedom” that marked another genocidal effort in the east African country.

That earlier conflict was largely between the north and south, stretching over more than 20 years before ending ostensibly in 2005. That strife was based on religious differences, with the militant Islamic forces backed by the government pillaging Christian, animist and moderate Muslim villages in the central and southern parts of the country.

The U.S. State Department has designated Sudan as one of its eight “countries of particular concern,” a category reserved for the world’s worst violators of religious liberty.

The ICC is located at The Hague, The Netherlands.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to fight against religious persecution and to uphold human rights in America and around the world. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. If your church is interested in purchasing materials on religious liberty, please visit our online bookstore.

A citizen-initiated grand jury in Sedgwick County adjourned July 2 without indicting George Tiller for performing illegal, late abortions, according to The Wichita Eagle. Tiller’s clinic, Women’s Health Care Services in Wichita, advertises on its website it has “more experience in late abortion services over 24 weeks than anyone else currently practicing in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Australia.”

The grand jury said in a written statement it found “questionable late-term abortions” performed by Tiller but it did not receive enough evidence to indict him.

The grand jury also said state law was confusing, The Eagle reported. Kansas law bars abortions after 22 weeks’ gestation on babies considered viable unless two independent doctors decide continuing the pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” according to the newspaper.

“As the current law is written and interpreted by the Kansas Supreme Court, late-term abortions will continue for many circumstances that would seem, as a matter of common interpretation, not to meet the definition of ‘substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,’” the grand jury’s statement said, according to The Eagle.

Mary Kay Culp, Kansans for Life’s executive director, criticized District Attorney Nola Foulston for inadequate guidance to the grand jury. “The law doesn’t need to be changed. The enforcers of the law need to be changed,” she said, according to the newspaper.

Kansas permits citizens to call grand juries by means of a petition drive. Pro-life advocates led the campaign that resulted in a grand jury to investigate Tiller.

In a different case, Tiller still faces a charge of failing to obtain an independent doctor’s opinion before performing a late-term abortion, The Eagle reported.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to protect the sanctity of human life. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. If your church is interested in purchasing materials on the sanctity of human life, please visit our online bookstore and erlc.com.

Congress had designated nearly $40 million for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), but the State Department again determined, as it has every year since 2002, a grant to the organization would violate a 1985 law. That measure, known as the Kemp-Kasten amendment, prohibits family planning money from going to any entity that, as decided by the President, “supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

During the last seven years, the Bush administration has withheld nearly $235 million from the UNFPA based on its findings.

Officials in many parts of China have practiced a forced family planning program for nearly three decades in an attempt to curb the birth rate in the world’s most populous country. A law codifying the policy throughout China went into effect in 2002, although the national government forbids physical coercion for abortion or sterilization.

The policy limits couples in urban areas to one child and those in rural areas to two, if the first is a girl. Penalties for violations of the policy have included fines, arrests and the destruction of homes, as well as forced abortion and sterilization. Infanticide, especially of females, also has been reported.

The United States has regularly urged China to eliminate coercive abortion and sterilization, and it has called on the UNFPA to redesign its programs so it could receive U.S. funds, according to a written statement from the State Department. “Since no key changes have taken place, these restrictions are being applied again,” said Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman.

Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, applauded the action. “All pro-life Americans ought to be grateful that in spite of the most intense pressures, both external and domestic, the Bush administration has once again held the line in not allowing tax dollars to be used to help support the coercive abortion policies of the People’s Republic of China,” Land said.

The amendment is named after Republican Reps. Jack Kemp of New York and Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, who sponsored the measure.

Tiller escapes indictment by grand jury

A Kansas grand jury has declined to file charges against the country’s best known, late-term abortion doctor after a six-month investigation.

A citizen-initiated grand jury in Sedgwick County adjourned July 2 without indicting George Tiller for performing illegal, late abortions, according to The Wichita Eagle. Tiller’s clinic, Women’s Health Care Services, advertises on its website it has “more experience in late abortion services over 24 weeks than anyone else currently practicing in the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Australia.”

The grand jury said in a written statement it found “questionable late-term abortions” performed by Tiller but said state law was confusing, The Eagle reported. Kansas law bars abortions after 22 weeks’ gestation on babies considered viable unless two doctors decide continuing the pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” according to the newspaper.

“As the current law is written and interpreted by the Kansas Supreme Court, late-term abortions will continue for many circumstances that would seem, as a matter of common interpretation, not to meet the definition of ‘substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,’” the grand jury’s statement said, The Eagle reported.

Mary Kay Culp, Kansans for Life’s executive director, criticized District Attorney Nola Foulston for inadequate guidance to the grand jury. “The law doesn’t need to be changed. The enforcers of the law need to be changed,” she said, according to the newspaper.

Kansas permits citizens to call grand juries by means of a petition drive. Pro-life advocates led the campaign that resulted in a grand jury to investigate Tiller.

In a different case, Tiller still faces a charge of failing to obtain another independent doctor’s opinion before performing a late-term abortion, The Eagle reported.

German woman not ill but chooses assisted suicide

A 79-year-old German woman recently chose assisted suicide not because she was either sick or nearing death but because she feared living in a nursing home.

Bettina Schardt, 79, a resident of the Bavarian city of Wurzburg, took her life June 28 with the assistance of Roger Kusch, a well known assisted suicide promoter and a former government official, according to The New York Times.

Government officials decried Kusch’s counseling of Schardt before she consumed the lethal drugs.

“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” said Beate Merk, the justice minister of the German state of Bavaria, The Times reported. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Merk declared her intention Bavaria would not become another Switzerland, which permits assisted suicide. Almost 500 Germans have gone to Switzerland in the last decade to kill themselves with the aid of a Swiss organization, according to The Times.

“We want to make it illegal for people here to offer ‘suicide by reservation,’” Merk said. “That is inhumane.”

Kusch, however, proclaimed his resolve to help others commit suicide. His offer “is to allow people to die in their own beds,” Kusch said, The Times reported. “That is the wish of most people, and now it is possible in Germany.”

In the wake of the horrific attacks on the United States, telecommunications companies heeded requests from the U.S. government to monitor phone and fax communications with those suspected of plotting future attacks on our nation. No doubt in large part to the cooperation of these companies, our country has enjoyed nearly seven years without another attack.

A House-passed bill, now awaiting Senate action, would reauthorize a 1978 law—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—to allow our intelligence community to monitor foreign terrorists’ communications and give retroactive immunity to companies that have helped fortify national security by assisting the government through monitoring foreign terrorist networks.

But some senators are in no hurry to move on the legislation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) chose to send the Senate home for its July 4 recess without considering the renewal of the law, pushing the issue aside for another day. That day is expected to be today—and action on the bill could not come soon enough. Beginning Aug. 1, several surveillance-monitoring provisions will expire, including the ability of companies to monitor communications between some overseas foreign terrorist suspects without first obtaining a warrant from the special FISA court.

It appears leadership in the House and Senate has been playing games with the measure for months. The Senate first approved a reauthorization of FISA in February with broad bipartisan support, 68-29, but weeks and months passed without its consideration in the House. Now the House has drawn up a compromise in concert with the White House. That bill passed the House June 20 by another strong margin, 293-129.

The centerpiece of debate is whether to shield telecom companies from lawsuits. The issue has divided the liberal bloc, even placing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama at odds with many supporters and those within his party. The Illinois senator is backing the House-passed bill. He promises, however, to fight to strip retroactive immunity for telecom companies.

The back-and-forth political delays help only a few special interests, namely the trial lawyers who have leveled some 40 lawsuits against the telecom companies to the tune of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, our national security is at greater risk as our foreign enemies can more easily pass information into our country without us knowing it. During this time of war, it would be both dangerous to hamstring our intelligence community from intercepting foreign communications and reprehensible to punish telecom companies for their cooperation.

It is our understanding that three amendments are being proposed addressing immunity for the telecom companies that assisted the U.S. government in its efforts to identify terrorist suspects. Amendments will be offered by Sens. Russ Feingold (D-WI), Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). None of these amendments, however, is helpful to our efforts to keep the American people safe from terrorists.

If you agree that the telecom companies should not be held liable for their efforts to work with the U.S. government in helping to keep our country secure, please contact your senators immediately and express your opposition to these amendments.

Just a few years ago 57-year-old Karen Weber sat around the kitchen table talking about the Terri Schiavo case with her husband, Ray, and her mother, Martha Tatro. None of the three could have anticipated the chain of events that began in November when Karen Weber had a seizure and then a paralyzing stroke.

Now in a nursing home in Okeechobee, the woman is at the center of a dispute between family members over whether she is competent enough to make her own decisions about basic medical care. Karen Weber breathes on her own, but the stroke paralyzed her left side, leaving her unable to speak or swallow.

Ray Weber, Karen’s husband of 34 years, sought to have her feeding tube removed in March and Karen transferred to hospice. Weber’s mother, who says she is alert and responsive has indicated that she does not wish to go to hospice.

This article is continued on the Web site of the Florida Baptist Witness.

This excerpt is reprinted with permission from the July 3, 2008, issue of the Florida Baptist Witness.

The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission works to protect the sanctity of human life. If you would like to learn more about this issue, additional resources are available here. If your church is interested in purchasing materials on the sanctity of human life, please visit our online bookstore and erlc.com.

It’s true. The same governor who pushed for the growth of gambling in our state is now saying a proposed 2,000-machine casino at Interstate 35 and Britton Road in Oklahoma City would have a deleterious effect.

Read carefully. Unfortunately, there is no change of heart, just a change in the stakes.

Our Governor has chosen to be selective in his opposition to the expansion of gambling. Perhaps he weighed the odds and determined it was a better bet to upset the Shawnee Tribe rather than weaken the smiles of Oklahoma’s gambling horsemen and the majority of Oklahoma’s gambling tribes.

The Governor is quoted as saying, “Not only would this proposal by the Shawnee Tribe prove devastating for Remington Park and the horse industry, but there is every reason to believe it would secure an unfair advantage over the dozens of other tribal casinos scattered through central Oklahoma.”

An unfair advantage? Are we missing something here? Last we checked, it is pretty clear that the odds are in favor of the gambling industry, not gamblers and certainly not school children. When gamblers win, we all lose. Gambling hasn’t solved any of our problems; it has only added to them. Where was the Governor when we needed him most? If his current arguments had been used during the gambling vote, our state wouldn’t have one of the highest casino populations in the nation!

The Governor is apparently concerned with the way education funding projections have nosedived and fears that adding another casino to the Oklahoma landscape will only make things worse!

Really? Weren’t new fangled one-armed bandit slot machines supposed to be the answer to our state’s education budget woes?

It gets better. The Governor has also indicated that approval of the tribe’s application would cause traffic problems, and it would result in costly infrastructure issues for Oklahoma City.

The next time you are caught just outside a casino in a traffic jam burning $4 per gallon gasoline going nowhere fast, don’t forget that Oklahoma voted to go for broke!

Based on the traffic jams we’ve seen outside of casinos, it would be fair to conclude that our education funding problems should have disappeared by now. Unfortunately, the bright neon signs continue to lure droves of gambling bugs to local casinos. Milk money and paychecks are forfeited in hopes of hearing a little ching-ching from a slot machine. If gamblers would donate the money they throw away in slot machines to education funding, our school problems would be solved.

Sure, a few lucky ducks have walked away with the loot and some money has been raised for education, but reality is that the wallets of most Oklahomans are thinner now than before we expanded gambling in our state.

As for building a new Shawnee Tribe casino? We are against it. We side with the Governor on this one. We only regret the Governor didn’t side with us before now. Gambling is never good for Oklahoma. Not then, and not now.

This article is reprinted from the June 19, 2008, issue of the Baptist Messenger, the newspaper of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.