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Monday, October 04, 2010

Japan warns about Europe terror; tourists are calm - Yahoo! News

Japan warns about Europe terror; tourists are calm - Yahoo! News

Japan and Sweden joined the U.S. and Britain on Monday in warning citizens about traveling in Europe because of concerns about a terror attack. Pakistani intelligence officials said five German militants were believed killed in an American missile strike close to the Afghan border.

The Bishop Has No Clothes










The Bishop Has No Clothes
By David A. Love
The Color of Law
By David A. Love, JD
BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor

Just about everyone knows about the problems facing Bishop Eddie Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.  Specifically, there are the four young men who allege that the prominent Atlanta-area pastor coerced them into a sexual relationship, and possibly more waiting in the wings.  They claim that Long used his status to seduce them with money, clothes, bling, cars, foreign trips, access to celebrities, and the like.  The men allege that they called Long "dad" or "daddy," which sounds awfully cultish.  One of the plaintiffs even claims that he was 14 when his relationship with Long started, which brings up issues of child abuse and statutory rape. 

These accusations will be addressed in court, and who knows, maybe there will be a quiet out-of-court settlement.  To be sure, this is not the first religious leader to face accusations of sexual and professional misconduct and abuse of authority, nor the last.  Similarly, the Bishop is not the first homophobic preacher to be outed as a gay man.

But Bishop Long's sexual orientation ultimately is not the subject of this commentary, although it provides some valuable context.  Now, if these accusations are true, then Bishop Long is at least guilty of hypocrisy and self-hatred.  And if the charges are not true, he is still an anti-gay minister who has damaged many people.  Either way, he is a prosperity preacher who preys on the black community, and shames the legacy of the civil rights movement.  And that's most of what we need to know.

When the Southern Poverty Law Center decides to write an intelligence report about you, you know you've done something wrong.  SPLC calls Bishop Long "one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement."  In one sermon, he says of gays and lesbians, "God says you deserve death!"  The message of "hate the sin and the sinner" are strong words in a religion that is supposed to teach love, healing and redemption.

Long believes that homosexuality is a spiritual abortion, "a manifestation of a fallen man."  He believes that if black gays and lesbians feel alienated and abandoned by the black church, the problem is not intolerance against them, but their own sins.  But before these people go to Hell as he contends they are, Long is trying to cure gays and lesbians (except himself, we can assume).  And his church bookstore sells the works of authors such as the homophobic James Dobson of Focus on the Family—no friend of the black community.

And Long's misappropriation of the King legacy is shameful.  Coretta Scott King's funeral was held at New Birth in 2006 rather than Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King family's church.  Civil rights giants Harry Belafonte and then-NAACP chair Julian Bond were so mortified by this fact that they boycotted the funeral.  After all, Mrs. King was a supporter of gay marriage, and she called it a civil rights issue.  The late Yolanda King, the oldest child, took after her mother in that regard.  Bernice King, the youngest child in the King family, called Long her "new father," and symbolically passed a torch to him.

To add to the insult, Bernice King and Long participated in a march to Dr. King's gravesite to support a national constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  In 2004, Long and others successfully pushed for a similar amendment to the Georgia state constitution.  And it should be noted that Alveda King, Dr. King's niece, is herself a homophobic minister who exploited her uncle's name at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, an event replete with aggrieved white supremacists, Obama haters and gun enthusiasts.  "Homosexuality cannot be elevated to the civil rights issue," Alveda King said in a 1998 speech. "The civil rights movement was born from the Bible. God hates homosexuality."

Bishop Eddie Long is a prosperity-oriented minister, adhering to a theology that essentially says God will financially hook up the believers.  Some would call it a false gospel, given Jesus' targeting of the money changers, and his proclamation that it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  Others would call it pimping.

Long's New Birth megachurch has a membership of about 25,000, and sits on 240 acres in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, Georgia.  The nonprofit religious "charity" he started in 1997 has served him well—a $1.4 million, 20-acre home with 9 bathrooms, a $350,000 Bentley, and a $3 million salary over three years, not to mention all of the expensive jewelry.  Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) launched an investigation into the finances and tax-exempt status of six megachurches, including New Birth, and Creflo Dollar's World Changers International Church.  Due to the recession, New Birth had to cut back on its $250,000 Easter Sunday service last year, and that is not a misprint.  Tithes and membership dropped 20 percent, given that it is hard to be about prosperity when you are poor and hurting, and black folks have been hit harder than most in this recession.         

And as Wall Street bankers, megachurch preachers and other prosperity pimps live like lottery winners, people in America are suffering.  The Census Bureau recently reported that poverty is higher than it was 10 years ago, with nearly 15 percent of Americans in poverty.  The gap between rich and poor has tripled in three decades, and is the highest it has been since the 1920s.  Meanwhile, unemployment is entrenched and not going anywhere anytime soon.  
   

Surely, Bishop Long and his supporters would maintain that his reputation is being dragged through the mud.  But his reputation was already muddied via his homophobia and corrupt bling theology.  Rather, Long should worry far more about what Dr. King would say about him.

Although King fought against and even disobeyed unjust laws, Long supports them.  Dr. King decried the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism, and called for a radical revolution of values, from a "thing-oriented" society to a 'person-oriented" society.  Figures such as King and Malcolm X walked the talk by fighting for the people—and for causes greater than their personal bank account— through great personal sacrifice and a modest existence.  Remember that Dr. King donated all of his $54,000 Nobel Peace Prize money to the civil rights movement.  I dare say it would be hard to find many leaders today—black or otherwise— who would follow in the footsteps of this great man.  How many of them would lift a finger to help the downtrodden?

Meanwhile, Bishop Eddie Long just wants to get paid, and beat the case.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, David A. Love, JD is a journalist and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to The Huffington PosttheGrioThe Progressive Media ProjectMcClatchy-Tribune News ServiceIn These Times and Philadelphia Independent Media CenterHe also blogs at davidalove.comNewsOneDaily Kos, and Open Salon. Click here to contact Mr. Love.







New Supreme Court Term Opens With New Justice





Newsmax.com


Breaking from Newsmax.com

New Supreme Court Term Opens With New Justice

The Supreme Court is starting its new term with a new justice, Elena Kagan, and bad news for hundreds of parties trying to get their cases heard at the nation's highest court.

The justices are expected to start work Monday by denying many of the nearly 2,000 appeals that piled up in recent months. The court also is hearing argument in a bankruptcy dispute and an appeal by criminal defendants seeking shorter prison terms.

Editor's Notes:

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During the new term, the court will look at provocative anti-gay protests at military funerals and a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children. These cases worry free speech advocates, who fear the court could limit First Amendment freedoms.

The funeral protest lawsuit, over signs praising American war deaths, "is one of those cases that tests our commitment to the First Amendment," said Steven Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Another case involves a different aspect of the First Amendment, the government's relationship to religion. The justices will decide whether Arizona's income tax credit scholarship program, in essence, directs state money to religious schools in violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, marking his fifth anniversary on the court, and with the replacement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor by Justice Samuel Alito, the court has been more sympathetic to arguments that blur the line between government and religion, as long as one religion is not favored over another.

Kagan, confirmed in August, is the one new face on the court, but nearly everyone will be sitting in different seats when the term opens.

Like so much else at the Supreme Court, the justices sit according to seniority, other than the chief justice at the center of the bench. The retirement of John Paul Stevens, who had served longer than the others, means Roberts now will be flanked by Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the court last year, will sit at opposite ends of the bench. The woman with the longest tenure, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also is now the senior liberal-leaning justice with Stevens gone.

Though it's never certain how changes will affect the court's direction, President Barack Obama said he was looking for someone in the mold of the liberal-leaning Stevens when he chose Kagan. If Kagan votes as Stevens did, her presence would not affect the ideological divide that has four justices on the conservative side, four on the liberal side and Kennedy in the middle, though more often with the conservatives.

Then, too, a justice's first term is not necessarily an accurate predictor of future performance. If anything, getting a read on Kagan in her first year may be even harder because her former job as Obama's solicitor general already has forced her to take herself out of 24 of the 51 cases the court has so far agreed to hear. The solicitor general is the top lawyer who argues the government's cases before the high court.

The first case from which she is withdrawing will be argued Monday, and Kagan will slip out of the courtroom before Roberts invites the lawyers to begin their argument.

Kagan's absences create the potential for the eight remaining justices to split 4-4 in some cases. That outcome leaves in place the decision reached by the most recent court to have the case, but leaves unsettled the issue the high court was set to resolve.

A second Arizona law, imposing penalties on businesses that hire illegal immigrants, also is before the court this term. At issue is whether the state law intrudes into an area, immigration, that really is the federal government's responsibility.

The result at the Supreme Court could signal how the court might resolve another suit working its way through the federal courts over the Arizona immigration law that puts local police officers on the front lines of enforcing federal immigration law, said Brian Wolfman, a Georgetown University law professor.

Several cases that pit consumers against business also revolve around when federal law trumps state action.

© Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Monday, October 4, 2010


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Monday's Daily Brief





The Huffington Post   2010-10-04
     

The Daily Brief

   
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Robert Kuttner: Trade War Is Here -- and We've Disarmed

2010-10-04-chinaflowers.jpg

AP

Robert Kuttner: Supposedly state socialism failed, but China has created an improbable combination of a one-party socialist state and predatory capitalism. American industry is so far into the tank with the Chinese, and the U.S. government is so heavily dependent on the Chinese to buy our bonds, that the administration can't imagine taking a hard line against Beijing. Our diplomats behave more like a client power genuflecting before the might of the imperial master than the dominant nation that the U.S. is supposed to be. Click here to read more.


Ann Pettifor: The Broken Global Banking System

How many Americans understand how broken and defective the banking system as a whole has become? For the crazy facts are these: bankers now borrow from their customers and from taxpayers.

Robert Reich: Why It's Foolish to Weaken the Dollar to Create Jobs

It's no big accomplishment to create jobs by getting poorer. Our goal isn't just more jobs. It's more jobs that pay enough to improve our living standards.

Alec Baldwin: A Few Words About Barbara Boxer

Carly Fiorina's lack of experience does not trouble me so much as her reductive attitude towards Barbara Boxer on a personal level and her complete and shameful obfuscation of Boxer's record in the Senate.

Esther Wojcicki: Superman Does Not Exist and Teachers' Unions are Not the Villains

Instead of destabilizing our schools and bashing teachers, we should channel all that outrage into a positive reform movement that could really improve the schools.

Mike Lux: Restoring the Balance

Picking a new head for the National Economic Council is an important moment for the president's rapidly realigning staff. The old economic models are broken, and a little entrepreneurial populism is exactly what is needed.

 
 

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