Associated Baptist Press - 5/22/2008

Associated Baptist Press
May 22, 2008 (8-53)

IN THIS ISSUE:
IRS clears United Church of Christ of wrongdoing in Obama speech
McCain rejects Hagee’s endorsement over televangelist’s Hitler comments
Texas court rules against seizure of polygamist sect’s children
Appeals court again overturns Virginia ‘partial-birth’ ban
BWA, Samaritan’s Purse make inroads to assist storm survivors
IMB regional director resigns over policy disagreements

IRS clears United Church of Christ of wrongdoing in Obama speech
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- Barack Obama’s denomination did nothing wrong in hearing a speech from the Democratic presidential candidate, the Internal Revenue Service has told officials of the United Church of Christ.

The denomination announced the move on its website May 21, releasing a May 13 IRS letter that cleared the church of violating the law for a speech the Illinois senator delivered at the UCC’s biennial General Synod last June. It closed an investigation that church officials first made public in February.

The letter said the UCC’s response to the investigation “established that the United Church of Christ had verbally communicated to those in attendance that Sen. Obama was there as a member of the church and not as a candidate for office, that the audience should not attempt to engage in any political activities, and that the church's legal counsel had advised Sen. Obama's campaign on the ground rules for the speech.”

Churches and other non-profit groups organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code are barred from endorsing or opposing candidates and political parties. If they do so, they risk losing their tax-exempt status. The prohibition extends to activities that would appear to endorse a candidate, including allowing the politician to speak in his or her capacity as a candidate at a worship service or church meeting.

The UCC is generally considered the nation’s most liberal large Protestant body. Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, has been an active member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for more than two decades. Trinity is the UCC’s biggest congregation.

In February, UCC officials received a letter from Marsha Ramirez, an official in the regional IRS office in Cleveland, where the denomination is headquartered. The initial letter informed the UCC that it was under investigation for potential violations.

In it, Ramirez said the agency’s concerns “are based on articles posted on several websites” that described Obama’s June 23 appearance at the meeting, held in Hartford, Conn. The senator -- by then an announced Democratic candidate for president -- spoke to about 10,000 church members, according to denomination and news accounts.

But UCC officials said they took pains to ensure that the speech was not perceived as a campaign event or an endorsement of the candidate.

Obama was invited “as one of 60 diverse speakers representing the arts, media, academia, science, technology, business and government. Each was asked to reflect on the intersection of their faith and their respective vocations or fields of expertise,” a UCC news release issued at the time said. It also said church officials invited Obama as a church member rather than in his capacity as a candidate. In addition, it noted, they first invited him to speak a year before he declared his intention to run for higher office.

The exoneration letter, also signed by Ramirez, appeared to vindicate those claims. “Based on your response to the inquiry, we have determined that the activity about which we had concern did not constitute an intervention or participation in a political campaign … and that the United Church of Christ continues to qualify as an organization described in section 501(c)(3),” she wrote.

In their May 21 announcement, UCC officials hailed the letter as a “complete vindication.”

“We are pleased that the IRS reviewed the complaint quickly and determined, as we expected, that the church took every necessary precaution and proactive step to ensure that Sen. Obama’s appearance at General Synod was proper and legal,” said John Thomas, the denomination’s chief executive. “This is very good news.”

James Hutchins, a UCC member from suburban Cleveland who is a frequent critic of the denomination’s stances on secular politics via his blog (ucctruths.blogspot.com), said May 21 that he could live with the ruling. But he said he still contends that the denomination did break at least one IRS guideline for church-related campaigning, because it mentioned Obama’s candidacy in some of the promotional materials that led up to the speech.

“Clearly, from the IRS response to the UCC, these guidelines are not firm and it opens up the spectrum of accepted political activity that churches may participate in and still be compliant with the IRS,” he wrote, in a May 21 post.

However, he said, the exoneration made more sense than the agency’s recent clearing of Southern Baptist pastor and activist Wiley Drake. The IRS dropped its investigation of him -- announced shortly before the UCC inquiry -- even though he had endorsed then-GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in a press release written on church letterhead and through comments on a radio show that Drake said was conducted under the auspices of his First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif.

“The offenses identified by the UCC complaint to the IRS are arguably peripheral next to the complaint against Drake, but that doesn't mean that the UCC didn't walk into a gray area by identifying Obama as a presidential candidate in promoting his General Synod speech on the UCC web site,” Hutchins wrote.

“The only logical conclusion I can make is that the IRS is giving churches great latitude in their freedom of speech before threatening their tax-exempt status. That may be the more prudent approach. As long as they are consistent, I can live with it, although I think it should be clearly reflected in their guidelines.”

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McCain rejects Hagee’s endorsement over televangelist’s Hitler comments
By ABP staff

(ABP) -- After months of pressure to reject the endorsement of conservative televangelist John Hagee, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain finally did so May 22 after the preacher’s views on Hitler raised new controversy.

In a decade-old sermon, reported by the Huffington Post website, Hagee said Hitler was doing God’s will by forcing Jews to return to Israel, saying “the Nazis had operated on God's behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine.”

"Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them," McCain told CNN in a statement. "I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well."

McCain describes himself as a Baptist and attends North Phoenix Baptist Church when home in Arizona. He said Hagee is not a “spiritual advisor,” although some news reports and pundits had described him that way when the preacher’s controversial statements first became widely publicized.

McCain, who sought the San Antonio-based evangelist’s endorsement, had earlier expressed disagreement with some of Hagee’s other past comments on the Catholic Church. However, he did not reject the endorsement at the time. But the latest revelation about Hagee’s views on Hitler proved more than McCain could handle.

After the Arizona senator made his announcement May 22, Hagee withdrew his endorsement.

Hagee, an adamant Christian Zionist, also has said Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment on New Orleans for allowing a gay-pride festival, and has cited the Inquisition and the Crusades as evidence of anti-Semitism within the Roman Catholic Church.

After his comments became controversial, Hagee apologized to Catholics in a letter to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights. He wrote, "Out of a desire to advance a greater unity among Catholics and evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful."

He also quietly retracted his New Orleans statement, saying he should not have presumed to “know the mind of God concerning Hurricane Katrina.”

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Texas court rules against seizure of polygamist sect’s children
By ABP staff

SAN ANGELO, Texas (ABP) -- The state of Texas had no right to remove more than 460 children from their polygamist parents, a state appeals court ruled May 22.

It was unclear if or when the children -- some held in Baptist children’s homes -- would be returned to their parents, who are members of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, church. The sect is led by controversial polygamist Warren Jeffs, who is himself in jail on unrelated charges.

A district judge in April ruled in favor of the state of Texas, which seized the children during an April 4 police raid on the church’s 1,600-acre Yearning for Zion Ranch compound near Eldorado. Thirty-eight FLDS mothers filed suit against the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to have their children returned.

A three-judge panel of the Texas 3rd District Court of Appeals ruled May 22 that the state failed to prove the children are in immediate danger: "Evidence that children raised in this particular environment may some day have their physical health and safety threatened is not evidence that the danger is imminent enough to warrant invoking the extreme measure of immediate removal prior to full litigation of the issue," the court’s majority wrote.

After the April 4 raid, several Baptist churches and agencies were among those asked by the state to help care for the children. Baptist Child and Family Services, an agency affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, was charged with coordinating care for hundreds of the children.

The appeals court instructed the lower court to vacate its ruling, but did give instructions for returning the children, according to several news reports. Attorneys for FLDS said they will seek the children’s immediate return. The state could appeal the case to the Texas Supreme Court.

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Appeals court again overturns Virginia ‘partial-birth’ ban
By Robert Marus

RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) -- Despite a recent Supreme Court decision upholding a federal ban on a kind of late-term abortion procedure, a federal appeals court has again overturned a similar statewide ban in Virginia because it could limit far more abortions than intended.

A divided three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., issued the ruling May 20. The judges said the Virginia law banning so-called “partial-birth” abortions was sufficiently different from the federal ban that the Supreme Court upheld last year’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision that it remained unconstitutional.

The Gonzales decision was the first time since legalizing abortion nationwide in 1973 that the Supreme Court has upheld a nationwide ban on a specific abortion procedure. The court had previously declared any restriction on abortion unconstitutional if it did not allow exceptions to preserve the mother’s life or health.

But in Gonzales, a narrow majority of justices said Congress had the right to ban the procedure -- which involves the partial delivery of a fetus, whose skull is then crushed and its contents evacuated to facilitate easier passage through the birth canal -- because of disagreement over whether it was ever medically necessary to protect a mother’s health.

The 4th Circuit had earlier declared the same Virginia law unconstitutional because of its lack of a health exception. But last year, the Supreme Court asked lower courts to review such decisions in light of the Gonzales ruling.

Nonetheless, in the latest ruling the appeals panel’s majority said the Virginia law differed from the federal one in one crucial area: It did not contain an exemption for physicians who don’t set out to perform the banned dilation-and-extraction procedure, but are forced to do so. Some such procedures result when the far more common -- and still lawful -- dilation-and-evacuation procedure fails. That method of abortion involves dismembering the fetus while still in the womb, then removing it in pieces.

Unlike the federal law, Judge Blane Michael wrote in the panel’s majority opinion, the Virginia ban penalized doctors who set out to perform a legal procedure, “but who nonetheless accidentally deliver the fetus to an anatomical landmark and who must perform a deliberate act that causes fetal demise in order to complete removal.”

Those landmarks are reached when the fetus’s “entire head” or his or her “trunk past the navel” has emerged from the mother’s body.

To ensure that they avoid criminal prosecution, Blane said, Virginia abortion providers would have to stop performing the most common second-trimester abortion procedure. The effect of that would be an unconstitutional curtailment of abortion rights across the commonwealth.

But, in a strongly worded dissent, Judge Paul Niemyer said that the majority was simply trying to ignore the Gonzales decision.

“The majority’s selective use of statutory language and its rationalizations represent nothing less than a strong judicial will to overturn what the Virginia Legislature has enacted for the benefit of Virginia’s citizens and what, in materially undistinguishable terms, the Supreme Court has upheld as constitutional.”

Virginia’s attorney general, reacting to the decision, indicated that he may ask for a re-hearing before the full complement of 4th Circuit judges, or may appeal the panel’s decision to the Supreme Court.

The appeals court’s decision is Richmond Medical Center v. Herring, No. 03-1821.

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BWA, Samaritan’s Purse make inroads to assist storm survivors
By ABP staff

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (ABP) -- Baptist World Aid, the relief and development arm of the Baptist World Alliance, is working through six relief camps in cyclone-devastated Burma (also known as Myanmar), while a United States-based organization readies an airlift to earthquake-shocked China.

BWAid Rescue24, a search, rescue and relief effort, is working through the Myanmar Baptist Convention and one of its smaller entities, the Karen Baptist Convention, to minister to displaced individuals in camps near Yangon, Burma’s largest city and former capital.

The team reported that “the assistance is literally saving lives at this point, with situations of widespread diarrhea, and serious electricity and water shortages.”

With the total death toll at 134,000, team members noted the cyclone had devastated rice fields and agricultural animals, virtually wiping out future food sources.

Fishing, another major food source in the stricken Irrawaddy Delta region of Burma, also has been brought to a standstill.

The high death toll has hindered burial efforts. As a result, many bodies have been thrown into rivers. Locals are reluctant to fish in contaminated waters.

Baptists in Myanmar were among those hardest hit by Cyclone Nargis, which struck the country May 2-3. More than 10,000 Myanmar Baptists died, according to BWA, with some 94,000 additional members suffering property loss. Many church buildings were destroyed, and the convention’s headquarters in Yangon was badly damaged.

The Myanmar Baptist Convention organized a cyclone relief committee to assist with relief efforts.

Meanwhile, U.S.-based Samaritan’s Purse has chartered a plane to take supplies to Chengdu, China. That city is the largest in the Sichuan region, devastated by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck May 12. As of May 22, according to official statistics, it had killed 51,151 people and injured 288,431. Nearly 30,000 remained missing.

The organization, founded by evangelist Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, plans to airlift 90 tons of supplies, including temporary shelter material and water filtration systems, from Charlotte, N.C., on Friday.

It already has sent 45 tons of supplies to Burma.

Contributions for Myanmar and China relief efforts can be made online at www.thefellowship.info/give (Cooperative Baptist Fellowship); www.abc-oghs.org/give (American Baptist Churches, USA); www.bwanet.org/bwaid (Baptist World Alliance); www.baptistglobalresponse.com (Southern Baptist Convention); and www.samaritanspurse.org (Samaritan’s Purse).

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IMB regional director resigns over policy disagreements
By ABP staff

RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) -- A high-ranking Southern Baptist Convention International Mission Board employee resigned May 5 because he disagrees with policies governing missionary qualifications.

Rodney Hammer, IMB’s regional leader for Central and Eastern Europe, cited disagreement with policies disallowing missionary candidates because of disagreements about their mode of baptism or the fact that they practice a “private prayer language.”

In a personal letter to missionaries in his region, Hammer noted he also disagreed with the IMB’s “unnecessary, extra-biblical narrowing of parameters for Southern Baptist cooperation in the Great Commission they represent.” Former IMB trustee Wade Burleson of Oklahoma posted the letter on his blog.

In 2005, board trustees adopted policies that ruled out appointment of candidates who practice either speaking in tongues in public or as a private devotional act. They also determined that candidates must have been baptized in a Southern Baptist church or in a church of another denomination that practices believer’s baptism only by immersion, and without regenerative or sacramental connotations. The policies were revised in 2007 and called “guidelines.”

In his letter, Hammer affirmed the Baptist Faith and Message, the Southern Baptist Convention’s doctrinal statement. However, he added, board trustees should not exceed those doctrinal parameters.

According to an IMB press release, Hammer and his family began a stateside assignment on May 5, and they plan to be reassigned to a field assignment as missionaries after finishing their domestic service.

Hammer was appointed in 1990 as strategy coordinator for China with Cooperative Services International, the IMB’s former relief and development arm. He served in that position until 1996. Trustees named him leader for Central and Eastern Europe in 1999.

Before joining the IMB, he was a pastor and church staff member in Missouri. He earned degrees from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo.

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