Associated Baptist Press - 11/5/2008

Associated Baptist Press
November 5, 2008 · (08-107)

David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Acting Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer

In this issue
Obama election victory signals shift, but Religious Right still scores wins (660 words)
Baylor reports racially related incidents on Election Day (295 words)
Baptist World Aid seeks funds for Congo (351 words)
Opinion: Regardless of politics, a reason for America to rejoice (878 words)

Obama election victory signals shift, but Religious Right still scores wins
By Robert Marus (660 words)

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- All religious groups shifted toward Barack Obama, the candidate opposed by the Religious Right's leadership, in his historic presidential win Nov. 4. Still, religious conservatives did manage a few victories.

The Democratic candidate garnered about 52 percent of the popular vote to GOP nominee John McCain's 46 percent.

While McCain and running mate Sarah Palin -- a darling of the right -- lost the night's biggest prize, four statewide ballot initiatives aimed at curtailing gay rights appeared headed for passage. Other ballot initiatives watched closely by religious conservatives -- like gambling and abortion rights -- were a mixed bag.

Obama improved significantly on John Kerry's performance in every major religious category, according to exit polls as analyzed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, lost white evangelicals by huge margins and Catholics by a narrower margin in losing to President Bush's re-election bid.
Obama did better than Kerry among evangelicals and won a majority of Catholics. He also scored increased support among Jews, Protestants in general and those not affiliated with any religion.

Democrats added at least five seats to their Senate majority -- with four still unresolved as of press time for this story -- and about 20 to their House majority. While picking off some prominent congressional social conservatives, Democrats failed to unseat others considered vulnerable prior to the election:

-- In North Carolina, Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole -- who came under heavy fire for a last-minute campaign ad implying her challenger was an atheist -- lost by a wide margin to Democratic state Sen. Kay Hagan. Hagan, an ordained elder and Sunday school teacher at First Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, N.C., answered with her own ad accusing her opponent of "bearing false witness against fellow Christians."

-- In Colorado, GOP Rep. Marilyn Musgrave -- who has been the chief House backer of failed attempts to add an anti-gay- marriage amendment to the Constitution -- lost to Democratic challenger Betsy Markey, 57 percent to 43 percent.

-- In Minnesota, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann eked out a 46 percent-43 percent victory over Democrat Elwyn Tinklenberg, overcoming negative publicity about a national TV interview in which she said she thought Obama might have "anti-American" views.

-- And in Georgia, conservative Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss appeared headed for a Dec. 2 runoff with Democrat Jim Martin. Neither had garnered more than 50 percent of the vote by press time.

On state ballot initiatives, religious conservatives claimed a big victory in California. Proposition 8, which would repeal the marriage rights that the state's highest court authorized in May for same-sex couples, appeared headed to a narrow victory when this story was written.

Evangelicals, conservative Catholics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints joined together to promote the measure. The Mormons poured tens of millions of dollars into advertisements that gay-rights activists called blatantly misleading.

Bans on same-sex marriage in Florida and Arizona -- which defeated a similar state constitutional amendment two years ago -- passed easily.

Nearly 57 percent of Arkansas voters approved a ban on unmarried couples serving as adoptive or foster parents. The measure bans both same-sex and opposite-sex cohabiting couples from caring for children, but opponents and some supporters said it was targeted at keeping gays from adopting. It came in response to a 2006 Arkansas Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on homosexual foster parents.

Anti-abortion forces didn't fare nearly as well as opponents of gay rights.

Measures to outlaw or restrict abortion lost in California, Colorado and South Dakota. The measure in South Dakota would have been the nation's strictest abortion ban. It was similar to an abortion ban that state defeated by a similar margin in 2006.

Lottery or gambling-expansion measures passed in three of six states where they appeared on the ballot.

Washington state approved the nation's second assisted-suicide law. Neighbor Oregon is the only other U.S. jurisdiction that allows physician-assisted euthanasia.

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Baylor reports racially related incidents on Election Day
By Ken Camp (295 words)

WACO, Texas (ABP) -- Baylor University police responded to three apparently racially related on-campus incidents on Election Day.

Late on the afternoon of Nov. 4, officials at the Texas Baptist school were notified a single clothes-line rope resembling a noose was seen in a campus tree.

Later in the day, police investigated a small fire in a barbecue pit next to Brooks Flats residential community. Allegedly, several Obama/Biden campaign signs were burned.

That evening, police were called to a disturbance outside Penland Hall men's dormitory, where a shouting match occurred between two small groups of white and African-American students.

"These events are deeply disturbing to us and are antithetical to the mission of Baylor University," Interim President David Garland said in an e-mail to all Baylor students. "We categorically denounce and will not tolerate racist acts of any kind on our campus."

Garland cited university policies regarding civility and respect. Baylor's eight-page civil-rights policy says the university "does not engage in unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, nationality or ethnic origin, sex, age, or disability in employment or the provision of services."

"We are committed to maintaining the safety and unity of our campus community," Garland said. "We wish to celebrate and strengthen inclusiveness, understanding and acceptance of all members of the Baylor family."

Garland encouraged faculty, staff and students to participate in ongoing dialogues sponsored by Baylor's multicultural activities department.

African Americans make up about 7 percent of Baylor's current student enrollment. The university's student body is 72 percent Anglo.

"We believe that the incidents on our campus yesterday were irresponsible acts committed by a few individuals," Garland concluded. "As a community, we condemn these terribly unfortunate events that do not represent the values we share as members of the Baylor family."

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Baptist World Aid seeks funds for Congo
By Bob Allen (351 words)

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (ABP) -- The head of an international Baptist relief agency has sent out an urgent fundraising appeal to ease the suffering of victims of civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Just back from a conference in Uganda in which Baptist leaders discussed the crisis, Paul Montacute, director of Baptist World Aid, appealed Nov. 4 for gifts to assist people in the eastern part of the country. The area has affected by intensified fighting between rebel troops and government forces in recent weeks.

Montacute said the catastrophe in Congo is not a new one, although it is just now garnering worldwide media attention. The struggle dates back to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, as many Congolese find themselves squeezed between the Congolese army and ethnic Tutsi rebels led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda.

Montacute said the Baptist World Alliance counts three member groups from the area. BWAid, the BWA's relief-and-development arm, has long cooperated with those partners to help local Baptists work with abused and violated women and children, provide school resources, fight poverty and conduct other programs.

"Once again, it is the innocent people of Kivu Province who are suffering at the hands of armies and rebel forces," Montacute said. "They deserve better, and are relying on us to help them."

Montacute returned Nov. 3 from the meeting with Baptists caught up in the situation. They came not only from Eastern Congo but also neighboring Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and Tanzania. All, he said, "were very concerned about the escalating issue."

Baptist facilities in eastern Congo are being used to provide shelter for displaced persons, Montacute said, but funds are desperately needed for basic needs of shelter, food, water and sanitation.

Montacute said funds sent to BWAid would be used to help Baptists in Congo and neighboring countries to help these struggling people. Gifts for the appeal should be designated "Goma Congo Appeal." Information on how to give is available on the BWAid website.

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Opinion: Regardless of politics, a reason for America to rejoice
By Robert Marus (878 words)

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- Nov. 4, 2008 was the most improbable day of my 34-year-old life.

The unlikely elevation of an African American to the presidency is just the latest episode in what the president-elect himself has called "the unlikely story that is America." And Christians of all ideological and political stripes should be able to cheer some aspects of what happened yesterday. I certainly can.


I am a Caucasian-American son of the South, raised in the first generation born after school integration. I graduated from a high school that is a landmark of the Civil Rights Movement. Ancestors on both sides of my family fought for the Confederacy.

And I experienced an American reality yesterday that would have been but a fantasy to a significant portion of our population for the first 500 years of America's life.

It began yesterday morning, on my way to work, when I went to vote. I reside in the District of Columbia and -- as in many urban precincts around the country -- the lines at my polling place were long. An African-American woman who looked to be in her 60s was in front of me, and she struck up a genial conversation.

She was raised in the South, she told me, and she remembered the days when her parents had to pay a poll tax to claim their right to vote. She was beaming at the chance to vote for a black man for president -- an idea that would have been inconceivable to her ancestors.

It turns out she and my father share the same hometown -- Pine Bluff, Ark. When I told her about our common Arkansas roots, she embraced me.

After work, I joined about 20 friends -- mainly fellow young adults from my church -- for a voting-returns party in my neighborhood. When the networks announced that the senator from Illinois would be the next president, my friends, of every race, shed tears of joy.

And then our party and scores more like it spilled out into the streets of our Northwest Washington neighborhood. Everywhere I looked, there were merry bands of celebrants walking down sidewalks, shouting as fellow revelers passed by in cars and cabs, honking horns and blaring music.

The national news networks were showing footage of thousands of similarly jubilant Obama supporters who had gathered in front of the White House, about a mile south of where we were. Not wanting to walk that far in a chilly drizzle, we wandered down "U" Street, which was once the commercial and nightlife heart of Washington's African-American community -- so much so that it was dubbed "Black Broadway."

At the corner of 14th and "U" a similar impromptu celebration had broken out. Thousands of people -- mostly young, but with some older folks, and of every ethnicity under the sun -- were dancing, singing, chanting. One guy even shimmied up the flagpole in front of the municipal building where I had voted earlier that day to shake the American flag with pride. The crowd cheered him wildly.

The police closed the intersection to vehicular traffic as the crowd swelled. Boisterous partiers set off fireworks. People grinned ear to ear.

The celebration went well into the wee hours, even as media outlets finally declared that the Commonwealth of Virginia -- the mother state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the state whose law banning interracial marriage was not struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967 -- would cast its electoral votes for the son of a black Kenyan immigrant and a white Kansan mother.

What many might not know is that the corner of 14th and "U" is the very place where, 40 years ago last April, the news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked the first of a massive wave of riots in black neighborhoods across the country. Washington burned for days, and "Black Broadway" was virtually destroyed. It didn't even begin to recover until young professionals -- many of them white -- began to gentrify the neighborhood in the late 1990s.

But last night another demonstration of a very different sort broke out at 14th and "U." Instead of people mourning the death of one dream for black America and destroying their own community in the process, a multi-hued array of humanity celebrated the birthing of a new dream -- a dream in which they all have a legitimate stake.

Many white Baptists are wary of Obama because of his stances on some social issues. Others dislike his economic policies. But what any Christian who claims to believe in our Constitution should be able to thank God for is the sheer fact that a bi-racial man named Barack Hussein Obama has been elected to the highest office in a land where, scarcely 40 years ago, his parents wouldn't even have had the right to marry in many states.

And, as a result, millions of young Americans of every race and creed now feel that they are full participants in the political process.

Anyone who claims to follow the God who created all people in his own image should rejoice at that news. As the son of former slave owners, embraced by the daughter of former slaves, I certainly do.

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-- Robert Marus is ABP's acting managing editor and Washington bureau chief.