Associated Baptist Press - 2/4/2009

Associated Baptist Press
February 4, 2009 · (09-15)

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

In this issue
SCHIP passage to add 4 million children to insurance rolls (632 words)
Former Samford president Tom Corts dies (427 words)
Opinion: Freedom of the press a Baptist 'trophy' (734 words)

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SCHIP passage to add 4 million children to insurance rolls
By Bob Allen (632 words)

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- On his 16th day in office, President Barack Obama signed a bill expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program by $32 billion, providing coverage to an additional 4 million children in families with incomes too high to receive Medicaid but who cannot afford to buy health insurance.

"Today marks a tremendous victory," said Katie Paris of Faith in Public Life, one of a number of religious groups that worked more than two years for passage.

The House of Representatives voted 289-139 in favor of the bill Jan. 14 and signed off on minor changes by the Senate Feb. 4 by a vote of 290-135. The president signed the measure into law later in the day in the East Room of the White House.

"This is only the first step," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "As I see it, providing coverage for 11 million children is a down payment on my commitment to cover every single American."

President Bush twice vetoed measures in the last Congress to expand the program, saying it would move the nation toward socialized medicine. Due to run out March 31, SCHIP currently covers about 7 million children across the country.

A federal program authorized under Title XXI of the Social Security Act, SCHIP provides matching funds to states while giving broad guidelines for individual states to set their own standards for designing and administering the program.

The new guidelines provide coverage for children from birth until age 19, said Jocelyn Guyer, deputy executive director at the Georgetown Center for Children and Families. It also allows coverage of pregnant women.

Prior to voting 66-32 to reauthorize SCHIP Jan. 29, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have guaranteed that states have the right to extend coverage to children before they are born. That would have put into a law a pro-life regulation implemented by the Bush administration in 2002.

Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, called rejection of the amendment "tragic" and "yet one more example that America is sadly becoming an anti-child culture."

Land also criticized the legislation expanding SCHIP as "nothing less than creeping socialized medicine by stealth," according to Baptist Press.

Previous House and Senate votes on the measure have fallen largely along party lines, but religious groups like the PICO National Network, a faith-based coalition of 1,000 congregations spanning the political spectrum to press for healthcare for the nation's children, say it is not a partisan but rather a moral issue.

"I am very conservative," Roy Dixon, a bishop in the Church of God in Christ and life-long Republican told reporters in a conference call Jan. 4. "I have been that way all my life, but I believe that our children definitely need SCHIP, and I'm very glad that it has passed and will be signed today."

With passage of the federal bill, action now turns to the states. "It's a good day for kids," Guyer said. "More work to be done, but a very good day for kids."

Funding the increase in part is a 60-cent tax increase on cigarettes, to about $1 a pack. Supporters say the provision adds to health benefits, because if tobacco products are too expensive it might reduce the number of people who smoke, while opponents say it unfairly burdens smokers.

"Increasing the federal tobacco tax to fund SCHIP is a win-win proposal that will help children get the health care they need, while also acting as a deterrent to young smokers and potential smokers," the American Medical Association said in a statement. "Higher tobacco taxes result in lower smoking rates in the long run, which will generate long-term health care savings-as fewer smokers means fewer people with strokes, heart attacks, cancer and other smoking-related conditions."

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

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Former Samford president Tom Corts dies
By Bob Allen (427 words)

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (ABP) -- Former Samford University President Tom Corts died unexpectedly Feb. 4 of an apparent heart attack.

Corts, 67, died after being taken by ambulance to Brookwood Medical Center in Birmingham, Ala., accompanied by his wife of 44 years, Marla.

Corts held the title of president emeritus at Samford, a Baptist-affiliated university in Birmingham, which he led from 1983 until his retirement in 2006. After that he served briefly as executive director of the International Association of Baptist Colleges and Universities.

He also served as interim chancellor of the Alabama College System in 2006 and 2007. He had recently returned home to Birmingham after serving the Bush administration as coordinator of basic education for all United States government assistance to the developing world, an appointment he accepted in 2007.

Corts' 23 years at Samford's helm were some of the brightest in the school's history. During his tenure Samford's endowment grew from $8 million to $258 million. Thirty new buildings were constructed on campus, and Corts signed and presented more than 17,000 diplomas at Samford.

"There is no way to measure the impact of Tom Corts' life and ministry on this university and the thousands of lives whom he touched," said a statement from Samford President Andrew Westmoreland, who succeeded Corts at Samford in June of 2006. "We have all lost a great friend."

Corts was born in Terre Haute, Ind., the fifth of seven children in his family. He grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, and graduated from Georgetown College in Kentucky in 1963. He went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate from Indiana University.

He was president of Wingate College (now Wingate University) in North Carolina for nine years before becoming Samford's 18th president. An ordained minister, Corts originally aspired to a career in journalism.

He was a former president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, an accrediting agency for 11 states spanning from Virginia to Texas, and a founding director of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Corts also formerly chaired Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform. The public-interest group formed in 2000 to seek to replace the state's 1901 constitution, which critics say institutionalizes racial and economic inequalities from the days of segregation. Despite backing from many centrist and progressive religious leaders, the effort failed at the polls after strong opposition from the Religious Right and some business interests.

Along with his widow, Corts is survived by two married daughters, a married son and six grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.

He was a member of Brookwood Baptist Church in Birmingham.

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.

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Opinion: Freedom of the press a Baptist 'trophy'
By Doug Weaver (734 words)

(ABP) -- Religious freedom has long been considered the "trophy" of Baptists -- even if some Baptists of yesteryear weren't as radical as heroes like Roger Williams, John Clarke, Obadiah Holmes and John Leland -- and accounts of Baptists fighting for the separation of church and state fill the history books.

Contemporary observers are often shocked when they find Baptists -- of all people -- compromising religious liberty issues and church-state separation for government favoritism. Given the Baptist reputation for their advocacy of religious freedom, it is assumed that Baptists have swiftly announced their support for other First Amendment freedoms found in the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution.

Baptist giants of the early 20th century -- E. Y. Mullins and George W. Truett -- both voiced support for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Mullins, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said that these freedoms were "implied" in the fundamental freedom of religious liberty. Because Baptists believe in these freedoms for themselves, Mullins reasoned, they must affirm them equally for all people.

Truett, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, argued for a free press that would not be "censured by the Sultan, nor sizzled by some Czar." Truett anticipated later squeamishness about abuses in the print media, however. He implored newspaper editors to have integrity and take the moral high road of integrity when deciding what to publish.

Truett lamented that many a newspaper sifted "through the sewers and cesspools for matter with which to fill its columns .... It plunges its accursed beak into the putrescent carcasses of crime and virtue, and it parades it all before a waiting world."

Baptist contributions to the freedoms of speech and the press have especially come through the work of Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes. A lifelong Baptist and the first president of the Northern Baptist Convention upon its formation in 1907, Hughes was chief justice of the court for 11 years, from 1930 to 1941.

The Hughes Court advanced the parameters of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. In particular, Hughes helped incorporate both freedoms into the Fourteenth Amendment, so that First Amendment freedoms are protected from state interference.

The first significant press case to reach the Supreme Court was Near v. Minnesota (1931). It involved a Jay Near, who criticized government officials for doing nothing to stop corruption of the "bootlegging and racketeering" of "Jewish gangsters."

Minnesota legal authorities halted the publication of Near's Saturday Press, accusing him of violating a "Public Nuisance Law (1925)" which banned the publication of material that was "malicious, scandalous and defamatory."

The Hughes Court, however, prohibited censorship and found "prior restraint" -- a concept that referred to governmental activity that halted publications -- to be "presumptively unconstitutional" except for "exceptional cases."

Contemporaries of Hughes said that his Baptist commitment to individual conscience contributed to his legal insights and that he had shown a "greater fondness for the Bill of Rights than any chief justice this country ever had."

Southern Baptists confronted the issues of a free press during their "controversy" that raged during the 1980s. Was the denominational press a public-relations agency for the Southern Baptist Convention, or were the journalists free to report all the news in the spirit of a free press?

Most journalists argued for a free press -- and were accused of siding with the moderate faction of the convention fight for doing so. In particular, Paul Pressler, one of the architects of the SBC's fundamentalist takeover, vehemently complained about reporting by the SBC news agency Baptist Press and accused journalists of initiating interviews that criticized the "conservative resurgence." In 1990, with the fundamentalist victory complete, Al Shackleford and Dan Martin of Baptist Press were fired.

The concept of a free press was also tested severely at the Sunday School Board when agency trustees stopped the publication of their history -- in their minds skewed with liberal bias -- by seminary professor Leon McBeth.

During the 400th anniversary of the origins of the Baptist tradition, we will applaud our commitment to freedom. Let's be proud of the trophies, but not forget the reality of squeamishness and censorship.

If freedom of the press is implied in religious freedom, as E. Y. Mullins suggested, then we must be free to search and report the truth, as we understand it, and we must allow others to do the same.

Doug Weaver is associate professor of religion at Baylor University.