USA: Freedom From Religion Foundation takes on "Faith-Based Initiative"

Freedom From Religion Foundation, a large group of atheists and agnostics of USA, will soon fight its most high-profile battle. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on its lawsuit against President Bush's faith-based initiative. The "initiative" helps religious organizations get government funding to provide social services. The court will decide whether taxpayers can sue over federal funding that promotes religion.

The message of Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Foundation, is clear: Keep God out of government. "What's at stake is the right to challenge the establishment of religion by the government," Gaylor said. The case in front of the high court claims White House conferences to promote the faith-based initiative turn into unconstitutional pep rallies for religion. "There was a feeling that there was almost a near religious-right takeover of our government and that we better speak up now," Gaylor said. Annie Gaylor and husband Dan Barker, a former fundamentalist minister who turned against religion, are co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Her mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, founded the group in 1978 to counter religious influence in government after clashing with religious leaders over abortion. Among its victories, the group has stopped funding for a Milwaukee charity that Bush visited during the 2000 campaign and an Arizona group that preached to children of prisoners.

Freedom From Religion Foundation has 8,500 members in 50 states, with the most coming from California. Members consider themselves freethinkers who form opinions based on reason, not faith. Gaylor is hoping an advertising campaign on progressive talk radio, the Internet and in liberal magazines helps the group reach 10,000 members this year.

The American Religious Identification Survey in 2001 estimated that 29 million Americans had no religion, double the number from 1990. The survey, which was conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, estimated that 1.9 million identified themselves as atheist or agnostic. Before its battle against the faith-based initiative, the Freedom From Religion Foundation stopped prayers during the University of Wisconsin's commencement and overturned Good Friday as a state holiday in Wisconsin.

Pakistan: Minister and fighter for women’s rights killed by fanatic

Zilla Huma Usman

Zilla Huma Usman, 35, Pakistani minister and fighter for women’s rights, has been shot dead by an Islamic fundamentalist. Ms. Usman was about to address a meeting of party activists in Gujranwala, 120 miles south east of Islamabad, where her office is based. When she stepped out of her car, the attacker fired a single shot from his pistol at close range at her and hit her in the head. She was airlifted to a hospital in Lahore, but died soon afterwards.

Zilla Human Usman was minister for social welfare in Punjab province and joined the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League after being elected in 2002. She was a strong supporter of the President’s policy of “enlightened moderation” and an outspoken and courageous proponent of women’s emancipation. In April 2005, she encouraged the holding of a sports event involving female competitors in Gujranwala. The program led to riots and police had to protect it from armed Islamic fanatics, who tried to disrupt it. Ms Usman also run a fashion shop and encouraged women to wear modern dress. Giving an example, she herself used to wear salwar kameez like many professional women in Pakistan, and to go without veil. Ms Usman was married and mother of two sons.

The assassin, Mohammad Sarwar, is a stone mason in his mid forties, who seems not to belong to any fundamentalist outfit, but is known for his fanatism. After his arrest, he appeared relaxed and calm when he told a television channel that he had carried out God’s order to kill women who sinned. “I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah’s commandment,” he said, adding that Islam did not allow women to hold positions of leadership. He also criticized that the minister did not obey the Islamic dress code and wore no veil. “I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path, if I am freed again,” he said. Sawar had been previously held in connection with the killing and mutilation of four prostitutes in 2002, but was never convicted due to lack of evidence.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a recent report said that violence against women had increased alarmingly, with some of the incidents incited by Mullahs opposed to women’s emancipation. Islamists also campaigned against the Women Protection Bill which was recently passed by parliament, which seeks to provide protection to women who have suffered discrimination under Islamic Sharia laws.

Women are gravely under-represented in Pakistan politics. They make up about 20 per cent of the lower house of parliament, and there are three women ministers in the cabinet of the federal government.

UK: Schoolgirl loses veil ban challenge

Girl with niqab

A 12-year-old Muslim girl, who challenged her school’s ban on wearing the niqab, a full-face veil, has lost her case in the High Court. The court rejected her lawyer’s argument that the ban violated her human rights.

The unnamed girl, protected by anonymity order, started wearing niqab in last September on reaching puberty, when her school told her that it was not acceptable because the teachers believed it would make communication and learning difficult. The niqab covers all of the face except the eyes. She was the only one of 120 Muslims attending the 1,300-students girl school in Buckinghamshire, who insisted on wearing the niqab when in the presence of male teachers or other male personal, while 60 girls use to wear the hijab scarf leaving the face free.

Her lawyer told the court that his client and her parents had the “legitimate expectation” that she would be allowed to wear the niqab as three of her elder sisters had attended the same school – and all wore the niqab. The ban, he argued, breached her right to freedom of "thought, conscience and religion" as guaranteed under Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The school won the support of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, which agreed that not all Muslims agree with the wearing of the niqab.

Spain: Catholic Church fights legal battle to stop mass exodus

Thousands of Spaniards wish to quit the Roman Catholic Church. But the church does not want to let them go. In Madrid and Valencia, the bishops have gone to court to fight a legal battle against the mass exodus.

This is the last step in the ongoing fight between the Catholic Church and the growing anticlerical movement in Spain. It started, when 47 former Catholics decided to leave the flock and seek formal termination of their church membership. Since there is no bloody Inquisition any more to force apostates into submission, the church authorities tried to stop them by pure arrogance. They blatantly refused to delete their names in the church records. The would-be-apostates alerted the national Data Protection Agency, which classified entries in baptism records as private data under the protection of the law that have to be deleted on demand. The church did not move. This obstinate refusal to respect people’s decision to quit became the rallying point for all those, who were unhappy with the church. When the Pope visited Spain in July 2006, 1500 people took to the streets and demanded that their names be deleted from church records.

Protesters with stop-the-Pope sign during Pope visit in Valencia

Meantime the Spanish Data Protection Agency has won a high court ruling against the church. But rather than accepting the limits of their power, the bishops went for a legal battle against apostasy and filed an appeal. Their hair-splitting argument: baptism records are historical documents that cannot be changed!

The Catholic Church is loosing ground in Spain. Though officially 82 per cent of the population are Catholics, only 48 per cent are practicing their belief. And believers or non-believers: according to recent surveys by the government, 75 per cent of the population are convinced that the church hierarchy is out of touch with today’s reality and want to see their influence curbed. The great majority supports the social referendum introduced by the Socialist government under Prime Minister Zapatero, that paves the way for stem cell research, faster and easier divorce, same sex marriages and gay adoption.

New Zealand: There's no state religion

A revised national statement on religious diversity has retained the principle that New Zealand has no state religion. Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres told that point was kept in the updated draft, released at a national inter-faith forum in Hamilton. "We start with the state seeks to treat...all faith communities and those who profess no religion equally before the law. New Zealand has no state religion." Prime Minister Helen Clark held the same position as Mr De Bres on Newstalk ZB: "There is no state religion, there will be no state religion. We are very diverse peoples these days. We simply couldn't agree on a state religion -- this is not like a Scandinavian country where people are virtually born into the Lutheran church, and have to resign from it at a later age."

"It's a statement of fact as far as I know," De Bres said, "it was also a fact there was diversity in New Zealand." The purpose of this statement is basically to set out some very simple ground rules about tolerance and respect of human rights and that means the human rights of people who are religious and the human rights of people who are not." Prime Minister Helen Clark is to present an agreed statement to an Asian inter-faith dialogue in Waitangi in May.

The statement was drafted for the Human Rights Commission by Victoria University Religious Studies Professor Paul Morris. The public consultation process has been conducted by the Race Relations Commissioner and the Human Rights Commission, and has involved city councils, interfaith councils and individual faith and community groups across New Zealand. There have been submissions from interfaith meetings and groups, from the Exclusive Brethren, the Destiny Church, Catholic Bishops, the evangelical Vision Network, Rationalists, Humanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Baha'is, Jews, Sikhs, Quakers and many others, he said.

Rationalists have been raising the issue of the more than one million New Zealanders who profess no religion.

China: Murdering brides for the marriage market of the dead

In January 2007, the police in Sha’anxi province in northern China arrested Yang Dongyan and his four accomplices. The gang had specialized in a macabre business. They murdered young women and sold them as brides for the spirits of unmarried dead men. Belief in an afterlife is common in China. Surviving family members see it as their duty to look after the needs and wishes of the spirits of their ancestors and deceased relatives ensure that they are comfortable in the other world. At funerals, fake money is burned as well as paper models of house or car and other things the deceased might need. When a young man dies before getting married and his family wants him to enjoy the company of a wife in the afterlife, they find a suitable dead bride and burry her along with him after performing a religious marriage ritual for the ghost couple. This practice called mighun has a tradition of more than two thousand five hundred years. Though it is legally banned today, it is still common among uneducated and superstitious villagers. Brokers strike secret deals between families of unmarried young men and families of unmarried young women. Selling a girl’s body for mighun makes her a married woman and elevates her social status. The money is taken as compensation for the dowry that her parents lost because of her death.

It is common in rural China to sell daughters for dowry to their future husbands or to intermediaries, who would pass them on with a profit margin. Some girls are sold several times before actually getting married. Yang Dongyan had been a bride trader earlier. When a handicapped girl he had bought did not sell well, he killed her and sold her with high profit margin for mighun. “It’s a quick way to make money”, he said remorselessly, when he was arrested. In some areas, a dead bride, if she is beautiful and in good condition, fetches up to four times more than a living one and handicaps or mental problems are no concern.