=== Aum Shinrikyo
1. AUM guru may undergo mental tests

=== Falun Gong
2. falungong leader savages ''wicked'' Chinese leadership
3. China's crackdown on falungong sect rooted in fear and ignorance: members
4. China Jails 13 More Falun Gong Activists

=== Unification Church
5. Ministers upset by Moon visit
6. Rev. Moon's event raises local hackles
7. In Oakland, Moon Stresses Family
8. Rev. Moon delivers message in Oakland
9. The Reverend Moon's Comeback

=== Islam
10. 2 Bamyan Buddhas completely destroyed, reports AIP
11. Taliban vows to keep thumbing nose at the world
12. Taliban close BBC Kabul office
13. The anti-Buddhist fury in Afghanistan

=== Catholicism
14. Ranking Congressmen Support Suspect Religious Group

=== Mormonism
15. Skinhead Church
16. 'It Isn't A Sunday Religion. It's A Lifetime Change.'

=== Hate Groups
17. FindLaw Forum: Court should have heard KKK case
18. Haider the Rightist Is Firing Up Vienna's Election With Slurs

=== Other News
19. Novato 'Diploma Mill' Shut Down by State
20. Leader Of Religious Group, Son Charged With Molestation
21. Man charged with DUI and fired after drinking kava sues employer
22. Elementary may be closed due to polygamists withdrawal
23. 'Fairy' pictures fetch £6,000

=== Faith-Based Initiatives

24. Christian leaders pan Bush's faith plan
25. Cult fear hits Bush plan to fund by faith
26. Poll: Americans approve of Bush
27. Delay on Faith-Aid Plan Puts Time on Bush's Side
28. Senate To Introduce Religion Plan

=== Human Rights Violations

29. Amnesty International Condemns Sentencing of 14-year-old Boy to Life Imprisonment Without Possibility of Parole

=== Noted
30. Hearing From Dearly Departed Proves a Hit on Sci-Fi Channel

=== Trends
31. Claim of 'Post-Denominational Era' Defied
32. It's chic to be a Protestant in France


=== Hate Groups

17. FindLaw Forum: Court should have heard KKK case
FindLaw/CNN, Mar. 12, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(FINDLAW) -- The U.S. Supreme Court made news last week by declining to hear a case arising from the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission's denial of the Ku Klux Klan's application to participate in Missouri's Adopt-A-Highway program.

Under the Adopt-A-Highway program, organizations can clean up litter from alongside stretches of highways, or plant flowers, even mow the grass. The state rewards their volunteerism by erecting a sign bearing their name.

The Klan successfully challenged the denial of its application to join the program in federal court, winning at the trial and appellate levels. Missouri, with the support of the U.S. Department of Justice, then sought Supreme Court review.

The court may have declined to review the case because its outcome seemed to be determined by recent court precedents. If so, the court was wrong. The Klan case raised new and different legal issues, and thus deserved to be heard.
(...)

If the case is not about volunteerism, it must be about the other component of the Adopt-A-Highway program: the signs erected on the portion of highway groups have adopted, which honor the names of the volunteers.
(...)

These signs represent the state's decision to cede a little bit of its property so a message can be conveyed -- whether it says, ''Slow down,'' or says that Walt Whitman is a great enough poet to deserve his own rest stop.

When public property carries a private name -- just as when a private lawn carries a candidate's sign -- the message is unavoidably one of endorsement. And endorsement of the Klan, given the organization's history, is tantamount to a message of racism and hostility.

Consider this: Although others may have the legal right to pick up litter or plant flowers along ''the Klan's'' part of the highway, given the sign posted there, who would dare to do so?

And what traveler -- especially, what African-American or Jewish traveler --would choose to stop in the town next to which the Klan has adopted a highway? What easier way to run a de facto all-white, all-Christian hotel than to set up shop in that town?

The sign, in short, implies a message of government-sanctioned hatred and fear.

The issue is not, as in the famous First Amendment case, whether the Nazis can march in Skokie. It is, in effect, whether Skokie will honor them by erecting a highway sign with a swastika on it.

No wonder Missouri tried to fight this case all the way to the Supreme Court. The state does not want the racist image that would inevitably be evoked by the Klan's Adopt-A-Highway sign.

Missouri is right to be concerned: The message of the sign will be seen as the state's -- not the Klan's.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


18. Haider the Rightist Is Firing Up Vienna's Election With Slurs
New York Times, Mar. 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(...) With two weeks to go until the municipal elections on March 25, the suave Mr. Haider has emerged from a quiet period in the southern province of Carinthia, where he is governor, to fire up the campaign through remarks tinged with anti-Semitic innuendo.

During the last month, he has mocked the leader of the largest association of Vienna Jews, Ariel Muzicant, asking how somebody called Ariel (the name of a detergent) ''can have such dirty hands,'' and described the election as a choice between ''the heart of Vienna'' and a Jewish ''spin doctor'' advising the Socialist mayor.

The mayor, Michael Häupl, is using an American campaign strategist, Stanley Greenberg, as one of his advisers for the elections. Mr. Haider's reference to a man called ''Greenberg'' from the ''East Coast'' prompted hoots of laughter and derision at a rally last month.
(...)

Although Haiderism lowered it voice, it is far from moribund in Europe. Its combination of anti-immigrant slogans, criticism of perceived Jewish power and slick populism aimed at those left behind or angered by globalization and European integration continues to draw support.

Recent opinion polls show the Freedom Party gaining about 22 percent of the vote in Vienna, down from the 27.9 percent it won in the last municipal poll, in 1996, but still more than double the totals of less than 10 percent that it registered until the end of the 1980's.
(...)

Johannes Peterlik, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said, ''The expressions used by Mr. Haider against Mr. Muzicant are not excusable.'' Last week, Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, whose conservative People's Party governs with the Freedom Party, also said such personal attacks were inexcusable.

But the European Union, so vociferous in its criticism of Mr. Haider last year, has fallen silent. The sanctions caused unease among some European governments inside and outside the Union because the Austrians felt that their national sovereignty had been trampled on.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]
» Back to menu