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Religion News Report - March 19, 2001 (Vol. 5, Issue 337)
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=== Aum Shinrikyo
1. Aum Doomsday Cult Shadows Japan
2. Key Members of the Aum Cult

=== Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God
3. Uganda Cult Mass Murder Anniversary
4. Up in smoke or into thin air? Uganda's killer cult leaders a year on

=== Ho-no-hana Sanpogyo
5. Taxman sinks boot into foot cult
6. Bureaus put foot down over Honohana taxes
7. Foot cult leader failed to declare 750 million yen in income

=== Falun Gong
8. Girl Set Ablaze in Tiananmen Dies
9. Exhibition Targeting Falun Gong Begins in Hong Kong
10. Falun Gong puts spotlight on HK civil servants
11. Analysis: US, China still clash on Falun Gong

=== Scientology
12. Threat of Scientologists' Legal Wrath Prompts Slashdot to Censor a Posting
13. Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot
14. Slashdot buckles to Scientology loonies
15. Xenu Do, But Not on Slashdot
16. Holy? Or wholly without grounds

=== Buddhism
17. 'Buddha's hair' found in China

=== Islam
18. 400 Afghan clerics decided to destroy statues: Minister
19. Taliban Ways Under Question

=== Catholicism
20. Italy threatens to silence Vatican [Radio]
21. Few confessions

=== Mormonism
22. SLOC and the LDS Church downplay the church's involvement in the Olympics
23. From SLOC Leadership to Liquor, Church Has Long Had a Powerful Olympic Voice
24. Special Treatment for the Church?
25. Non-LDS Religious Leaders Cite Minimal Input
26. Courting Controversy
27. Sex change worshipper sues the Mormons

=== Hate Groups
28. Bertollini sues Coeur d'Alene newspaper
29. Parade foes to put best foot forward
30. Report Links Putin to Anti-Semitism
31. Estee Lauder's latest tangle
32. What's in a Name?

=== False Memory Syndrome
33. Jury awards family millions

=== Faith Healing
34. Senate Panel Backs Faith-Healing Ban When Kids At Risk
35. Mandatory medical aid for sick kids gets committee OK

=== Other News
36. Atheist leader's remains found on Texas ranch
37. China Extends Cult Crackdown to Protestants, Says Rights Group
38. Sect Not Allowed to Build Cult Hall [Universal Church of the Kingdom of God]
39. Man Shot Dead As Bulletproof Magic Fails
40. Moscow police make arrest in multiple murder
41. Poles rethink anti-sect moves after minority church complaints
42. Appeals court says Ohio motto is acceptable

=== Faith-Based & Community Initiatives
43. Conservatives call for ouster of director of faith-based charities


=== Mormonism

22. SLOC and the LDS Church downplay the church's involvement in the Olympics
Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 18, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Like a few thousand other Olympics reporters around the world, Winnipeg Free Press hockey writer Scott Taylor received his first invitation to write about the LDS Church in the mail recently.

It was a toy suitcase, the size of a Barbie doll accessory, embossed with the church's 2002 logo, containing an accordion-folded list of story ideas proposed by LDS public relations. A few weeks later, the church sent him a glossy color calendar for the months of January 2001 through February 2002 titled ''Glimpses of Utah: A 15-Month Insight into the History and Culture of the Home of the 2002 Winter Games,'' with a collection of scenic photos including the Salt Lake Temple, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Seagull Monument.

Taylor also received a booklet offering LDS-guided media tours. ''No other place in America has a story to tell like that of Salt Lake City -- a sanctuary founded by religious refugees from within the United States' own borders,'' reads the introduction. ''And none can tell that story better than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.''

Since then, the Canadian sportswriter has gotten ''three or four basic mailings, very polite, lovely. If I want to convert, they're ready for me,'' he says. ''We got a chuckle about it in the office. I mean, we knew this was going to be the 'Mormon Olympics.' I'm not offended by it.''

While some reporters have been amused by the church's efforts to market Mormonism through the media during the 2002 Winter Games, a few have been taken aback by the intensity of the campaign.

LDS Church officials insist they are merely contributing to the Olympic undertaking as a good member of the community. But some observers question if the Mormon public relations overtures cross the line from civic booster bystander to subliminal if not overt proselytizing, fulfilling the faith's mission to spread news of the ''restored gospel'' worldwide.

''This could be a first,'' says University of Maine sports historian William Baker, author of the new book If Christ Came to the Olympics. ''Proselytizing has gone on at every Olympics since 1964, but what the Mormons are doing is much more complex than merely people witnessing and trying to win converts. It's so calculated, almost selling by providing information, trying to get reporters to talk to bishops.''

Yet instead of portraying Mormonism in a favorable light, the push may lead to embarrassment abroad and divisiveness at home for faithful Mormons and their gentile neighbors.
(...)

LDS Church officials say they are merely attempting to be good hosts and foster a better understanding of the Mormon faith. And they are determined to keep history from recording the 2002 Winter Olympiad as the ''Mormon Games.''
(...)

Olsen stresses that Mormon missionaries won't be working the streets for converts during the Games. However, the church's public relations department sent news packets to more than 3,000 Olympics reporters and has plans for a special LDS media center, where reporters can use computers and telephones.

Church officials are encouraging reporters to tour Salt Lake Olympics venues before the Games and do stories on Mormonism, offering to arrange interviews with a typical Mormon family or visits to Deseret Industries or Welfare Square. Church officials will even help reporters trace their own genealogy.

By Any Other Name: Call it proselytizing or good public relations, the image-conscious LDS Church plans to take full advantage of the Olympic spotlight to help its recruitment efforts.
(...)

Fuel to the Fire: Add the Olympics to the long list of religious debates between Mormons and non-Mormons -- from beer billboards poking fun of Mormon culture and a dry medals plaza on church property to the Main Street expansion of Temple Square and the church's attempts to shape the management of The Salt Lake Tribune -- that are part of what has been called the state's ''Irrepressible Conflict.''

Now, with mass mailings of paraphernalia declaring to visiting reporters that no one can tell the story of Utah during the Olympics better than the LDS Church, Utah's cultural wars continue to escalate.

''I think what the church is doing is going to backfire,'' says Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. ''I don't fault anybody for trying to get their point of view over to the media, but given the sensitivity as to whether these are going to be the 'Mormon Games,' it seems to me there needs to be some wise restraint exercised.''

Anderson says he has ''great respect for the LDS heritage and my own family's history with the church,'' but he contends his job during the Olympics is to ''show everything else and include everyone else.''
(...)

''The church thinks it can stage-manage these Games and that's a real risk,'' says Dyreson, a former Weber State University faculty member. ''Reporters from around the world are not exactly the most uncynical folk and are not averse to going to the bar and having a smoke. They are going to be looking for these quirks.''
(...)

''For years, Brigham Young's city in the Great Salt Desert has been trying to get rid of its image as a holier-than-thou-Hicksville,'' is how The Economist profile of Salt Lake City began. ''Now it has managed it: the Olympics scandal has made it a byword for bribery and corruption.''
(...)

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: University of Utah historian and author D. Michael Quinn, a specialist in Mormon history, says courting the Olympic media for positive stories -- not just about Mormonism but Utah in general -- is a double-edged sword.

''On balance, the leadership has certainly considered what would be the possible consequences, but the positive image of the church -- the proselytizing consequences afterward of the Games -- will far outweigh the negative consequences,'' says Quinn.

Dyreson suspects the church will benefit even from bad publicity.

''If the old scabs are opened and the world makes fun of Utah, then the church can say, 'See, we're still oppressed, no one understands us, we were accommodating and they snubbed us,' '' he says. ''It can play at home in the same way it did for Germany in the 1936 Olympics in Munich, when much of the world was impolite in its coverage and it fed into the German persecution complex and allowed the ruling party to continue to push its policies.''

At the same time, Quinn recognizes how difficult it will be for an institution steeped in cultural isolation to grow a thick enough hide to endure inevitable less-than-charitable assessments.

''I don't think the church will ever break out of its persecution complex,'' he says. ''The headquarters of the church is only two steps away from a siege mentality. It's imbedded within the psyche of the culture.''

The LDS Church ramped up its public relations efforts in 1995 to counter what it perceived as increasingly negative news coverage of Mormons worldwide. The church hired a top New York City agency, Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, and redesigned its logo to enlarge the words ''Jesus Christ'' in its formal name.
(...)

Most recently, church leaders emphasized the faith's Christian beliefs by urging reporters and members to call the institution ''The Church of Jesus Christ'' on second reference, rather than the traditional ''LDS Church'' and ''Mormon church.'' The coming Olympics was regarded as ''a good opportunity'' to announce the change, Otterson has said.

Some theologians view the public relations overtures as a concentrated effort by church leaders to sanitize the church's separationist past and portray modern Mormonism as mainstream Christianity.

''There is the poignant and persistent insistence of Mormons, 'We really are Christians!' '' wrote the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus of the Institute for Religious Research (IRR), an organization whose editorial advisory board includes Bruce Hafen, a member of the LDS Church's First Quorum of the Seventy.

''Sometimes that claim means that they really are Christians and the rest of us are not,'' Neuhaus wrote in the IRR's journal last spring. ''Increasingly, at least among some Mormons, the claim is that they are Christians in substantively the same way that others are Christians.''

The path from setting the young church clearly apart from mainstream faiths to the modern church's current efforts to be unquestionably placed into the category of ''Christian'' has struck some as contradictory.

''The church that shocked polite society by sanctioning marriages in which an older man could take a dozen wives or more -- some of them half his age -- is now a public guardian of strict family values no more experimental than Beaver Cleaver's,'' reporter Timothy Egan wrote in The New York Times last year. ''The founders of perhaps the most successful attempt at American socialism have given way to the competent capitalists who run an empire worth more than $25 billion. And the descendants of political radicals who proudly defied the constitutional separations of church and state with their theocracy in the desert now hold up those once-scorned democratic ideals as divinely inspired.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

Theologically, the Mormon Church is a cult of Christianity. It does not represent historical, biblical Christianity in any way.

23. From SLOC Leadership to Liquor, Church Has Long Had a Powerful Olympic Voice
Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 18, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
It was a sunny autumn Saturday in 1997 when a select group of Olympic leaders were summoned to the Governor's Mansion to mend the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's frayed edges.

SLOC President Tom Welch had resigned amid spousal abuse allegations, egos were bruised from the battle to anoint a new board chairman, skepticism was growing over SLOC's budget numbers and questions lingered about bid-era expenditures.

The time had come to close ranks. And who better to help calm the waters than Elder Robert Hales, an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the church's top Olympic liaison?

While SLOC Chairman Robert Garff said Hales was ''a participant, but not a leader'' at the meeting, Hales' participation speaks volumes about the church's stake in the success of the Games and the pervasiveness of the state's predominant religion. It also is the kind of behind-the-scenes collaboration that gives rise to concerns that the 2002 Olympics are and always have been ''The Mormon Games.''

The subject is a sore one for organizers. SLOC President Mitt Romney, a Mormon, held a news conference on Friday complete with champagne -- LDS Church doctrine prohibits alcohol consumption -- to refute the Mormon Games label, calling such characterizations ''divisive and de- meaning.''

Longtime Involvement: Church authorities initially were split about the potential benefits and pitfalls of bringing the Olympics to Utah. Officially, the church says it took a ''neutral position'' on whether the Games should come to Salt Lake City. But its leaders have never been disinterested bystanders.
(...)

Once the bid was won, the church's involvement in the Games increased exponentially.

Today, the church's influence reaches to the pinnacle of the organizing committee.

The church acknowledged to The Salt Lake Tribune that it had a hand in hiring Romney, a Boston businessman who took the helm of the organizing committee in the wake of the bribery scandal. Gov. Mike Leavitt, also a Mormon, asked a number of community leaders, including Hales, ''for a short list of names -- people who could possibly do what was needed to re-establish confidence and handle the extraordinary challenge of staging an Olympic Games,'' the church said in a written response to reporters' questions.

Romney was one of three people Hales recommended.

United Campaign: Even in the earliest efforts to win the Winter Olympics, Salt Lake business leaders understood how critical having Mormon united with gentile would be in procuring the Games.
(...)

Today, SLOC is surrounded by Mormon image-makers.

Former LDS Church spokesman Steve Coltrin handles national media contacts under a public-relations contract that involves more than $1 million in pro-bono services. And when CEO Romney needs to bounce an idea off someone, he often turns to Mormon advertising guru Gordon Bowen, the man responsible for the LDS Church's famous family-values-laden television ads. Bowen, who is not on SLOC's payroll, came up with the 2002 slogan, ''Light the Fire Within.''

SLOC's No. 2 administrator is Fraser Bullock, a business colleague of Romney's and fellow Latter-day Saint. But SLOC's most visible spokesman-- and LDS lightning rod -- is Romney, who spent two years in France on a Mormon mission, held various leadership positions in his Boston LDS ward, attended Harvard with Hinckley's son, Clark, and whose own sons have all attended BYU.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


24. Special Treatment for the Church?
Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 18, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Special Treatment? An LDS Church calendar, which uses the Olympic catchphrase ''Home of the 2002 Winter Games'' on its cover, has been distributed to thousands of journalists apparently with the blessing of the Salt Lake and U.S. Olympic committees.

Yet similar words, when used by Salt Lake City leaders in an economic development brochure, triggered legal threats from SLOC that forced the city to reprint the brochure without Olympic-related references.

''It's amazing they would call the host city on that but allow it to go out for any other entity,'' said Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. ''Also, to present that as a guide to the host city when it's all church-related unfortunately feeds into that one-dimensional stereotype that too many people outside of Utah already have.''

SLOC spokeswoman Caroline Shaw said: ''Not-for-profits distributing materials free of charge with the approval of SLOC does not violate our brand protection policy.''

The city, however, is a nonprofit and its brochure was free.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


25. Non-LDS Religious Leaders Cite Minimal Input
Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 18, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Other religious leaders in Utah say they have not been consulted on Olympic preparations to the degree LDS Church officials have. At the same time, many are not surprised at the large Olympic role being played by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

''I haven't had anything like that, and I wouldn't expect it, quite frankly,'' said Bishop George Niederaurer, spiritual leader of Utah's 160,000 Roman Catholics. ''To be honest, the LDS Church does represent 70 percent of the people of Utah and we [Catholics] represent 7 [percent] or 8 percent.''

Niederauer said he, several other non-Mormon religious leaders and community representatives have been asked for their input on the Games' Opening and Closing ceremonies, but otherwise the Diocese of Salt Lake City has focused its contributions on its membership in SLOC's Interfaith Roundtable and hospitality and ministerial services related to it.

Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish of the 6,000-member Episcopal Diocese of Utah echoed Niederauer, noting she also was consulted about Olympic ceremonies.
(...)

''Speaking only personally at this point, the area that bothers me is that the LDS Church at least gives me the feeling -- real or perceived -- that their values will be imposed on me during the Games,'' he said. ''For example, the alcohol issue. They seem to say, 'We're not going to be like anywhere else in the world, but this is the value system of Utah so that's the way it will be.' But you really get the feeling that these are really the values of the LDS Church.''

In Park City, home to many of the Games venues, Rabbi Joseph Goldman said no one from SLOC has contacted him for feedback on Olympic issues. ''Not so much as a whisper,'' he said.

As for revelations about the LDS Church's influence over the Olympics, he said: ''It seems to me that it could only happen in Utah.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


26. Courting Controversy
The Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 14, 2001 (Editorial)
Publication date: 2001-03-14
http://beta.yellowbrix.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Last Friday's Utah Supreme Court decision affirming the dismissal of Lynette Franco's lawsuit alleging clergy malpractice against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have been on firm legal ground, but the legality of the ruling, for better or worse, may be lost owing to the controversial aspects of it.

The justices upheld a trial court's decision to dismiss a child rape victim's civil lawsuit against the LDS Church on grounds that the court, by virtue of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion, had no business defining standards for counseling by clergy in faith traditions.

Utah's high court is right to be concerned about this. Religious freedom is fundamental, like the rest of the provisions in the Bill of Rights. A court that decided it should come up with standards governing religious counseling is not too distant from a court determining that its prerogative includes dabbling in theology, too.

This aside, the ruling and the case in which the issue was presented to the court is troubling. Although the high court ruled for the church and not for the plaintiff, the decision represents a shot across the bow, so to speak, to all churches to take sexual abuse allegations seriously, to not slough off victims' allegations and not downplay or ignore the conduct the perpetrator allegedly
committed.

This need is evident in Utah's law requiring those with knowledge of child sex abuse and several other child-related crimes to notify authorities of it. Under this law, clergy are not exempt unless their sole source of information is the perpetrator's confession. The court's decision probably will not affect this law, since the law smartly skirts the religious-freedom issue the court cites.

Also troubling is the image problem of a Mormon state Supreme Court ruling in favor of the LDS Church. Regardless of the legitimacy of the ruling, or any ruling for that matter involving the church, many will perceive it as favoritism, hypocrisy or justices using their positions to look out for the interest of their church.

Sure, these are cheap shots barring any evidence to the contrary, but they are concerns that many Utahns feel.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


27. Sex change worshipper sues the Mormons
Ananova, Mar. 16, 2001
http://www.ananova.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A sex-change worshipper is suing the Mormon Church for excommunicating her.

Jessica Park, formerly Stewart Park, says the announcement of her expulsion from the pulpit was highly humiliating and painful.

She is seeking unspecified damages and re-instatement in the Church.

Hong Kong International District Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has banned her from all their churches.

''They said Brother Stewart was being excommunicated when I had been living as Jessica for over a year; it was extremely humiliating,'' Miss Park says.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

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