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AFA
ACTIVISM
AFA Journal, AgapePress
staffers garner press awards
AFA Journal news editor Ed
Vitagliano received fifth place in the Evangelical Press Association’s
(EPA) 2003 awards for writing in the critical review category. Vitagliano’s
review, "Bruce Almighty: God on the Big Screen,"
in the July 2003 issue, was the winning entry. Awards were announced
at EPA’s annual conference in May. EPA has more than 270 member
publications.
"Ed’s work always measures up to the
best," said editor Randall Murphree. "He has received
an EPA award every year we’ve entered his articles. We are
fortunate to have him on the AFA Journal staff."
Jennifer Parker, associate editor of AFA’s
AgapePress, also won EPA recognition. Her article, "The Sex
Lives of Christian Teens," was a freelance article she wrote
for The Christian Reader’s March/April 2003 issue. (See
July AFA Journal.) Parker won second place in the reporting
category.
"Jenni is a professional-caliber writer
who sincerely desires to use her God-given abilities to glorify
the Savior," said Jody Brown, AgapePress editor. "Our
news service is indeed blessed to have a writer of Jenni’s
talents." AgapePress is a daily E-news service to several thousand
subscribers including many other Christian and conservative media
outlets.
At the Southern Christian Writers Conference
in June, Vitagliano won second place in non-fiction for "The
Rebirth of Christianity," published in the March 2004 AFA
Journal. The article highlighted the remarkable spread of the
gospel in Africa and Latin America. Murphree received honorable
mention in the same category for "Christians go to the movies,"
an extended review of The Gospel of John film. It, too, appeared
in the March issue of the Journal.
CULTURE
‘One nation under God’ safe
for now
A recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme
Court temporarily protected the inclusion of "one nation, under
God" in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by school
children.
The issue was tossed into the national spotlight
after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the inclusion of
the words in the Pledge violated the principle of separation of
church and state.
The original challenge to the Pledge was initiated
by Michael Newdow, an atheist who filed the lawsuit on behalf of
his daughter. Newdow — who is estranged from the girl’s
mother — claimed he had joint custody of his grade-school daughter
and thus had legal standing in court. However, because his name
does not appear on the legal custody documents, the high court disagreed
and struck down the appellate court’s ruling on that narrow
basis.
The high court ruling was unanimous, and the
practical effect of the decision is to permit public school students
to continue to recite the Pledge with the words "under God."
"We are pleased that the Supreme Court
has turned away Mr. Newdow’s challenge, but caution that a
future challenge is likely," said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel
for the AFA Center for Law and Policy. "The Court failed, however,
to settle the ultimate issue of the constitutionality of reciting
the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge, thus effectively
inviting another challenge."
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote a concurring
opinion — joined by Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence
Thomas — that stated that "the Pledge as recited by schoolchildren
does not violate the Constitution."
www.cnn.com, 6/14/04; www.afa.net/clp,
6/14/04
ENTERTAINMENT
Some video games take a sleazy turn
Parents who are wringing their hands
over the violent content of their kids’ video games now have
something else to worry about — nudity and sex.
An article in CNN/Money highlighted a growing
trend within the video game industry to add sleaze. For example,
one game features Playboy models who strip, while another contains
full frontal nudity and sex between characters — with same-sex
versions for those who prefer it.
With an abundance of pornography already available
to Americans in virtually every form imaginable, it might seem to
be futile to complain about such video games. However, industry
analysts are watching to see how such games are rated — which
might have a bearing on whether or not children could rent or purchase
them.
The Electronic Software Rating Board (ESRB)
determines the ratings for video games. The ESRB rates some games
"M (Mature)," which is generally understood to be the
equivalent of an R-rating for movies. But an "AO (Adults Only)"
rating is also available for games, and CNN/Money said most
retailers will simply not carry a game with that rating.
The question is, what sort of rating will the
ESRB give games with sex and nudity? "We’ve been working
really closely with the ESRB from day one," said Jay Adan,
marketing director for Cyberlore, which has developed the Playboy
video game. "Everyone knows what the limits are for violence
because everyone has pushed that envelope. But no one knows where
the limits are for sex and nudity."
The question is not simply academic. Some retailers
— like Wal-Mart — will not carry games with an AO rating
but will carry some rated M. So what happens if Wal-Mart has the
opportunity to carry an M-rated game that contains nudity and sexual
situations?
CNN/Money asked the retailer. "Business
is a series of judgment calls and we offer what we think our customers
want to buy," answered Wal-Mart spokeswoman Karen Burk. "They
will let us know if we’ve hit the mark. It’s really that
simple."
That is, if parents know what’s coming.
CNN/Money, 5/13/04
FAMILY
Protestant fathers
come out on top
New research shows that men are more
involved and attentive as husbands and fathers if they are religious
— and specifically evangelical Protestants.
According to an article in USA Today, "Though
they favor a patriarchal family structure, evangelical Protestant
men who attend church regularly scored higher on several national
surveys that evaluated levels of family involvement and affection
than did men from other religious groups and men who consider themselves
religiously unaffiliated."
Data was analyzed after being collected from
three surveys conducted more than once during 1972-1999. The surveys
"examined behaviors and attitudes toward family and gender
among different religious groups including Catholics and Protestant
Christian denominations, Jews, Muslims and others."
Of the groups surveyed, churchgoing Protestants,
especially evangelicals, ranked higher in family involvement and
lower in domestic violence. Those categorized as evangelical Protestants
include Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists and nondenominational
evangelical churches.
Evangelical Protestants hold a traditional social
approach contrary to popular culture. Although these traditional
values act as a shield to the corrupt culture, they also indicate
reluctance on the part of men to share domestic responsibilities.
"Fifty-eight percent of evangelical Protestant
men, compared with 37% of those who said they were unaffiliated
with a religion, believe that men should focus on breadwinning while
women focus on homemaking," the article said.
www.usatoday.com, 6/16/04
Family backgound affects
marriage views
Men from non-traditional families
tend to shun the idea of ever marrying, and they are less likely
to marry by their early 30s than men raised in traditional families.
They are also less trusting of women according
to a survey of more than 1,000 heterosexual men from ages 25-34.
These are the findings of a study conducted by the Opinion Research
Corp. of Princeton as commissioned by the National Marriage Project
at Rutgers.
The researchers attribute this negative perception
of marriage by men of non-traditional families to the bitterness
caused by divorce that so often plagued their childhood.
As reported by USA Today, David Popenoe, co-director
of the National Marriage Project, said that " … adults
raised by divorced parents have more ‘live together’ relationships
than do those from traditional homes."
Diane Sollee, director of Smart
Marriages.com, told USA Today, "Example is not just the best
teacher, it’s the only teacher, and a lot of these guys learned
attitudes about marriage and women from their fathers."
www.usatoday.com, 6/22/04
HOMOSEXUALITY
Participant
in video now an ex-gay
The producers of the pro-homosexual
video It’s Elementary are apparently unwilling to let
viewers know that one of the main homosexuals in the film has left
the lifestyle.
It’s Elementary has stirred up controversy
since its premiere in 1996 because it instructs public school teachers
and administrators how to influence children to accept the "gay"
lifestyle. AFA considered It’s Elementary so potentially
damaging to the nation’s children that the ministry put out
its own rebuttal video, Suffer the Children, in 1999.
One of the themes of It’s Elementary
— that homosexuals are born that way — is of concern to
Dr. Warren Throckmorton, who is a researcher on sexual orientation
and issues surrounding homosexuality. The associate professor of
psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania has written extensively
about the fact that homosexuals can change their sexual orientation.
In fact, Throckmorton has produced a video about
"gay-to-straight" change called I Do Exist!, scheduled
for released in mid-July. The documentary highlights the stories
of five ex-gays who left the lifestyle.
One of those five, Noe Gutierrez, was featured
in It’s Elementary, when he was still "gay"
and an outspoken activist.
Throckmorton asked the producers of It’s
Elementary, Helen Cohen and Debra Chasnoff, for permission to
use portions of Gutierrez’ appearance on their video in his
documentary.
"I thought perhaps in the spirit of fairness
and tolerance that they might allow us to use the clip of Mr. Gutierrez
as a gay man in our new project that tells Mr. Gutierrez’ story
as an ex-gay man," Throckmorton said. "However they refused
to do that."
He said the filmmakers evidently felt that allowing
others to know of Gutierrez’ change would undermine their project.
AgapePress, 6/22/04;
www.drthrockmorton.com, 6/25/04
Groups attempt to overturn
sex laws
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) is teaming up
with a radical sexual freedom group to eradicate "antiquated
and unjust sex laws in the nation," according to a jointly
released press statement.
NGLTF is joining with the Woodhull Freedom Foundation
(WFF), which on its Web site calls for the legalization of prostitution
and public sex.
In their press release, the NGLTF and WFF said
laws against public sex "are routinely misused to persecute
and prosecute people who participate in non-traditional forms of
sexual expression," namely "gay and bisexual men."
According to the National Association for Research
and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a mental health organization
dedicated to helping homosexuals change their sexual orientation,
what the new NGLTF-WFF alliance hopes to accomplish has already
been seen in Massachusetts.
In that state, NARTH said a homosexual rights
group challenged arrests of men who were charged with having sex
at roadside rest areas. The Massachusetts high court ruled that
men could have public sex as long as there was no "substantial
risk" that they might be observed by those passing by.
www.narth.org, 6/1/04; www.thetaskforce.org,
5/28/04; www.woodhullfoundation.org, 5/28/04
Canadian survey: only
1% homosexual
Homosexual activists regularly claim
that "gays" and lesbians are between 5-10% of the population,
and that overinflation of numbers is used to bolster their demands
for special rights.
However, in addition to previous studies in
the U.S. and elsewhere, a new government survey in Canada shows
that the percentage of people who claim to be homosexual is a much
smaller fraction of the general population.
According to WorldNetDaily, the Canadian Community
Health Survey found that just 1.3% of men and 0.7% of women said
they were homosexual — amounting to roughly 1% of the population.
"What’s amazing is that, in Western
nations like Canada and the U.S., homosexuals are such a small sliver
of the population yet boast great political power," said AFA
President Tim Wildmon. "That can only be explained by the great
amount of sympathy for the homosexual agenda among the elites in
the media, academia, and liberals in the nation’s capital."
www.worldnetdaily, 6/16/04
PORNOGRAPHY
Ruling slows down
establishment of sex shops
The U. S. Supreme Court has spelled
out the rights and obligations of municipalities in setting conditions
for sexually oriented businesses in City of Littleton, Colorado,
v. Z. J. Gifts.
The Court ruled that communities had a constitutional
right to establish ordinances restricting adult businesses. It also
said such businesses did not have a right to "an unusually
speedy judicial decision" after being denied a zoning permit.
According to Stephen M. Crampton, chief counsel
for the AFA Center for Law and Policy (CLP), "This decision
settles once and for all a municipality’s right to impose reasonable
restrictions on the operation of sexually oriented businesses without
fear of costly First Amendment litigation over procedural technicalities."
Such a ruling actually slows down the establishment
of sexually oriented businesses, Crampton said, because they often
depend on the threat of legal action to intimidate cities.
He said it also demonstrated that the CLP’s
14-year-old model ordinance of regulating sexually oriented businesses
is constitutionally sound.
The CLP is a legal arm of AFA and is available
to assist in drafting and defending ordinances such as this one.
The center can be contacted by calling 662- 680-3886 or at www.afa.net/clp
.
Web porn law blocked by
high court ruling
The Child Online Protection Act (COPA),
a law intended to protect innocent children from pornography on
the Web, was recently ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court as a probable
violation of the Constitution.
COPA was signed into law by President Clinton
and is now backed by President Bush. It imposed fines for providing
children on the Internet with easy access to materials deemed "harmful
to minors." Adults who wanted to access pornographic Web sites,
for example, would have to register first.
According to the Associated Press, the high
court split 5-to-4 over the constitutionality of COPA, and the majority
agreed with a lower court ruling that blocked enforcement of the
law because of constitutional concerns.
The Supreme Court said filtering software would
be better at protecting children than the provisions of COPA.
The case, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), was the third time for the high court to consider
the issue, and the case was sent back to the lower court to allow
the government another crack at defending the law.
The ACLU, which challenged COPA, was pleased
with the ruling, but Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the AFA
Center for Law and Policy, took the ACLU to task.
"The ACLU has shown once again that it
will do anything to win. In the last Internet porn case [over CIPA,
the Children’s Internet Protection Act], the ACLU attacked
filtering software as clumsy and overprotective. This time, the
ACLU argued that filtering software was much better able to protect
children than the mechanism required by COPA," Crampton said.
He added, "By siding with the ACLU, the
Supreme Court has again affirmed that those bent on destroying the
family are entitled to more First Amendment protection than those
seeking to protect it, such as pro-lifers and street preachers."
Associated Press, 6/29/04;
www.afa.net/clp, 6/29/04
‘Adult’ Web
sites top Internet usage
Google, the leader of top Web search
engines, recently became a follower as it fell in line behind highly-visited
"adult" sites.
Hitwise, a California-based Web-use tracking
company, reported online pornography sites as receiving about three
times as many visits as the top Web search engines as evident the
week ending May 29, 2004.
All Internet visits by U.S. users during the
designated tracking time revealed that "adult" Web sites
accounted for 18.8% of the visits, while the category containing
search engines led by Yahoo, MSN, and Google only accounted for
approximately 5.5%.
Of all Web sites visited during the tracked
time, Bill Tancer, Hitwise vice president of research, reported
to Reuters that Google, Yahoo Search, and MSN Search received 2.7%,
1.7%, and 1.1% respectively.
http://money.cnn.com,
6/4/04
PRO-LIFE
Abortion ban ruled
unconstitutional
In San Francisco, U.S. District Judge
Phyllis Hamilton recently struck down the partial-birth abortion
ban signed into law by President Bush in 2003, and ruled it unconstitutional.
According to USA Today, Hamilton said "the
ban imposed an ‘undue burden on a woman’s right to choose
an abortion.’" Her ruling on the ban’s constitutionality
makes it a first by a federal judge since its signing last year.
The ban prohibits what is known as "intact
dilation and extraction," a procedure in which the living fetus
is partially delivered before the skull is crushed or punctured,
causing death. In addition to prohibiting the procedure, the ban
also includes a two-year prison sentence for doctors who perform
it.
The ban has not yet been enforced, despite testimony
by doctors who explain that the procedure causes pain to the fetus,
thus making it inhumane. It is being challenged in two other federal
courts.
According to the Los Angeles Times, "Government
attorneys defending the ban in the three trials argued that the
procedure causes fetal pain, blurs the line between abortion and
infanticide, and is not medically necessary."
Those who oppose the ban claim the procedure
is sometimes the safest method for a woman seeking an abortion.
Well aware of the argument charging that the
procedure is inhumane, Hamilton still ruled the ban unconstitutional
based on the ambiguity of its language. She said due to the wording
of the ban, doctors could be wrongly accused of using similar abortion
procedures not mentioned in the bill.
The Bush administration condemned the ruling.
USA Today, 6/2/04; www.latimes.com,
6/2/04
Christian history
series releases two more books
Two new volumes from the Christian History Project (CHP) are
available in this fine series of books that aims to reconnect Christians
to the history of their faith.
Often spellbinding in its prose and filled with
powerful artwork and photos, this series has already garnered impressive
endorsements from a variety of Christian sources, such as AFA Chairman
Don Wildmon; Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship; Dr. James
I. Packer, author and professor of theology at Regent College; Fr.
Alphonse de Valk, editor of Catholic Insight; and George
Barna, directing leader of the Barna Research Group.
Darkness Descends: AD 350 to 565, The Fall
of the Western Roman Empire, and The Sword of Islam: AD 565
to 740, The Muslim Onslaught all but Destroys Christendom, are
the fourth and fifth in a planned set of twelve volumes.
The opening chapter of Darkness Descends
confronts the reader with early struggles of the church against
heresies — a battle that should sound strangely familiar to
those believers who are currently fighting to save their own denominations.
The focus then shifts to chapters covering,
among other things, the barbarian invasions, the fall of Rome and
collapse of the West, the birth of the medieval world and the foundation
of the Byzantine empire.
The Sword of Islam covers the rise of
Islam and the early Middle Ages, and spans the years 565 to 740.
While covering events in the Christian world as well, this volume
will help Christians understand the foundations and development
of Islam, especially at a time in history when the world’s
two largest faiths are often at odds.
To find out more about this series or to order
copies, visit www.christianhistoryproject.com
or call 1-800-853-5402.
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