September 14, 2010 | 8:47 pm

Ninth Circuit to revisit headscarf case

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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In May, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled that Orange County Sheriff’s deputies did not violate a Muslim female inmates civil rights when they forced her to remove a headscarf before being placed into a cell. (Not to be confused with the Disneyland hijab ordeal.) Now the appellate court has agreed to rehear the case en banc.

The San Fransisco Chronicle explains why:

The dispute affects thousands of inmates throughout the nine-state circuit who are taken to holding cells before being brought to court, said Khatib’s lawyer, Becki Kieffer. She said it was the first such case to reach a federal appeals court.

Kieffer argued that the majority in the three-judge panel’s ruling had misinterpreted a federal law that broadly protects inmates’ religious freedoms.

The law prohibits government agencies from imposing a “substantial burden” on the right to practice one’s religion in a prison, jail or pretrial detention facility. The issue in the case is whether a courthouse holding cell, where inmates are held up to 12 hours before hearings, is a pretrial detention facility.

That federal law is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. I wrote about constitutional challenges to that law back in 2005.

September 14, 2010 | 10:54 am

Still a virgin? Need help?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

First I laughed. Then I wondered what exactly was going on here. Another Richard Dawkins ad campaign?

My friend Andrew shot this picture on his way to work in San Diego a few weeks ago. I found it a bit strange until I spotted a similar billboard up close in L.A. last week. A la the ads used for “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” this is part of the marketing campaign for “The Virginity Hit,” which looks like the bastard child of “American Pie” and “Blair Witch Project.”

Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t been kind. Neither was Variety:

Equal parts bold experiment (in sustaining a YouTube aesthetic for an entire film), and shallow redux of well-worn teenage sex comedy tropes, “The Virginity Hit” reps a regression for producers (and Funny or Die honchos) Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Returns for the Columbia release should be decent enough, though split sharply on generational lines: Those with the stomach for 90 slapdash minutes of nonstop crudity and cruelty will be tickled, while their elders will likely despair at these youngsters’ lack of a moral center or ability to hold a camera steady.

In other words, save your money. Stick to the billboard.

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September 13, 2010 | 7:45 pm

What happened to our schoooooooooool?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The “Dances with Smurfs” episode of “South Park” was on again last night (or maybe the night before), and in light of all the attention Glenn Beck has gotten recently I thought it was worth sharing this clip. And, yes, this is parodying Beck. By the end of the episode Cartman’s hair has turned quite Beckian.

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September 13, 2010 | 5:30 pm

Feds sue city of Walnut for religious discrimination

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Caught Frank Stoltze talking on KPCC this afternoon about how the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a religious discrimination lawsuit today against the city of Walnut. Looks like the federal government doesn’t think the small city in eastern Los Angeles County gave a fair shake to an application for a Buddhist temple.

From KPCC:

The complaint alleges that Walnut treated the Chung Tai Zen Center’s application to build a temple differently than it did applications from other religious groups. It refers to the city’s approval of a permit for a Catholic church that, when completed, will be larger than the temple. The complaint also says that Walnut hasn’t denied a permit to build a house of worship in nearly three decades.

In a press release, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said “no faith should be singled out for inferior treatment when it seeks to build a house of worship in compliance with local zoning laws.”

That is no minor blip in local politics. It’s also not shocking. Walnut is a long way from Apple Valley, but it’s not totally unusual for religious minorities to run up against old-fashioned religious NIMBYs. Even when the minorities aren’t Muslim.

What’s odd, though, is that a Buddhist temple would be discriminated against in a community that, according to the Census, is 60 percent Asian American—and whose city council has the same demographic makeup.

Obviously, Asian American doesn’t mean Buddhist. But I would have expected a lawsuit like this more in, say, San Bernardino.

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September 12, 2010 | 9:27 pm

Florida family is confused for Terry Jones

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Please. Make. It. Stop.

The latest twist in the Terry Jones media debacle, via the Orlando Sentinel’s religion blog:

In case you want to call the second number given out by Dr. K.A. Paul at a televised press conference today at a Gainesville church, don’t.

The number belongs to a family who have nothing to do with the church.

Paul, an evangelist, mistakenly gave out the number as a way to reach him during a nationally-broadcast news conference this afternoon. He had been speaking on behalf of Pastor Terry Jones at Dove World Outreach Center.

Absurd. Read previous posts about Jones’ planned Quran burning event here.

(Hat tip: The Ted Olsen)

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September 12, 2010 | 6:03 pm

Synagogues or churches: which bring in more donations?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Interesting story from The Forward about the difference between requiring congregation dues and just passing the plate. Turns out, in numbers at least, there isn’t much of a difference between the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Josh Nathan-Kazis writes:

While synagogues require roughly the same amount of dues from each of their members, church giving does not appear to be so evenly distributed.

Take Ahavath Achim, a Conservative Jewish synagogue in Atlanta, and Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in Manhattan. The two congregations are broadly comparable: Both serve slightly more than 1,000 middle- and upper-middle class households, have a multimillion-dollar endowment, employ about a dozen people and operate on an annual budget of $2.7 million.

Both draw around half their income from regular fees paid by members. But, like virtually all American churches, Heavenly Rest does not charge dues. Like most synagogues, Ahavath Achim does.

At Ahavath Achim, those fees are assigned by the synagogue, with each family paying up to $2,100 per year. Annual pledges at Heavenly Rest? As much, or as little, as you can give. While only one-third of member families participate in the church’s annual pledge drive, those that do give an average of $2,700 — far more than the cost of dues at Ahavath Achim.

Technically, churches do not require dues or fees or donations or anything from members. Tithing is expected, encouraged and even pushed from the pulpit, but it’s voluntary.

The story later explains this, but it threw me at first. What’s not clear is why The Forward performed this survey and wrote this story, the first of two in a series. There really isn’t a nut graph, and I’m not sure if there is some argument out there for moving synagogues away from mandatory dues (even those are only so mandatory because all synagogues have relief funds). However, such a movement is hinted at in the story’s finale paragraph:

Meanwhile, Jewish leaders say that the dues model is entrenched, irrespective of its merit. “If we eliminated dues tomorrow and said to the congregation, ‘Tithe your income,’ we’d go out of business in a year,” said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of New York’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. “Large swaths of American Jewry have in fact adopted a fees-for-services approach, and their commitment is not at a high enough level to make the kind of contributions that would allow us to fund our synagogue in a different way — for example, through tithing.”

Regardless, read the rest here.

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September 11, 2010 | 4:40 pm

Christian book tops porn titles

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Remember Craig Gross? He’s the head of XXXChurch, the guy I followed at the Adult Entertainment Expo a few years ago as he shared the gospel with porn stars. Here’s a refresher:

If Craig Gross considers Jesus Christ his best friend, why is his arm around porn’s leading man?

“We are the world. We are the children,” Ron Jeremy sings as he and Gross draw a circus crowd at the Adult Entertainment Expo here.

During the past few years, the two—a conservative Christian who considers masturbation a sin and a secular Jew who has performed in 1,900 porn flicks—have grown close and, despite diametric career choices, have come to respect and appreciate each other.

“I have nothing against Ron Jeremy,” says Gross, an ordained minister who leads the anti-porn crusade XXXChurch.com “I love this guy. I love hanging out with him.”

Indeed the two have hit the speaking circuit together, debating God and porn.

Gross has a new book out, “Pure Eyes: A Man’s Guide to Sexual Integrity,” and Thursday it topped Amazon’s bestsellers in the category of porn. That’s right. Just ahead of Jenna Jameson’s biography about having sex like a porn star.

He’s been posting excerpts on the Men blog at XXXChurch.com. Here’s a chapter on prayer.

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September 11, 2010 | 3:04 pm

On this Sept. 11 anniversary

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

On this, the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, The New York Times delivers a story I would expect. The undertone of all of it—as has been the case for a few weeks now, what with the Cordoba house mosque and the timing of Eid and that yahoo in Florida—is a clear tension between American values and Islamic extremism and the misconceptions in the middle.

The NYT reports:

The names of nearly 3,000 victims were read under crisp blue skies in Lower Manhattan after the bells of the city’s houses of worship tolled at the exact moment — 8:46 a.m. — that the first plane struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. At the Pentagon, President Obama stressed tolerance and said, “As Americans we are not — and never will be — at war with Islam.”

The familiar rituals at ground zero — the reciting of names, the occasionally cracking voice of a reader, the silences — had a new element. The posters and photographs that victims’ relatives held aloft bluntly injected politics into New York City’s annual ceremony, addressing the debate over plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero.

Two posters cited the victims James V. DeBlase and Joon Koo Kang. One read, “Where are OUR rights?” The other: “We love you!! Islam mosque right next to ground zero??? We should stop this!!”

Read the rest about how this 9/11 was unlike other 9/11s here.

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September 10, 2010 | 12:12 am

Quran burnathon back on?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m. So. Tired. Of. This. Charade.

Terry Jones, the Florida pastor no one had heard of before he proclaimed 9/11 burn-the-Quran day, says that despite his concession earlier today his plans to torch the Quran may be back on. From the Los Angeles Times:

Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., said he canceled the threatened book burning after securing a promise that a controversial Islamic center and mosque planned two blocks from ground zero in New York City would be relocated farther from the former World Trade Center site.

But after two prominent Muslim leaders contradicted Jones’ claim, he ratcheted up tensions anew, telling reporters that he might go ahead with the Koran burning. He said he had been “lied to” by a Florida imam with whom he had discussed moving the New York mosque, the Associated Press reported.

Ugh.

In other news, the extremists at Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church had picked up the torch—literally—earlier tonight and said they would hold their own Quran-burning party. Also, The New York Times has a story tomorrow looking at how the media has covered this story; it’s an expedition I partook on at GetReligion this morning.

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September 9, 2010 | 4:11 pm

Florida church backs down from Quran burning

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Terry Jones calls off his Quran burnathon, but not before getting gobs of international attention and wasting the time of American politicians who needed to talk him down from this ledge. The New York Times reports:

“We have at this time no regrets,” said the pastor, who heads the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainvesville. “We feel we have accomplished our goal. We are very very happy with the outcome.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. Jones was praying for guidance about his plan.

“He says he’s someone who is motivated by his faith,” Mr. Obama said. “I hope he listens to those better angels and understands that this is a destructive act that he’s engaging in.”

What goal was that? A bit of repentance would not be out of line.

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September 7, 2010 | 5:02 pm

Burning the Quran: insane, not illicit

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This is the United States, where flag burning is protected by the First Amendment. Of course an individual can raise their voice by burning the Quran, an act of utmost offense toward Muslims. (Remember when Orthodox Jews in Israel torched a pile of New Testaments?) But it’s insane—remember the reaction when an inaccurate report spread of a Quran being flushed down the toilet—and intellectually weak.

There are a lot more persuasive ways to criticize strains of Islam on 9/11.

And call Frank James at NPR cynical, but he raises a good point about what really might be at issue here for Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center, the 100-member Florida church that has said it will mark the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks with a Quran burnathon.

James writes:

Last year, Marc Grizzard, the pastor of a 14-member church in Canton, N.C. announced that on Halloween 2009 his flock would burn a pile of books they considered evil.

That included every version of the Bible that wasn’t the King James Version since only the KJV was “God’s preserved, inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God… for English-speaking people” Grizzard said.

(skip)

Just as has happened with the Florida church that promises to burn the Quran, Grizzard was warned by local officials that his church could be slapped with a huge fine, in his case as high as $25,000, because book burning would violate local ordinances.

So Grizzard and his people reconsidered; they had a non-book burning party, instead shredding the Bibles and other books that drew their ire if not their fire.

The few media who showed up had to take their word for it since it all happened inside the little church. Grizzard proclaimed the event a great success. And it was. A church with a membership of 14 got world-wide publicity.

A keen insight. Read the rest here.

(Hat tip: Master Jay)

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September 7, 2010 | 12:11 pm

Goldberg and Colbert; Israel and bombing Iran

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I’m still catching up on my “Colbert,” and in the above segment Stephen Colbert talks with one of my favorite journalists, Jeffrey Goldberg, about Israel, Iran and the bomb.

Goldberg wrote this month’s cover story for The Atlantic on the same topic. Here’s an excerpt; please forgive the insanely long first sentence:

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program, however, Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism; it may derive for itself the secret thanks (though the public condemnation) of the Middle East’s moderate Arab regimes, all of which fear an Iranian bomb with an intensity that in some instances matches Israel’s; and it will have succeeded in countering, in militant fashion, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is, not irrelevantly, a prime goal of the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House.

Goldberg goes on to offer the disclaimer that this is no “one-man war game” or thought exercise. Israel has shown its mettle before.

Read the rest here. Can 7,000 Facebook “likes” be wrong?

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