January 22, 2012 | 3:38 pm

SC exit polls show Gingrich won evangelical votes

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Newt Gingrich speaks to supporters at his SC primary election night rally in Columbia, Jan. 21. Photo by REUTERS/Eric Thayer

Still wondering about evangelicals in the South Carolina primary? The New York Times has the exit poll stats and shows the breakdown of how Newt Gingrich closed a massive gap. Evangelicals played a big role.

Nearly two-thirds of the voters described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christian. In 2008, 60 percent had indicated they were evangelical or born-again Christians. Mr. Gingrich was backed by about 40 percent of these voters; about a fifth of them voted for Mr. Romney. Although Rick Santorum was endorsed by a group of evangelical leaders in Texas, he received only a fifth of the votes from evangelical Christians.

Six in 10 voters said it was important that a candidate shared their religious beliefs, and nearly half of them backed Mr. Gingrich, who has converted to Catholicism; about a fifth went for Mr. Romney, a Mormon; and nearly the same for Mr. Santorum, also a Catholic. In 2008, Mr. Romney came in third in the Republican primary, when Senator John McCain placed first and Mike Huckabee came in second.

I find it both surprising that Gingrich carried the evangelical vote and significant that Gingrich did much better with evangelicals than Mitt Romney—grabbing about as many as Romney and Rick Santorum combined. Sadly, maybe it’s not surprising that Romney did so poorly with evangelicals ...

January 22, 2012 | 3:30 pm

Video: Giffords announces resignation from Congress

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It is amazing that Gabrielle Giffords ever made it back to Congress. But today, a year after being shot in the head by a crazed gunman, Giffords announced in the above video that she would be resigning.

Via JTA:

“I have more work to do on my recovery, so to do what is best for Arizona, I will step down this week,” she said. “I’m getting better. Every day my spirit is high. I will return, and we will work together for Arizona and this great country.”

Speaking slowly but clearly, Giffords thanked viewers for their prayers and said that she will always remember the trust her constitutents placed in her.

Giffords, who is Jewish and has been a mamber of a local synagogue, was shot in the head at a Jan. 8, 2011 meet-the-constituents event outside a supermarket in Tucson. The gunman, Jared Loughner, who suffers from mental illness, killed six people and wounded 13 others, including Giffords.

It was inspiring to see Giffords return to Congress, and it’s incredible to see how well she is doing. This resignation makes sense, though. Regardless of whether Giffords felt she could continue to serve her constituents as needed, stepping down will give her time to focus on her recovery.

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January 22, 2012 | 12:41 am

New Presbyterian denomination launches in response to PCUSA dropping gay clergy ban

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

New York Avenue Presbyterian Church steeple in Washington Jan. 6. Photo by REUTERS/Larry Downing

There has long been a divide within the Presbyterian Church USA regarding attitudes toward homosexuality, a divide that widened last summer after the PCUSA ended its ban on ordaining gay ministers.

This week, Presbyterians opposed to gay ordination launched a new denomination called the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians. Via Reuters:

“The problem is people are going to hell,” John Ortberg, a leader of the splinter group and minister at the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in California, said in a sermon to begin Thursday’s events.

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ECO will allow churches to commit exclusively to the new denomination, as well as affiliate with ECO without dropping its membership in the Presbyterian Church.

The new group has no members yet, pending a process for individuals and churches to join.

Read the rest here. The president of the new group, John Crosby, told Reuters that he doesn’t want the denomination to be a one-trick pony, but it doesn’t yet appear that there are other doctrinal distinctions with the PCUSA.

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January 21, 2012 | 9:35 pm

Gingrich cleans up in South Carolina primary

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I wondered how much stock voters would put in Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife claiming that he wanted an open marriage, and CNN’s Dan Gilgoff reported that it may have little:

“To a degree, it will give [evangelical voters] pause, but there’s a much more insatiable appetite to defeat President Obama,” said David Brody, chief political correspondent at CBN News at the Christian Broadcasting Network.

“Gingrich has never claimed to be a patron saint,” Brody said. “People have known for years about Gingrich’s marriage issues. In a way, his well-known history of troubled marriage works for him here.”

I’m not sure what role evangelicals played in the South Carolina primary tonight, but it looks like the accusation didn’t scare off Republican voters. After getting whipped in New Hampshire by Mitt Romney, Gingrich returned the favor tonight.

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January 20, 2012 | 12:35 pm

Gingrich ex-wife says he sought ‘open marriage’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Wow from the Washington Post:

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in 1999 asked his second wife for an “open marriage” or a divorce at the same time he was giving speeches around the country on family and religious values, his former wife, Marianne, said Thursday.

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After one counseling session, Newt Gingrich asked Marianne for an “open marriage” — though not in exactly those words — so that he could see other women, she said.

Marianne, who had attended services in a Baptist church with her husband, refused.

“He said the problem with me was I wanted him all to myself,” she said. “I said, ‘That’s what marriage is.’ He said [of Callista], ‘She doesn’t care what I do.’ ”

Marianne said, “He was asking me for an open marriage, and I wouldn’t do it.”

Gingrich has refused to discuss the interviews with his ex-wife. And obviously, an ex-spouse is someone who may have an ax to grind. But I suspect that this is going to be more damaging than just having been married three times. South Carolina primary is tomorrow ...

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January 19, 2012 | 5:19 pm

Why Gingrich’s views on federal judiciary are so terrifying

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Newt Gingrich at the Personhood USA presidential forum in Greenville, SC on Jan. 18. Photo by REUTERS/Chris Keane

With Rick Perry dropping out and endorsing Newt Gingrich, now is probably a good time to discuss why Newt terrifies me.

All other political issues aside, Gingrich’s understanding of the judiciary’s role in the U.S. democracy is appalling. You don’t need to take Professor Varat’s federal courts class to know that there’s a problem with the president telling the Supreme Court justices to suck it when he doesn’t like one of their rulings.

But this basically is what Gingrich has said he will do starting on Day 1. Here is what he said Monday, via The Guardian:

The Republican contender told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South Carolina’s primary election that as president he would ignore supreme court rulings he regards as legally flawed. He implied that would also extend to the 1973 decision, Roe vs Wade, legalising abortion.

“If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it,” said Gingrich to cheers.

This was far from the first time that Gingrich has demonstrated such contempt for the federal judiciary. Gingrich has rightly drawn a lot of criticism for these views. Michael Mukasey, who left the federal bench to serve as attorney general for George W. Bush, called Gingrich’s views “ridiculous” and “outrageous”  and said that it would lead to a “banana republic.”

This issue is ripe with religion implications, and I’d like to add my two cents.

First, Gingrich’s understanding of whom gets to interpret the statutes and Constitution of the United States is fundamentally flawed. That is “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department,” so it doesn’t matter of the president disagree, even on a fundamental level, with how a Supreme Court ruling.

Second, threatening to cast the country into a constitutional crisis when the president doesn’t get his way—the politician’s equivalent of taking his ball and going home—is hardly the type of leadership that I would expect from the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

If the issue is about checks and balances, then Gingrich just needs to recognize that the Constitution provides the president and Congress with recourse if they don’t like a Supreme Court opinion. If it’s the interpretation of a statute, Congress can pass a new law that gets around the Court’s interpretation or constitutional hang up; it can also abolish lower federal judgeships. If the president doesn’t like the tenor of the Court, he can appoint ideological fellow travelers to fill openings. And both Congress and the president can push the populace for a constitutional amendment that would override any opinion (for example, a constitutional amendment barring abortion).

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January 18, 2012 | 3:35 pm

Santorum staffer under fire for email about biblical propriety of female leaders

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Rick Santorum speaks at his NH primary election night rally, Jan. 10, 2012. Photo by REUTERS/Mike Segar

What is with Republican presidential campaign staffers in Iowa? First there was Newt Gingrich’s Iowa political director resigning over his “cult of Mormon” comment. Now Rick Santorum’s coalitions director has gotten his boss in trouble for sending an email over the summer that asked, “Is it God’s highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will … to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?”

That’s actually an arguable biblical question. What isn’t clear from the reports I’ve seen is the context within which the email was sent. Was it really about whether God would approve of a female president, which is what Michele Bachmann’s camp claims. They say the email was an example of sexism that was at play in Iowa and led to Bachmann dropping out:

“We did believe that sexism — I use the stronger word misogyny — was at play,” said Peter Waldron, Bachmann’s faith outreach coordinator.

Three influential pastors called for her to bow out of the race, and numerous others said “that a female could not be a civil magistrate,” said Waldron, who lives in Florida and has worked six presidential campaigns dating to Ronald Reagan’s in 1980.

I’m not really buying that. Bachmann was never going to get the nomination, even if she hadn’t done so poorly in the state she was born. And just because pastors called for her to bow out doesn’t mean that they did so because they don’t believe that God would support a female president. (“God endorses ____.” Interesting concept.) Needs more context.

But what about the other question that this raises? The email was reportedly sent from a personal email account and between friends, not as part of the staffer’s campaign job. Even if the staffer sincerely believed that the Bible condemns female leaders, does the fact that it has created a controversy suggest that it’s not OK for people in politics—even political staffers—to discuss such things? Or is it only relevant here because political agendas are shaped by staffers and here one of Santorum’s might hold objectionable, though biblically arguable, views?

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January 18, 2012 | 1:24 pm

Why it’s wrong for evangelical leaders to anoint a GOP presidential candidate

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Good op-ed about the danger of evangelical politicking from Christianity Today’s editor in chief, David Neff. An excerpt:

The 150 evangelical leaders who met behind closed doors on January 14 to anoint a Republican candidate for President were wise not to have invited me.

I believe that Christians have an urgent duty to engage the social, economic, and moral threats to a healthy society. That requires a wide variety of political action. However, one thing it doesn’t call for is playing kingmaker and powerbroker.

By conspiring to throw their weight behind a single evangelical-friendly candidate, they fed the widespread perception that evangelicalism’s main identifying feature is right-wing political activism focused on abortion and homosexuality. In truth, it is hard to imagine the Religious Left in 2008 doing something similar: holding a conclave to decide whether they would throw their collective weight behind either Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama, unwilling to leave the Democratic primary results to the voters.

Read the rest here. Neff goes on to invoke and discuss the “Evangelical Manifesto,” a 2008 document drafted by many leading evangelicals that condemned the politicization of the evangelical community.

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January 18, 2012 | 1:14 am

Goldman’s Islamic bond raises questions about sharia compliance

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A Goldman Sachs sign at the company's post at the New York Stock Exchange, Jan. 18. Photo by REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Interesting story from Reuters about the latest trouble for Goldman Sachs: Questions about whether their Islamic bonds are 100 percent halal. The story:

Goldman Sachs’ controversial $2 billion Islamic bond programme faced a fresh challenge on Wednesday as it emerged that at least two scholars named as potential approvers had not even seen the prospectus.

Asim Khan, an adviser to Goldman on the issue which needs approval from sharia scholars to proceed, confirmed media reports that three of the eight scholars listed as potential approvers had not responded to requests to endorse the issue, but he said their lack of co-operation had no bearing on its sharia credentials.

Goldman’s first sukuk, also the first by any U.S. bank, is already facing suggestions that it may contravene religious principles by using proceeds to lend money to clients for interest, accusations rejected by the bank’s adviser.

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some of those scholars contacted by Reuters said they had been both surprised and concerned that their name was on the prospectus. Two scholars, neither of whom wanted to be identified, said they had not seen any documentation.

Getting sharia approval for Islamic banks and bonds is a complicated process that I hadn’t before understood. This article helps explain that it’s a little like having a hechsher approve that food is kosher. The key feature is that at least three sharia scholars advising a bond program must confirm that the bank is not charging interest.

But I still don’t understand how the program is then supposed to be profitable for the bank. Is it a matter of charging “fees for service” instead of “interest”?

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January 17, 2012 | 1:02 pm

Supreme Court leaves in place rulings that ban invoking Jesus in government meeting prayers

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo by Wikipedia/Jeff Kubina

The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert in two government prayer cases today. Both involved prayer at local government meetings—the invocations that I’ve discussed here and here—that tend to be religion-neutral in name but Christo-centric in practice. Bloomberg reports:

The justices today left intact a federal appeals ruling that said a North Carolina county board was violating the constitutional separation of church and state by opening most of its sessions with a Christian prayer. The high court also refused to review a separate decision that barred prayers at meetings of a Delaware school board.

The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the constitutionality of prayer at government meetings since 1983, when the justices said lawmakers could begin sessions with nonsectarian prayers offered by a state-employed chaplain.

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In the North Carolina case, the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners used private religious leaders to deliver its prayers, each year inviting members of various faiths to sign up on a first-come, first-served basis to deliver an invocation.

The result tended to be prayers that were predominantly Christian. From May 29, 2007, to Dec. 15, 2008, almost 80 percent of the prayers referred to Jesus, according to the decision by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.

That’s a pretty common result. What’s never been clear to me is whether it’s by design or a coincidence based on the fact that the majority of Americans are Christians.

The Delaware case also might sound familiar. That’s the one in which the county’s attorneys claimed that the Lord’s Prayer “is as generic and universal a prayer as can be crafted, inoffensive in its non-denominational textual statements of supplication and belief, and as all-inclusive as a prayer may reasonably be.”

Read the rest of the Bloomberg report here and see Howard Friedman prior discussion of both cases here and here.

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January 16, 2012 | 11:47 pm

N.Y. Jew suspected of anti-Semitic attacks

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

When I saw the headline “Jew charged with N.Y. anti-Semitic attack; motive unclear,” I suspected that the New York Times had made a mistake. This story must have been about the New Jersey Jew charged with smashing the windows of five Jewish-owned businesses back in November.

Nope. Same story. Different guy.

The N.Y. Jew’s name is David Haddad, and it’s not clear why he’s so mad with other Members of the Tribe. NYT reports:

In December, an 80-year-old Jewish woman in the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn received several phone calls in which the caller made anti-Semitic threats. On Thursday, a 78-year-old Jewish woman living nearby received a similar call.

Last week, in the Penn South co-op complex in Chelsea, home to many elderly Jews, several residents found swastikas on their apartment doors. Another resident there received an angry phone call.

The police said Monday that they had charged David Haddad, 56, of Penn South with aggravated harassment as a hate crime in connection with those acts. The police said that Mr. Haddad is himself Jewish, and that he knew all the victims, at least two of whom are his relatives.

No motive yet.

Read the rest here. JTA also has some details about Haddad’s alleged actions.

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January 16, 2012 | 10:38 pm

MLK on the legality of Hitler’s evilness

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that, if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.

Read the rest here.

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