Some of you may have noticed that it’s been a long time since I published my Not The BBC News blog. The reason is that most of the news was bad news (as is the case with most news bulletins), and I grew tired of focussing so much on what’s wrong with the world.
However, I do want to provide some updates on long-running stories that I featured, and also to mention on or two new ones.
Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to grant marriage licences to same-sex couples on the grounds of conscientious objection and was jailed for contempt of court after being ordered to do so, has effectively won her case to be exempted from issuing such licences. She is not allowed to prevent her deputies from issuing the licences, but she decided to remove her own name from the licences that were issued, and the governor of Kentucky swiftly dealt with this by ordering that all clerks’ names should be removed from marriage licences issued in the state.
Asia Bibi, the Christian woman who was arrested in Pakistan in 2009 and sentenced to death on a charge of blasphemy because she drank from a cup that was normally used by Muslim women, remains in jail. The Supreme Court suspended her death sentence (again) in June 2015 and promised a hearing in March 2016. Hearings in this case are regularly delayed by death threats against lawyers representing Mrs Bibi.
The latest unlikely venue for a Christian revival is a coal-mining town in West Virginia. A three-day revival event led by an evangelist called Matt Hartley ‘just kept going’ and is now into its 6th week of near-daily meetings. On a recent Wednesday night, 650 people turned up and 10 became Christians; on Saturdays, the numbers have swelled into thousands. The revival began in a high school, and meetings were held in the school’s auditorium, and then the school’s football stadium, until the Freedom from Religion Foundation complained that promoting religion using school facilities was unconstitutional.
The ‘transgender bathrooms’ issue in the USA is brewing into a major clash of the ideologies of equality and freedom. The key problem is identifying those who truly have transgender tendencies (but have not yet completed surgery, or started cross-dressing) rather than men who simply declare themselves to be transgender because they feel that way today, or they want to be peeping toms in the women’s toilets, or the men’s toilet is too far away. Some large stores (notably Target) have declared their toilets are open to anyone; Macy’s too has fired an employee who refused a man entrance to the ladies’ room. Various celebrities and businesses have declared a boycott of the state of North Carolina which was the first to pass a law against transgender toilets; such groups have been called hypocrites for doing so in the light of recent prosecutions of Christian bakers, wedding planners and so on. And the Department of Justice issued an order to North Carolina to rescind its law, but that order has been mired in controversy over whether the DoJ has the authority to make such a demand. On the other side of the coin, some states have passed laws making it an offence to admit men into women’s restrooms (or vice versa), and there is a growing boycott of Target.
Meanwhile New York City, whose mayor is radically supportive of such issues, has released a list of names for genders that employees in the state must be allowed to describe themselves as; the list contains not two genders, or three, or four, but thirty-one different labels. Businesses can be fined up to $125,000 for not referring to an employee by their chosen label or pronoun.
President Obama has entered the debate on the side of the transgender bathrooms; he attempted to quote Scripture by saying his views were based on the Scripture that “children should be treated with kindness.” Obama has also declared that hospitals that refuse to perform abortions or gender reassignment surgery will be denied federal funding. These actions have led to some Christian leaders to refer to him as “tyrant-in-chief”.
In the UK, the most important legal case on equality versus freedom of conscience is the Asher’s bakery case, which had its appeal heard recently. The appeal focussed on the question of whether Ashers’ reason for not baking a cake with a pro-gay-marriage message was their opposition to the message (as Ashers’ managers claim) or discrimination against the gay customer (which the original judge deemed had occurred, although unknowingly). The appeal also touched on freedom of speech, with the judges asking the prosecutor whether fining a business for refusing to make or support a particular statement is ‘forced speech’. Judgment was reserved, but should be issued in the next month or so.
It has emerged that Antonin Scalia, the heavily conservative Supreme Court justice who died a few months ago, was found dead alone with a pillow over his face. There has been considerable criticism of the failure of the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into his death, especially in the light of the efforts expended to determine how the entertainer Prince died.
There have been further arrests of Christians in Iran. A pastor from the Church of Iran and three of his congregation were arrested after raids on their homes in Rasht in the north of the country. The pastor was released the same day but the other three were detained. It is not clear what the charges are. The pastor has previously spent three years in prison on a charge of evangelising Muslims; one of the three church members has previously received 80 lashes for drinking alcohol during a communion service and for possessing a receiver and satellite antenna. In the USA, in contrast, the first Muslim woman to win Miss USA (in 2010), Rima Fakih, has reportedly converted to Christianity, triggering protests from some Muslims on social media.
There have been further arrests of Christians in Iran. A pastor from the Church of Iran and three of his congregation were arrested after raids on their homes in Rasht in the north of the country. The pastor was released the same day but the other three were detained. It is not clear what the charges are. The pastor has previously spent three years in prison on a charge of evangelising Muslims; one of the three church members has previously received 80 lashes for drinking alcohol during a communion service and for possessing a receiver and satellite antenna. In the USA, in contrast, the first Muslim woman to win Miss USA (in 2010), Rima Fakih, has reportedly converted to Christianity, triggering protests from some Muslims on social media.
Two American missionaries have been murdered in Jamaica. The two men were last seen heading into a remote area of the island to check on the foundations of a house that they planned to build for a local woman. The motive for the killing is not clear.
In mid-April, 125 Ethiopian children were kidnapped from the Gambela region by South Sudanese militia. 32 of these children were recovered two weeks later.
And finally, an 87 year old woman who lived in an assisted-living home in Cincinnatti, Ohio, swallowed a piece of meat and started to struggle to breathe. A 96 year old fellow resident used the Heimlich manoeuvre to dislodge the meat from her throat and to save her life. The man was Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the manoeuvre and had demonstrated it many times, but this was the first time he had used it for real. “That moment was very important for me,” he said.
