Religious Freedom Watch - Defending Religious Rights

Seldom does a new religious movement survive its founder’s death, as Scientology has, and take root during subsequent generations, gain followers and become established as a church. But those movements that do succeed are vilified at the beginning, when they have no advocates and no power. President Buchanan sent the U.S. Army to try to take control of the Mormon colony in Utah; Seventh-day Adventists (”Millerites”) were ridiculed for falsely predicting the date of the apocalypse twice; Pentecostals were regarded as devil-worshipers and “holy rollers” because of their ritual encounters with the Holy Spirit. Today all are established mainstream religions.

Excerpt from LA Times article, Scientology stands a chance, written by Jean E. Rosenfeld, February 22, 2008. Read the entire article here.

Since 9/11, anti-religious extremists on the internet have worked overtime to fill the breach of accurate information about minority religions with disinformation and hate speech. As demonstrated by the article below, the spread of such lies creates unfounded concerns and prejudices in communities.

Pittsburgh’s extremists include David S. Touretzky, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Touretzky is a constant source of racist and anti-religious hate speech on the internet and uses his university offices, equipment and website to facilitate his hate campaign.

Religion at work: A growing number of discrimination cases center on employees’ beliefs
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
By Anya Sostek, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For the past 20 years, Samuel Cordes has made his living representing clients alleging discrimination from their employers for reasons such as age, race or gender. But in the last few years, his mix of cases has changed: an increasing proportion is now coming from religious discrimination.

“It’s coming up a lot more,” said the Downtown-based employment lawyer. “Until 2001, I bet I didn’t have more than one a year.”

Right now, Mr. Cordes is working on five religious discrimination cases. Nationally, religious discrimination charges by the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission rose from 1,939 in 2000 to 2,572 in 2002 and have remained roughly at that level ever since. In 2006, the EEOC reported 2,541 charges of religious discrimination.

“There are far more of them than you read about,” said John Myers, chair of the labor and employment department at Downtown-based law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott. “In 25 years, I never had a case involving an Islamic employee and in the last couple of years, I’ve observed more decisions and personally picked up a handful of cases.”

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers are prohibited from discriminating against employees because of their religion in hiring, firing or other workplace conditions.

Continued at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Sept. 11, Mormon candidate challenge U.S. ideal of acceptance

By Susan Campbell
The Hartford Courant
Friday, August 24, 2007

For a country that prides itself on being a religious refuge, Americans like their public figures pious - but not overly so. And they like their religions straight, or at the very least, familiar.

So what to do with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a faith that, from all indications, is intensely personal and important to the Republican presidential candidate? Where do most Americans put Muslims, who in this country number roughly 6 million? And what to think about the Church of Scientology, which warehouses the spiritual well-being of so many entertainers?

If history is any indication, Americans are uncharacteristically slow to embrace the new, or unfamiliar, in theology. And we are uncomfortable with anyone we consider a religious extremist.

‘’For many, especially literal-minded Christians, there’s a tradition that Christianity ends with the New Testament,'’ says June-Ann Greeley, assistant professor of religious studies and director of the Center for Catholic Thought, Ethics and Culture at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. ‘’The sense that there would be another revelation is very problematic.'’

Theoretically, the attacks of Sept. 11 were supposed to usher in a new era of religious understanding. In an effort to study the perversion of Islam that moved terrorists to attack, non-Muslims would teach themselves about the religion. In a 2002 Washington speech at the Afghanistan Embassy, President Bush said, ‘’All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true . . . face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate.'’

But many people in the United States - which by many estimates is roughly 80 percent Christian - have not educated themselves about Islam, and the ignorance is telling.

Greeley, who teaches about the religion, says: ‘’We’re about 45 minutes outside of New York City. Many of our students either knew someone personally, or knew someone who knew someone, who died in 9/11. They come to classes in Islam any time a class is offered,'’ but not necessarily to learn.
‘’I don’t know if it is to welcome a new understanding of religion, but to find certain ways in which it’s really a wrong religion. That’s not all students, but there will always be that other group who find it an evil religion and take a class to prove that it is.'’

In such a class, she focuses on the Quran and waits for students to recognize the similarities between it and their own religious texts. ‘’What often will happen is students will say, ‘Gee, this sounds like something I read in the Old Testament,’ ‘’ Greeley says. ‘’It’s really not so different.'’

Gabriel Greenberg, co-author with Peter Gottschalk of Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy, says neither Muslims nor Mormons have been considered mainstream in America, even though they are among the fastest-growing religions in the country.

‘It almost takes an event that affects [their] lives'’ before Americans seek to educate themselves about different faiths, says Greenberg….

Continued at Daily Camera Online

The BBC Panorama Exposed intro. The full documentary can be seen at Panorama Exposed.