Legion of Angels News Archive

GREELEY, Colo. — On Sunday mornings, Rose Chavez volunteers to greet people at New Hope Christian Fellowship Church, a Hispanic congregation that worships in the renovated former headquarters of a meatpacking company on the outskirts of town, surrounded by fields of cabbage and corn.

Far afield, yes, but also far from ignored by the major party presidential campaigns.

Like most Hispanic evangelical and Pentecostal voters, Chavez backed George W. Bush four years ago. She believed his values lined up with hers.

Now, with two weeks to another election, the 33-year-old is part of a Hispanic Protestant defection to Democrat Barack Obama, a shift that could prove key in battleground states with large Hispanic populations such as Colorado, Nevada, Florida and New Mexico.

“A lot of people say Obama doesn’t have much experience, but bringing the troops home is a big issue,” said Chavez, who works at an employment staffing agency. “They don’t need to be there anymore. We were tricked into believing in Bush and his ways.”

As the economy and sour mood of the country conspire against Republican John McCain, analysts point to other factors hurting him with Hispanic Protestants, who accounted for about one-third of all Hispanic voters in 2004.

The list includes an unpopular war, an inability to connect on a personal level with Hispanics as Bush did, the marginalization of social issues like abortion and gay marriage and simmering anger about Republican rhetoric on immigration.

A report in late July from the Pew Hispanic Center found Obama leading McCain two-to-one among non-Catholic Hispanics who affiliate with a religion - in other words, mostly evangelicals and Pentecostals.

Other numbers suggest a closer race. Gallup daily tracking polls from Sept. 1 through Friday show Obama leading McCain 47 percent to 43 percent among non-Catholic Hispanic Christians.

In 2004, exit polls showed 63 percent of Hispanic Protestants supported Bush. In 2000, that demographic group supported Democrat Al Gore by a similar margin. Hispanic Catholics have largely remained loyal to the Democratic Party, so evangelicals and Pentecostals are swinging the Hispanic vote.

“I find it powerfully refreshing, enforcing the reality that we’re not going to be the white evangelical community,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We’re not the Christian right. We will not be the extension of one political party and we won’t be exploited and used for victory and then ignored.”

Rodriguez and others said the immigration debate that hit a fever pitch in 2006 caused the shift back to the Democrats.

“We blamed the Republican Party for the immigration reform debacle, and we blamed them for xenophobic rhetoric,” said Rodriguez, who added that he will probably vote for McCain anyway because Obama is too liberal on abortion and marriage. “That pushed Hispanic evangelicals to look at ourselves.”

Other factors are at work, as well. Hispanics remain conservative on abortion and gay rights but have shifted to the left since 2004 against the Iraq War and for increased government services and stricter environmental regulations, according to summer polling from John Green of the University of Akron’s Bliss Institute of Applied Politics analyzed by the religion Web site Beliefnet.

The Rev. Wilfredo DeJesus, pastor of New Life Covenant church in Chicago, a Pentecostal Assemblies of God megachurch, voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. Now an Obama endorser and surrogate, DeJesus has promoted the candidate on a call-in radio show in Orlando, Fla., and met with pastors in Goshen, Ind.

“When you hear a Democratic candidate say that Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior, I don’t remember the last time a Democrat spoke like that,” DeJesus said. “For the Republican party to throw out one word - abortion … I’m still pro-life, I believe in the sanctity of marriage … but I’m not going to be put in a corner.”

The Rev. Mark Gonzales of Dallas, chairman of the McCain campaign’s national Hispanic advisory council for Hispanic evangelicals, believes abortion and gay marriage remain the most important values issues for Hispanics. He, and others, say it’s unfair to tie McCain to the GOP’s harsher anti-immigration voices.

McCain defied Republican hard-liners - and won admiration from Hispanics - for co-sponsoring an immigration bill that included a path to citizenship. But he lost some of that support in speaking more forcefully about border security after the bill was twice defeated.

“The party has a major job to do in terms of repairing the damage with the Latino community,” said Gonzales, who is also heading a first-of-its-kind, nonpartisan voter registration drive at Hispanic evangelical churches. “Hispanics are very loyal. It’s a legacy, being Democratic in the Hispanic community. There is still a learning curve.”

Few places have felt the sting of the immigration battle like Greeley, a city of 90,000 an hour’s drive north of Denver. On Dec. 12, 2006, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement staged a pre-dawn raid at the city’s Swift & Co. meatpacking plant, resulting in 261 arrests.

At New Hope Christian Fellowship Church, staff said attendance at the Spanish-language service suffered from rumors the church would be raided next.

“Everybody knew somebody who was picked up,” said Rigoberto Magnana, pastor of the Assemblies of God congregation. “All of us knew someone who was affected.”

Ask Magnana’s members what is guiding their vote, however, and immigration has faded behind making sure there’s food on the table and a roof overhead.

Even before the recent economic tailspin, last summer’s Pew survey found immigration was an important voting issue for Hispanics, but behind education, cost of living, jobs, health care and crime.

An emerging voice among Hispanic evangelical pastors, Magnana is a registered Republican who’s been courted by both campaigns. While he said he won’t tell people how to vote, Magnana said he’ll probably vote for McCain because he agrees with him philosophically and believes McCain can lead through crisis.

“I have to be honest,” Magnana said. “There’s still the issue of where Obama stands as far as his belief system. Where does he really stand? You see it on the Internet, saying ‘My Muslim faith,’ whatever. I would like for him to come out and say, ‘Look, I want to dispel this myth.’”

Obama did utter the words “my Muslim faith” in a September television interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos but corrected himself. Magnana said he was unaware that Obama has professed his Christianity repeatedly and explained how his Christian faith shapes his politics. Nevertheless, a Pew poll in September found 13 percent of all voters - and 19 percent of McCain backers - believed Obama is a Muslim.

Seated in a conference room after services, a half-dozen members of Magnana’s church expressed ambivalence about the election.

“Obama doesn’t have the morals, and he doesn’t seem to have the love of country I think a president should have,” said Esther Gomez, 65, a retired grocery store meat-wrapper.

But Gomez, a registered Democrat who voted for Bush in the last two elections, also has soured on Republicans. “It’s the illegals,” she said. “I don’t like how they’ve been treated.”

“I believe Obama does have morals,” said Carla Ortiz, 48, the church receptionist. “But he has to be so careful of what he says because everything gets distorted. It happens with McCain, also. Everyone says he’s going to be another Bush, but he’s his own man.

“Ultimately, we have to vote with our hearts - and I’m undecided.”

Source — The Seattle Times

The sensitive issue of race and the death penalty triggered an unusual public debate yesterday between two Supreme Court justices.

In respectful but pointed language, Justices John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas clashed over whether race could have influenced the imposition of the death sentence for Artemus Rick Walker, a black Georgia man convicted of killing a white bank vice president. The court rejects hundreds of cases each year, mostly without comment, and yesterday it declined to hear Walker’s appeal.

Stevens did not dissent from that decision. But he issued an eight-page statement saying he found the case “troubling” because it “involves a black defendant and a white victim.” Stevens criticized the Georgia Supreme Court, saying it carried out “an utterly perfunctory review” to ensure that racial disparities were not a factor in Walker’s sentence.

“The Georgia Supreme Court . . . must take seriously its obligation to safeguard against the imposition of death sentences that are arbitrary or infected by impermissible considerations such as race,” wrote Stevens, a leader of the court’s liberal wing who said this year that he thinks that capital punishment is unconstitutional.

Thomas, a conservative and the only African American justice, defended Georgia’s handling of the case and disputed Stevens’s contention that the state’s courts were required to review similar cases to guard against racial and other disparities.

“To the extent that Justice Stevens suggests that the Court’s precedent requires consideration of cases where the death penalty was not imposed, he is simply wrong,” Thomas wrote in a seven-page statement concurring with the rejection of the case. His first sentence said Walker had “brutally murdered” the banker, Lynwood Ray Gresham.

Gresham was stabbed 12 times in his yard in 1999 after Walker lured him outside, court records show. Walker then tried to get inside the house, but Gresham’s wife called police. Walker’s execution date has not been set, and his attorneys said he has several more rounds of appeals.

Death penalty experts said the dispute reflects the increasing division in the court over capital punishment. The justices this year upheld lethal injection, a method of execution used by nearly all states, but they have clashed over decisions rejecting the death penalty for child rapists and juveniles.

“You have one justice saying Georgia has done everything fine and another saying they have been very derelict in their duties. These are not just shades of difference,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. He said the justices might be preparing to review whether the death penalty is being applied in a discriminatory way, an issue the court has not taken up for two decades.

A variety of studies have concluded that criminals are more likely to be sentenced to death if they kill white people than if they kill someone from another race.

In his statement yesterday, Stevens said Walker’s failure to raise in state courts constitutional claims of arbitrariness and discrimination in his sentence “provides a legitimate basis” for the court’s rejection of his appeal. The justice emphasized that the denial sets no precedent.

Source — Washington Post

Lori Lipman Brown has had her fill of God-talk.

“It’s a very frustrating time,” said Brown, director of the Washington-based Secular Coalition for America, the first lobbying organization devoted to secular issues.

“All of us have been very hopeful that at the end of the Bush administration, we would stop seeing theology impose itself on civil law and yet in just the last few months, we’ve heard both major party presidential candidates support faith-based initiatives.”

For obvious reasons, Brown and other nonbelievers dislike President Bush’s emphasis on integrating religious faith with public policy. But what has her more upset — and perhaps disappointed — is the Democrats’
newfound emphasis on religion and courtship of evangelical voters.

With a recent survey showing that increasing numbers of Americans feel “uncomfortable when politicians talk about how religious they are,” is it possible the Democrats’ fervent attempts to court religious voters could backfire on Election Day?

Much media speculation and campaign strategy has been devoted to the political preferences of evangelical Christians, who make up an estimated 26 percent of Americans. But very little attention has been paid to the 16 percent of Americans unaffiliated with any religious tradition — or to those religious voters who prefer not to hear politicians talk about the Iraq war and God’s will in the same sentence.

Perhaps that’s because it is widely assumed that no matter how uncomfortable secular Americans are with Sen. Barack Obama’s overtures to the religious right, they simply won’t abandon the Democratic ticket.

Or, as Brian Parra of the Southern California-based Atheists United says, “They understand that (we) have nowhere else to go.”

The Coalition of Secular Voters’ blog, for instance, refers to Obama as “the Democratic candidate overseeing the greatest expansion of religiosity and religious pandering in his party’s history.” And secular groups were appalled when the organizers of the interfaith gathering at the Democratic National Convention refused to allow a nonreligious speaker to address the convocation.

“That’s a blatant disregard to the secular community, which makes up a huge portion of the Democratic ticket,” said Parra, director of communications and membership for the atheist group.

But Bobbie Kirkhart, a board member of Atheists United, said secularists do have options. In recent elections she has watched as some of her fellow nonbelievers defected to the Green Party or Peace and Freedom Party “for a more secular approach.”

Could the alienation of secular voters spell trouble for the Democrats? According to the Pew Forum, religiously unaffiliated voters favored John Kerry over President Bush in 2004 by a margin of 44 points. In the most recent survey, that same demographic, though still strongly Democratic, preferred Obama to Sen. John McCain by only 32 points.

Greg Smith, a researcher at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, says it’s unclear whether the Democrats’ greater willingness to talk about faith will cause nonreligious voters to decamp, but says the nonreligious comprise an important voting bloc that should not be ignored.

“If you were to count (the unaffiliated) as a religious tradition so to speak, it would be the fourth largest in the country,” he said.

Some fear that both campaigns’ intense focus on religious issues and constituents distracts the candidates and the country from more pressing matters.

For nearly a year, a group of citizens, science organizations and Nobel laureates operating under the name Science Debate 2008 have been trying to get the candidates to debate science issues.

Asked if she thinks science should have an equally prominent, if not more prominent, role as religion in this election, Darlene Cavalier, director of public engagement for Science Debate 2008, said, “I really do because a president is going to have influence on these critical science topics that will … affect us, not just in the next four years, but it will affect our nation.”

Though Republicans probably aren’t losing much sleep over alienating secular voters, some believe their professed devotion to evangelicals may not deliver the payoff they are expecting either.

“The word `evangelical’ doesn’t mean that much anymore because the population it describes is so incredibly diverse,” said Christine Wicker, the author of “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.” “The groups that they’re catering to are not the majority of Christians, they’re not the majority of religious people in this country.”

Still, August Berkshire, president of Minnesota Atheists, said in this election the candidates “not only have to be Christian, but (they) have to be the right kind of Christian.”

What won’t be known until all the ballots are counted is whether being the right kind of Christian can deliver the White House if such singularity ends up turning off religious and secular voters alike.

Source — The Pew Forums

With colleges back in session and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on board as the Republican vice presidential nominee, social conservatives are intensifying efforts to woo young voters, a demographic they once all but conceded to the Democrats.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has long enjoyed a huge edge among college students and voters in their 20s. Republicans now are seeing their first real chance to make inroads with that group. The key: Young voters may see the 44-year-old Gov. Palin as in tune with their concerns in a way that Sen. John McCain, her 72-year-old running mate, could never be.

“She reminds me of my friends,” said Allyson Wartick, 20, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Just two weeks ago, the mood on campus “was definitely, ‘Obama is the cool place to be,’” said Jennifer Kacerosky, 21, a senior at the University of Florida. This past weekend, though, she went to a football game sporting a McCain-Palin button, and “it was, ‘Where’d you get that? I need that!”

Gov. Palin’s down-to-earth image and her family travails — a pregnant teenage daughter, a baby who she says keeps her up at night, a schedule so busy she says it’s often macaroni and cheese for dinner — appeal to young voters who say they had a hard time relating to Sen. McCain. He’s been in Congress longer than many college students have been alive; he’s a hero from a war they know only from history books; he admits to being clueless about email and texting and Google. Sen. McCain has just 312,000 supporters listed on his Facebook site. Sen. Obama has 1.7 million.

Polls taken after the Republican convention don’t show Sen. McCain cutting into the Democrats’ lead among young voters; his support hovers around 33% in that group. But conservatives aren’t giving up. They plan to focus their youth effort on a few issues, including abortion. Although voters of all ages rank abortion quite low as a political priority, polls show the under-30 crowd is receptive to strict limits on abortion, and young evangelicals — potential swing voters this election — are more conservative than their parents on the issue.

Sen. McCain opposes abortion in most circumstances, but some conservatives view him as less than forceful. They see Gov. Palin as their true champion. She supports a total ban on abortion except when continuing the pregnancy would kill the mother.

At a string of Christian rock concerts in the swing states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the nonprofit group Redeem the Vote plans to mobilize voters by interspersing the music with calls to end legal abortion.

The antiabortion group Students for Life, meanwhile, has announced plans to flood YouTube with videos urging young people to activism in the fall campaign.

In Florida, conservative student groups plan a statewide “I Vote Pro-Life” rally later this month. Elsewhere, young antiabortion activists plan to talk up Gov. Palin’s position through phone banks and door-to-door visits. Emily Espinola, 23, a senior at Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio, expects her grades this fall will suffer. But it’s worth it, she said, if it boosts Gov. Palin to the vice presidency. “I love her so much,” Ms. Espinola said.

Democratic activists say Gov. Palin’s appeal to youth is real. “It means we have to work that much harder,” said Laurie Rubiner, a vice president at Planned Parenthood’s political arm. Still, she views abortion as a winning issue for the Democrats. A Pew Research Center poll from 2006 found that 46% of people age 18 to 30 believe abortion should be banned outright or permitted only in a few circumstances. But that still means more than half support legal abortion. And many young people know someone who has made the choice to end a pregnancy; some 600,000 abortions a year are performed on women under 25.

John Green, a political analyst who focuses on religious voters, said the right’s optimism made sense: “It’s certainly plausible that Republicans could recover some of the youth vote, especially among evangelicals and serious Catholics.” The question, he said, is whether they have enough time to take advantage of Gov. Palin’s appeal.

Sen. Obama has spent well over a year building ties to young voters and college campuses. Young voters are notoriously hard to get to the polls, unless they’re repeatedly contacted in person. “It’s not clear,” Mr. Green said, “that the McCain campaign has the infrastructure.”

Source — The Wall Street Journal

SAN DIEGO — A high school mathematics teacher has won a round in federal court in his fight to put “God Bless America” and “One Nation Under God” banners back in his classroom.

Brad Johnson, a teacher at Westview High in San Diego County, had the banners up in his classroom for two decades, but last year the principal ordered him to take them down, saying they were an impermissible attempt to make a Judeo-Christian statement to his students.

Johnson sued in federal court. Poway Unified School District officials sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that, as a public employee, Johnson had only limited 1st Amendment rights while on the job and that the principal had authority over what was put on classroom walls.

In a blistering 23-page decision, U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez rejected the district’s motion as legally faulty and blasted its “brash” attempt to take down the banners. The jurist noted that the district allowed other teachers to put up posters with Buddhist and Islamic messages, posters of rock bands including Nirvana and the Clash, and Tibetan prayer rugs.

Johnson’s banners, Benitez wrote, were patriotic expressions deeply rooted in American history.

“By squelching only Johnson’s patriotic expression, the school district does a disservice to the students of Westview High School, and the federal and state constitutions do not permit such one-sided censorship,” Benitez wrote in a ruling issued last week.

The school district’s attorney, Jack M. Sleeth Jr., said Wednesday that the school board would meet in closed session next week to discuss whether to appeal the ruling, settle the case or advance to trial. He said the principal made her decision after receiving a complaint about the banners.

“It’s an extremely complex issue,” Sleeth said. “It’s not as simple as the teacher loves the Lord and we tried to stop him. He was hired to teach mathematics. What do these banners have to do with mathematics?”

Sleeth said the district offered to let the banners remain if Johnson would provide material showing the historical context of the messages on them. But he refused, Sleeth said.

Johnson is seeking to restore the banners, which include “In God We Trust” and “God Shed His Grace on Thee,” and to be compensated for $30,000 in legal fees.

The lawsuit was filed by the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center, which supports cases involving religious issues nationwide. The center is also representing a Marine lieutenant colonel facing court-martial at Camp Pendleton for allegedly not investigating a possible war crime by troops in Haditha, Iraq.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel for the law center, suggested that the Poway district should settle rather than advance to trial.

“Many public schools exhibit a knee-jerk hostility toward Christianity,” he said.

In his ruling, Benitez noted that Johnson had never referred to the banners while teaching.

Source — Los Angeles Times