Eideard

Sugarcreek, Ohio – This village is as sweet as its name. Main Street climbs gently from a tidy railroad crossing, past a few gift shops to the simple brick First Mennonite Church…

This postcard from a gentler and simpler America is about as unlikely a place imaginable for the news that broke in September: one of Sugarcreek’s own, a prominent member of what some people here call the Plain Community, was under arrest, accused by federal prosecutors of running a Ponzi scheme that betrayed his neighbors’ trust and wiped out more than $16 million of their savings.

The news media made the obvious comparisons…

But the most intriguing aspect of Monroe Beachy’s story is how different it seems from Bernie Madoff’s — and from almost every other story with a “Ponzi scheme” headline over the years.

While victims of Mr. Madoff’s fraud, like most Ponzi victims, condemned their accused betrayer in court as a monster, many of Monroe Beachy’s investors have said in court that it is more important to forgive him than to recover their money.

While the Madoff case and others like it have inevitably created conflict between longtime investors fighting to keep their fictional profits and more recent investors trying to recover lost principal, some Beachy investors urged that their own share of his estate should be given to those in greater need.

And while Mr. Madoff’s wife and sons instantly became social pariahs in Manhattan, Mr. Beachy’s wife and children remain at his farmstead here, living peacefully with their neighbors…

It became the forum for a rare bankruptcy court battle over religious freedom, with Mr. Beachy’s Amish and Mennonite creditors insisting that the court’s way of dealing with his downfall could not be squared with their faith or with his…They formed their own committee to resolve the crime. There were two confounding contradictions: [1] all the creditors were not members of their faith and bound by the same methods or conclusions; [2] we still live in a constitutional republic where civil law takes precedence over religious rote.

Last March, Federal Bankruptcy Judge Russ Kendig in Canton, in the federal courthouse closest to Sugarcreek, ruled that “delegating insolvency proceedings to a religious body” would be unconstitutional…

No part of this story contrasts as sharply with the real Bernie Madoff case as what happened next…

“We are agreed among ourselves to accept your ruling as the will of Almighty God in this matter,” they wrote, after thanking him for considering their point of view so carefully. “If there is anything which we can do as members of the Amish-Mennonite community to facilitate the bankruptcy process and help bring it to a speedy conclusion please do not hesitate to contact any member” of the committee.

Unlike most American flavors of fundamentalist religion, these folks recognize and respect the law of the land over their religious beliefs. They call it God’s Will. An interesting way around the contradictions of their belief system; but, it leaves our constitution intact and doesn’t waste months and years trying to wear down the court system.

RTFA. It is a long and convoluted tale. One not without illustrations of every human frailty – even for folks who assay that frailty results from the supernatural.

Afghan police said they rescued a convoy of 41 children, some aged as young as six, from being smuggled over the border to Pakistan and trained as suicide bombers.

The children were stopped in a convoy of cars driven by four Afghan men in the mountainous eastern province of Kunar, police and interior ministry officials said. They said their parents had been fooled into believing they were sending their children to religious schools across the border, but were instead being sent to be trained to attack Afghan and international forces.

“They were bringing these children in the name of education, but they were not being sent to schools,” a police official in the province said, “They were being sent to be suicide bombers”.

The children were to be taken to a madrassah at Shamshato, close to Peshawar, which officials said was a recruiting ground for militants belonging to Hizb-i-Islami, one of Afghanistan’s main insurgent factions…

Several said they were from the violent Pech and Korengal valleys and had lost their fathers in clashes between American troops and insurgents, or in Nato airstrikes. They told reporters that with their fathers gone, their families could not afford to look after them so they were being sent to private madrassahs where they would receive free food and clothes…

Seddiq Seddiqi, spokesman for the interior ministry, said: “It was obvious what was happening with these boys. They were being taken across the border, without any paperwork or documentation, to Pakistan where there are lots of these madrassahs. They train these children and then they send them back to carry out attacks.”

The shame, the crime of stealing the youth, the lives of these children rests solely on the heads of the base criminals leading the Taliban theocracy. They are as guilty as any thug who steals and kills children for profit.

Using schools, clothing and food for the poor as an instrument to brainwash children is nothing new – in many cultures. Doing so to turn them into murderers is reprehensible.

About 2,000 Afghans protested outside the main US military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday over a report that foreign soldiers improperly disposed of copies of the Koran. US helicopters fired flares to try to break up as many as 2,000 demonstrators who massed outside several gates to the base, chanting anti-foreigner slogans and throwing stones.

Roshna Khalid, the provincial governor’s spokeswoman, said copies of the Muslim holy book had been burnt inside Bagram airbase, an hour’s drive north of the capital Kabul, citing accounts from local labourers.

“The labourers normally take the garbage outside and they found the remains of Korans” Khalid said. Nato’s top general in Afghanistan attempted to contain fury over the incident, which could be a public relations disaster for the US military as it tries to pacify the country ahead of the withdrawal of foreign combat troops in 2014.

“When we learned of these actions, we immediately intervened and stopped them. The materials recovered will be properly handled by appropriate religious authorities,” said general John Allen, head of the International Security Assistance Force ( ISAF). “This was NOT intentional in any way…”

Is this general an idiot? Is every officer in his command an obedient puppet idiot? Every military force in the West has a book to go by. And doing it “by the book” while stationed abroad is how you do it. Believe me – there already are rules and regulations governing everything from how and why the military acquired copies of the Koran – how they were used by the military – and what was appropriate when that use was completed.

Bagram also houses a prison for Afghans detained by US forces. The centre has caused resentment among Afghans because of reports of torture and ill-treatment of suspected Taliban prisoners, with president Hamid Karzai demanding the transfer of prisoners to Afghan security.

Winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is critical to US efforts to defeating the Taliban but critics say Western forces often fail to grasp Afghanistan’s religious and cultural sensitivities.

American-led forces often fail to grasp the religious and cultural sensitivities of anyone whose kin weren’t on the losing side of the American Civil War. Much less lands outside the territorial boundaries of the 50 states. It doesn’t have to be that way.

There is no shortage of bright, inquisitive, studious, able folks who have joined our military in recent decades. They’re dedicated to bringing our military and our politics into the 21st Century. They just don’t happen to be in charge of a whole helluva lot.

There’s an agenda behind those cookies the Girl Scouts sell, one bent on promoting communism, lesbianism and subverting “traditional American family values,” according to an Indiana lawmaker. That’s the reason Rep. Bob Morris, a Republican representing Fort Wayne, insists he won’t go along with a resolution meant to honor the Girls Scouts on the organization’s 100th anniversary…

“After talking to some well-informed constituents, I did a small amount of Web-based research, and what I found is disturbing,” Morris wrote Saturday to Republican House colleagues in a letter obtained by the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

Morris alleged that the Girl Scouts of America and the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts “have entered into a close strategic affiliation with Planned Parenthood,” which he claimed is trying to “sexualiz(e) young girls through the Girl Scouts.”

Even worse, he wrote, only three of the 50 role models promoted by the Girl Scouts have even “a briefly-mentioned religious background.” “All the rest are feminists, lesbians, or Communists,” he wrote.

As proof, Morris notes that the “radically pro-abortion” Michelle Obama is honorary president of Girl Scouts of America, which “should give each of us reason to pause before our individual or collective endorsement of the organization.”

After learning all this, he wrote, he pulled his two daughters out of the Girl Scouts and instead put them in American Heritage Girls Little Flowers, a parent-run group best described as a center for recovering Girl Scouts.

Heartwarming to view consistency in the ideology of our politicians. Even if it’s consistent dementia.

Doctor Allan LeReau

Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are “firing” such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor’s responsibility to these patients.

Medical associations don’t recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers…

In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal, and a recent survey of 909 Midwestern pediatricians found that 21% reported discharging families for the same reason…

Most pediatricians consider preventing disease through vaccines a primary goal of their job. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and AAP issue an annual recommended vaccination schedule, but some parents ask if their child’s immunizations can be pushed back or skipped altogether, pediatricians say.

It’s hard to imagine an outbreak of smallpox today. But for centuries the deadly virus wiped out entire populations. WSJ’s Christina Tsuei reports on how the discovery of vaccines (with the help of cows) eradicated the disease and led to the prevention of many other diseases.

While rates for several key inoculations in young children rose between 2009 and 2010, according to the CDC, lower immunization rates have been blamed as a factor in U.S. outbreaks of whooping cough and measles in recent years.

Parents often voice concerns about autism or that their child’s immune system may be overwhelmed by too many vaccines at once…Numerous studies since have dispelled these concerns among scientists. Rather, scientists say, it is more likely that autism symptoms begin showing up around the same age children are vaccinated…

But, parents whose primary source of medical knowledge is Mr. Stupid and Greedy who’s selling the latest spooky cure-all tome aren’t about to listen to their doctor.

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Christians who want to be exempt from equality legislation are like Muslims trying to impose sharia on Britain, Trevor Phillips, the human rights watchdog, has declared.

Religious rules should end “at the door of the temple” and give way to the “public law” laid down by Parliament, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said. He argued that Roman Catholic adoption agencies and other faith groups providing public services must choose between their religion and obeying the law when their beliefs conflict with the will of the state.

Mr Phillips singled out the adoption agencies that fought a long legal battle to avoid being forced to accept homosexual couples under equality laws. Last year, following a High Court case, the Charity Commission ruled against an exemption for Catholic Care, an adoption agency operating in Leeds.

Speaking at a debate in London on diverse societies, Mr Phillips backed the new laws, which led to the closure of all Catholic adoption agencies in England. “You can’t say because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws,” he said, in comments reported by The Tablet, the Catholic newspaper.

“To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

He added that religious groups should be free to follow their own rules within their own settings but not outside. “Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules, for example child protection, then it has to go with public law,” he said.
“Institutions have to make a decision whether they want to do that or they don’t want to do that…”

Mr Phillips has been outspoken in his defence of human rights law even when they conflict with religious beliefs.

He has accused some Christian groups of being more militant than Muslims. During the debate, he praised both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches for their work in inner cities, particularly through faith schools, but accused some religious groups of growing intolerance.

“There is something rather odd that is happening amongst what I call the righteous brigade, that is people of good will and so on,” Mr Phillips said. “And that is that if you don’t agree 100 per cent with them and excoriate people who have a different point of view actually somehow you are joining a bad bunch of people.”

Keith Porteous Wood, director of the National Secular Society, said Mr Phillips was “absolutely right…If society has decided that it wants to ensure by law that every citizen of this country has equal rights, then there cannot be endless exemptions for religious bodies or anyone else,” he said.

“There is no such thing as partial equality, and every time an exemption is made, someone else’s rights are compromised.”

Sound familiar? Except that Trevor Phillips has more backbone than Barack Obama when it comes to confronting civil rights, the validity of civil law over religious belief in a constitutional democracy. Confronting sharia-style precepts, Muslim or Catholic or whichever fundamentalist source requires the courage to maintain constitutional protections via civil law. Maybe he’ll be invited sometime to drop in and give lessons at the White House.

But, don’t hold your breath waiting.

Bed & Breakfast hotel run by a convent in Rome

Over the years, the Italian government has quietly passed scores of laws that benefit the Roman Catholic Church, but it is rare for it to issue a public statement announcing it intends to strip the church of privileges. The government of Prime Minister Mario Monti took that step on Wednesday, telling the European Commission that it intends to change Italian law to ensure the church pays property tax on the parts of its buildings used for commercial ends.

The church owns vast amounts of property in Italy, and the move is aimed at making sure that convents that offer bed and breakfast or church buildings that rent space to shops pay their full share of taxes.

The change — once it is formally drafted and approved by Parliament — could result in revenues of $650 million to $2.6 billion annually, according to municipal government associations. It could also set an example for other debt-strapped European countries — most notably Greece and Spain — where there is growing popular resentment over tax breaks for the church.

It would set an example for the United States – not only for Old World religions but the all-American bible belt crowd.

Even in Catholic Italy, the proposal shows the churchgoing Mr. Monti’s ability to read the national mood. Faced with their own belt-tightening and tax increases, Italians are increasingly fed up with what they see as unfair privileges — be it of the political class or the church. After new austerity measures were passed in December, 130,000 people signed an online petition calling on the government to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status…

Today, many church buildings fall into a gray area, taking advantage of a tax exemption for religious organization’s buildings even if they are largely commercial in use…

Overdue? It’s all overdue.

Take the time to discuss this with most folks and even the most thoroughly brainwashed True Believer will generally understand the sense of fairness that should discipline the funding of necessary government. It’s an all-in proposition. Certain work – like charity – might be exempt. Not individuals or organizations just by definition of their belief system.

 
This whole contraception debate is just so new-fangled, says billionaire investor and mega-funder to the super PAC supporting former Senator Rick Santorum for President, Foster Friess.

In a simpler time, there were other ways to deal with female sexual desire. “Back in my day, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly,” he said Thursday on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, setting the host back for moment.

The general conversation was about Santorum’s past statements about contraception, who…said that it was “harmful to women.”

The full exchange:

Mitchell: Do you have any concerns about some of his comments on social issues, contraception, about women in combat, and whether that would hurt his general election campaign would he be the nominee?

Mitchell: Excuse me, I’m just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly.

Most times when someone says something this stupid, this prejudiced – I post it with just a one-liner expressing my sincere contempt. But, describing Friess, say, as Stone Age in his outlook towards women slanders the average Neanderthal.

If some journalist needs validation for this – just take a hidden camera along and drop in at the nearest K of C bar, tomorrow night, payday. Bring up this incident on Andrea Mitchell’s show and tell it like a joke – just as Friess obviously intended. He’s probably been telling this one for 50 years. And record the reaction you get from everyone else at the bar. Good luck trying to correct anyone!

The bishop knows where to send the check…

The Democratic-led Senate is expected to reject as early as Thursday a largely symbolic Republican challenge to a White House rule guaranteeing free birth control for women who work for religiously affiliated employers.

Even Senate defeat of the legislation would allow Republican lawmakers to take a stand in a rancorous election year debate over a policy that is vehemently opposed by social conservatives and Roman Catholic bishops…

The Department of Health and Human Services announced in January that employers including those with religious affiliations — such as universities, charities and hospitals — would have to provide free birth control coverage for women enrolled in their health plans. Church employees are exempt from the rule…

The birth control coverage requirement infuriated Catholic leaders…who think they have a right to overrule civil law in America…

Roy Blunt’s bill would exempt employers from providing health benefits that conflict with “beliefs and moral convictions.” Anyone standing in line to watch Congress explain their “beliefs and moral conviction”?

Democrats including California Senator Barbara Boxer denounced the measure as too broad, saying it could allow potentially any employer to deny additional types of health insurance coverage on moral grounds.

It’s only been about a day since the last time I said this: I realize Christianity may hold the copyright on hypocrisy; but, today’s Republicans – with appropriate aid from the Kool Aid Party – have perfected the process.

Now we get to witness temporary nutball unity between the 14th Century and the 19th Century in an attempt to turn this nation into a theocracy.

Two Colombian priests who were found shot dead in the capital Bogota a year ago themselves hired the assassins who killed them, prosecutors say. They said the priests had agreed a suicide pact after one of them was diagnosed with AIDs, but contracted hitmen because they could not bring themselves to carry it out.

Relatives of the dead priests insist they were victims of an armed robbery. They have denied reports that they were involved in a gay relationship.

Two of the alleged killers are being prosecuted after being traced from calls made from the priests’ phones.

Father Richard Piffano, 37, and Father Rafael Reatiga, 35, were found shot dead in a car in southern Bogota in January 2011.

Prosecutors allege they paid the suspected hitmen around $8,500 to kill them and make it look like a robbery attempt.

The two priests had been friends since their training and often celebrated Mass and other religious services together, Colombia’s El Tiempo newspaper reported.

In his final church service, Father Reatiga asked parishioners to pray to Santa Marta, the patron saint of lost causes, the paper reported, while Father Piffano asked his to “pray for me”.

Suicide – like homosexual acts – is forbidden in the Catholic Church.

Apparently, the worst sin is love. There are so many sides to this tale that didn’t have to be, that didn’t have to end in death and sadness. All that was required was walking away from the ideology and customs of the Catholic Church.

These two men should have walked away from a calling that died centuries ago. They should have chosen a new life and enjoyed their love. Death is a decision only left to people without the understanding to change their own lives. Forget the ideology that cannot comprehend change. Or love.