Last update:

01/12/2004

October 2003           Issue #103

• A House-Senate conference committee finally worked out a law banning “partial birth abortions,” which the House quickly approved.  It removed a provision the Senate had added expressing support for Roe v. Wade.  The act has no exception for a mother’s health, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled made a Nebraska ban unconstitutional.

• The House followed the Senate’s lead in adopting a tax bill to encourage charitable giving.  Key portions of Pres. Bush’s faith-based initiative, such as funding religious charities, had been removed from the bill.

• The House narrowly adopted a vouchers program for D.C. last month.  After several days of debate on it, Senate Republican leaders withdrew the proposal, blaming a threatened Democratic filibuster, an impending October recess, and more pressing year-end business, including 6 of 13 government spending bills unfinished when the fiscal year ended.  They vowed to revisit the plan later this month, probably by rolling it into an omnibus federal spending bill.

• The Pledge Protection Act of 2003 (H.R. 2028) would deny jurisdiction to all federal courts except the Supreme Court over any claim that the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First Amendment.  It has 221 cosponsors, yet the Republican House Judiciary Committee chair has not set it for hearing or vote.  A similar Senate bill (S.1297) has only 5 cosponsors.

Calling it the "Issue of our Time" and “THE Issue Of 2004,” religious right groups vow to make “defending marriage” their top priority.  Over 20 religious right groups, joining forces as the Coalition to Protect Marriage, announced a campaign to maintain marriage as a union of a man and a woman.

The campaign began with an observance of Oct. 12-18 as Marriage Protection Week, which Pres. Bush officially proclaimed the day the coalition was announced.  The observance includes inserts in church bulletins, sermons and Christian radio programming on the issue throughout the week.

The groups will work to pass a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.  They will also ask all candidates for state or federal office to sign a "Marriage Protection Pledge."  The pledge is to protect “the inviolable definition of marriage,” which is defined as the legal union of one man and one woman, and not to recognize the uniting of persons of the same or opposite sex in a civil union, domestic partnership, or similar relationship.  The groups announced a voter registration drive and vowed to mobilize more than 25 million voters.  Speakers at the press conference announcing the effort called on this to be the main issue in the 2004 election.

The leaders of many of the groups composing the coalition say they are ready to do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to preserve the traditional view of marriage.  They claim to have strong grassroots support, buttressed by recent poll data.  Don Wildmon of the American Family Association said that the group is united like never before.  "I have never, in my 27 years of working in the pro-family movement, seen such agreement, cooperation and dedication among all the groups,” he said.

Many of these groups have coalesced on specific issues before with varying success, and Jerry Falwell, among others, has called for a constitutional amendment to “protect traditional marriage” for years. Recent events might activate some but it remains to be seen if voters consider this the paramount issue.

The White House has finalized 4 regulatory changes proposed in December and proposed 6 new changes to permit federal funding of faith-based organizations.  The final regulations include one that makes faith-based groups eligible for housing grants as long as the grant money is not used for a religious group’s principal place of worship.  The new proposals—described as “equal treatment” provisions—apply to the Departments of Justice, Education, Labor, and Veterans Affairs.  One would allow federal job training money to be used for religious training.

The religious right has been promoting petitions, rallies, and other actions in response to the removal of the Ten Commandments monument from Alabama’s court building.  A "Save the Commandments Caravan" from Alabama to Washington, D.C. culminated in a rally at the Supreme Court “to support the right to acknowledge God in public.”  The week-long caravan featured a lighted mobile billboard of the Ten Commandments and a life-size replica of the Alabama monument.

The rally took place on Oct. 6, the first day of the Court’s term.  Several hundred people attended.  Sponsors called for placing the Ten Commandments in state capitols or other public buildings and asking Congress to place a Ten Commandments monument in the U.S. Capitol, as well as confirming Pres. Bush’s judicial nominees and passing laws allowing the display of the Ten Commandments in governmental buildings.  Organizers delivered, they said, 385,000 petitions on behalf of the Ten Commandments.  A rally held the week before in Lufkin, at which Rick Scarborough of Houston’s Vision America spoke, drew more than 2,000, according to the Lufkin Daily News.