Friday, July 16, 2010

Cops: Kids can't pray at U.S. Supreme Court

FAITH UNDER FIRE

Silenced! Christian students ordered to stop devotional on public grounds


© 2010 WorldNetDaily

A Christian private-school teacher is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to allow constitutionally protected prayer outside the court building after her class was "abruptly" ordered to stop praying on the grounds.

Maureen Rigo, a teacher at Wickenburg Christian Academy in Arizona, took her class to the Supreme Court complex May 5 for an educational tour.

The students stood off to the side at the bottom steps of the Oval Plaza, bowed their heads and quietly prayed amongst themselves, according to the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal team Rigo contacted after the incident.

"Even though they were not obstructing traffic, not demonstrating and praying quietly in a conversational tone so as to not attract attention, a court police officer approached the group and told them to stop praying in that public area immediately," ADF reported. "The prayer was stopped based on a statute, 40 U.S.C. §6135, which bars parades and processions on Supreme Court grounds."

That statute reads as follows:

It is unlawful to parade, stand, or move in processions or assemblages in the Supreme Court Building or grounds, or to display in the Building and grounds a flag, banner, or device designed or adapted to bring into public notice a party, organization, or movement.

According to the Sonoran News, the police tapped Rigo on the shoulder and said, "Ma'am, I'm not going to tell you that you can't pray, but you can't do it here. Please go somewhere else."

A message left by WND at Wickenburg Christian Academy hadn't been returned at the time of this report.

ADF sent a letter to U.S. Supreme Court officials today, imploring them to stop their police officers from barring people from quietly praying outside the court.

"Mrs. Rigo was not engaging in a parade, procession or assembly. She was speaking in a conversational level to those around her with her head bowed," a letter signed by ADF attorney Nathan Kellum explains. "There is no reason to silence Mrs. Rigo's activities since these activities do not attract attention, create a crowd or give off the appearance of impartiality. The ban on public prayers cannot hope to survive First Amendment scrutiny."

ADF argues that the wording of the statute cited by the police officer does not apply.

"The wording of the statute does not seemingly contemplate quiet prayers like Mrs. Rigo's," Kellum states. "Such prayers are 'not designed or adopted to bring' Mrs. Rigo 'into public notice.' Indeed, Mrs. Rigo's prayers were not communicated to anyone outside of God and her very small group."

The group noted that the prayers are akin to routine conversations that take place during Supreme Court tours every day and that Rigo's class was not engaging in a parade, procession or assembly.

"The only logical explanation for prohibiting Mrs. Rigo's activities, while allowing other conversations, pertains to the viewpoint of Mrs. Rigo's expression," Kellum argued. "[T]he Supreme Court police have not targeted a subject matter or class of expression, but targeted a particular viewpoint for censorship. They have singled out and censored religious prayer as the only form of conversation to be silenced."

The letter states that the prayer ban "exemplifies viewpoint discrimination" in which "the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers" in violation of the First Amendment.

In the letter, the ADF demanded that court officials allow Rigo to return and "engage in conversation-level prayers directed to her nearby companions and God."

Police have three weeks to respond. If they don't, ADF has threatened legal action to protect Rigo's constitutional rights.

"Christians shouldn't be silenced for exercising their beliefs through quiet prayer on public property," ADF senior counsel Nate Kellum said in a statement. "The last place you'd expect this kind of obvious disregard for the First Amendment would be on the grounds of the U.S. Supreme Court itself, but that's what happened."

WND has reported on a series of efforts to remove mention of God and references to the religious faith and influences of the Founding Fathers from government grounds.

In 2008, an "oversight" at the nation's $600-million-plus Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C., left the national motto "In God We Trust" absent from the historical displays and at one point prompted WND columnist and veteran actor Chuck Norris to ask if he could help correct the situation.

That "oversight" was fixed in 2009 after U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., and 108 members of Congress expressed concern the historical content was inaccurate, prompting the committee's determination to make changes.

Also, WND reported in 2006 when Chaplain Todd DuBord, who works with Norris' TopKick Productions, told WND he was more than startled during his visits to the U.S. Supreme Court and two other historic locations to discover the stories of the nation's heritage had been sterilized of Christian references.

He visited the courthouse and was surprised that what the tour guides were telling him wasn't what he was seeing.

"Having done some research (before the trip), I absolutely was not expecting to hear those remarks," which, he had told WND, "denied history."

DuBord wrote to the Supreme Court and several other groups, asking them to restore the historic Christian influences to their presentations. He said he was most disturbed by what appeared to be revisionism in the presentations given to visitors at the Supreme Court.

There, he said, his tour guide was describing the marble frieze directly above the justices' bench: "Between the images of the people depicting the Majesty of the Law and Power of Government, there is a tablet with 10 Roman numerals, the first five down the left side and the last five down the right. This tablet represents the first 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights," she said.

"The 10 what?" was DuBord's thought.

Dubord began researching and found a 1975 official U.S. Supreme Court handbook, prepared under the direction of Mark Cannon, administrative assistant to the chief justice. It said, "Directly above the Bench are two central figures, depicting Majesty of the Law and Power of Government. Between them is a tableau of the Ten Commandments."

Further research produced information that in 1987 the building was designated a National Historic Landmark and came under control of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Under the new management the handbook was rewritten in 1988. The Ten Commandments reference was left out of that edition, and nothing replaced it.

The next reference found said only that the frieze "symbolizes early written laws." Then in 1999, the handbook refered to the depiction as the "Ten Amendments to the Bill of Rights."

"The more I got into [his research], the more I saw Christianity had been abandoned from history," he said.

When DuBord asked, his recent tour guide denied there were any Ten Commandments representations in the Supreme Court building.

Ex-prosecutor: Obama's Kenyan activities may be 'criminal'

McCarthy says Obama's foreign dealings as senator possibly illegal

© 2010 WorldNetDaily


In a new best-selling book connecting Islam and Obama-style socialism, a former top terrorism prosecutor chides the national media for failing to investigate Barack Obama's "borderline criminal" activities in Kenya as a U.S. senator.

Andrew C. McCarthy, the former U.S. attorney who investigated the American embassy bombing in Nairobi, Kenya, charges that Obama interfered in Kenya's internal politics possibly in violation of the Logan Act.

The centuries-old law bars Americans who are "without authority of the United States" from conducting relations "with any foreign government ... in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States."

In "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America," McCarthy says Obama undermined U.S. relations with a strong anti-terrorism ally in an African region where al-Qaida operates. In 2006, he details in the book how Obama campaigned for a pro-communist candidate running against Nairobi's pro-American government – "in outrageous contravention of U.S. policy and, probably, federal law."

Obama spent six days barnstorming the Kenyan countryside in support of Raila Odinga, the socialist Luo who was seeking the presidency. Appearing with Odinga at campaign stops, Obama gave speeches accusing the sitting Kenyan president of being corrupt and oppressive, leaving the masses in poverty.

Obama's interference "was more than reckless," McCarthy writes. "It was borderline criminal (and that's being generous)."

Earlier, Odinga had visited Obama in the U.S. – in 2004, 2005 and 2006 – and Obama had sent an adviser, Mark Lippert, to Kenya in early 2006 to plan a trip by the senator timed to coincide with Odinga's campaign.

Read about the plans Islam has for America!

McCarthy notes that Obama and Odinga, who named one of his children after Fidel Castro, are "leftist soulmates" whose families go way back. Their fathers belonged to the same Luo tribe – and both Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and the elder Oginga Odinga worked inside the Kenyan government as communist agitators.

There is also an Islamist connection.

On Aug. 29, 2007, Raila Odinga signed a secret Memorandum of Understanding with Sheikh Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum of Kenya. In exchange for Muslim support, Odinga agreed, among other things, to:
Rewrite the national constitution to install shariah as the law in all "Muslim declared regions."

Elevate Islam as "the only true religion" and give Islamic leaders an "oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions."

Establish shariah courts in every Kenyan divisional headquarters.

Ban Christian proselytism.

Fire the police commissioner for "allow[ing] himself to be used by heathens and Zionists" to oppress Muslims.

Adopt Islamic dress codes for women.

Ban alcohol and pork.

Even with strong Muslim backing, Odinga (who does business with a wealthy Saudi donor to Osama bin Laden) was defeated in the December 2007 election. But he accused the incumbent president of rigging the vote and incited his supporters to riot in protest.

Over the next month, some 1,500 Kenyans were killed and more than 500,000 displaced – with most of the violence led by Muslims, who set churches ablaze and hacked Christians to death with machetes.

All the while, Odinga was in regular communications with Obama, who publicly called for an end to the violence.

"Odinga's strategy, the extortion strategy of Islamist intimidation, worked to a fare-thee-well," McCarthy notes in his book. To appease his angry mob of supporters, he was named prime minister and allowed to share power with the president.

"With Obama's helping hand, leftists and Islamists had combined forces to overwhelm a constitutional democracy," McCarthy says, while decrying the national media's "stubborn disinterest" in the "stunning" chain of events.

The same alliance can be seen in the U.S., he says, as the Obama administration reaches out to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which according to the FBI, has a plan to infiltrate and sabotage the U.S. from within. Obama and other Alinsky "revolutionaries" are carrying out a similar plan, he maintains.

McCarthy says that while there's no evidence Obama is a practicing Muslim, he shares Muslim Brotherhood hatred for America and "the Muslim Brotherhood's sabotage strategy."

McCarthy says the administration ignores incontrovertible evidence tying Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America to Hamas and other terrorist groups. One of them, he notes, is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to be a benign civil-rights organization.

But he says the recent Holy Land Foundation trial – "and the eye-popping publication of 'Muslim Mafia'" – have exposed CAIR "as a farce." Quoting from "Muslim Mafia" – which he adds is an "important book" – the former top terrorism prosecutor further litigates the case against CAIR's "Hamas-tainted leaders."

In another bombshell, McCarthy reveals that he was dropped from the White House Christmas card list following his criticism of the Bush administration's purging of the words "jihad" and "Islamic terrorism" from the official military and homeland security lexicon.

Like President Bush before him, he says President Obama fails to grasp that Islam is not a "religion of peace" but "a huge part of the problem in combating 'violent extremism,'" which is the new euphemism for Islamic terrorism.

"To be sure, the same ground was staked out by his predecessor, President Bush," McCarthy argues. "They are (both) wrong."

"The need to deal with Islam is unavoidable," he adds, "not because it's an asset, but because it's a liability that can't be written off."