Kirjoittajan mukaan: Keijo Hyvönen (keijoo.hyvonen_miUku_somero.salonseutu.fi)
Päiväys: 29.11.2005 20:30
PELASTUSARMEIJA - SOPPAA , SAIPPUAA JA SYRJINTÄÄ
EU-perustuslaki keskusteluun pienenä pikanttina mutta jopa
kansainvälistä huomiotakin vaativanan lisänä toisin alla olevan
ajankohtaisen artikkelin joka koskee uskonnollisten syiden johdosta
tapahtunut syrjintää sekä rasismia jota on harjoitttu USA:n
veronmaksajien varoin vastoin asiasta annettua lainsäädäntöä.
Liittovaltion lainsäädäntö kieltää varojen osoittamisen tarkoituksiin joissa uskonnollinen yhteisö käyttää varoja rasismin tai muunlaisen syrjinnän harjoittamiseen koskien myös palkkausta tai siihen verrattavaa muunlaisten taloudellisten toimien suorittamista.
Eu-perustuslakisisältö tulisi hyvänä nähdäkseni olemaan kirkon ja valtion tässä yhteydessä Euroopan Unionin eron saavuttamiseen tähtäävä tunnustaen eri uskontokuntien olemassaolon vertaamatta uskonnon harjoittamista mihinkään muuhun yhteiskunnalliseen ajatteluun.
Lähtökohtana tulisi kuitenkin olla demokraattisen kansalaisyhteiskunnan tunnustaminen koko EU-alueella ilman eriarvoistavaa tai sitovaa osallisuutta uskontokuntaan.
Wanted: True Believers Only 29.11.2005 ****************************************************
Salvation Army bias case may transform hiring at faith-based charities getting government funds.
Larry Cohler-Esses - Editor-At-Large
Anne Lown, a Jewish woman from Boston, had worked nearly 25 years for the Salvation Army’s children’s services arm in New York when she was thrust into the world of faith-based initiatives.
Lown, associate director of the local Salvation Army’s government -funded Social Services for Children, was one of 18 employees to leave or be dismissed in 2003-04 for allegedly refusing to sign forms swearing loyalty to the group’s Christian principles.
The employees — among them Jews, Catholics, Evangelical and mainline Protestants, and one ordained Lutheran minister — said they also rejected the army’s demands beginning in 2003 for details about what churches they had attended over the past 10 years. They would not permit the army to contact ministers of these churches for information on them. And one manager said she refused a request from her superiors to identify gay workerson her staff.
“The whole time I was there no one had asked me about my own religion,” said Lown, a soft-spoken woman with a master’s degree in social work from Smith College. “There was never any kind of litmus test.”
Lown’s father, Dr. Bernard Lown, won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He had fled Lithuania during World War II to escape the Nazis. Many of her family members, she noted, had died in the Holocaust.
“To find this happening in your workplace, where I’d given my total commitment, was really incredibly enraging and disheartening,” she said. “I’d always believed because they took public money that that protected us.”
But last month, a federal district judge in New York ruled that even if the Salvation Army did all this, it broke no law, even though the programs in question are funded almost entirely by the government.
The ruling by Judge Sidney Stein is subject to a virtually certain appeal, but observers agree the Bush administration’s hand has been greatly strengthened for a slew of measures it has been pushing.
In his pre-trial ruling, Stein rejected the plaintiffs’ contention that the Salvation Army had violated their rights as employees under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That law, the judge noted, carves out a hiring exemption for religious organizations that Congress expanded in 1972to apply to any activities “regardless of whether those activities are religious or secular in nature.”
The fact that the religious organization’s activities were government funded in this case changed nothing, Stein wrote — the first time this exemption has been ruled to apply even to government-funded activities.
But the judge left two parts of the suit alive. The plaintiffs, he ruled, could go to trial with their contention that government agencies violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by allowing their funds to be spent on the Salvation Army’s alleged religious discrimination activities.
" Ongelmia ei tarvitse aina ratkaista,
ne voi ehkäistä "
Heidi Hautala
PUOLUSTUSVOIMA
www.heidi2006.fi