According to the Guttmacher Institute there are three times more crises pregnancy centers (CPC) than there are abortion providers.  What is so alarming about that?  These CPC’s are fake abortion clinics set up by anti-abortion extremists to deceive people seeking abortions into not having them.  This dangerous masquerade goes on daily all over the U.S. while these centers take in tens of millions of state and federal government dollars.  YOU – the taxpayer – are paying for it.

There is no tactic too despicable for them to engage in to deceive and/or confuse anyone coming through their doors.  There is no lie too heinous for them to tell a patient seeking an abortion who mistakenly enters their facility.   And  YOU – the taxpayer – are paying for it.

They set up their CPC next to or very close to a legitimate abortion clinic hoping a person will mistakenly enter their facility.  They deliberately choose names for their CPC which will trick a person seeking an abortion to believe it is an abortion clinic and advertise in the phonebook with that name.  And  YOU – the taxpayer – are paying for it.

Once the mistaken patient is inside the CPC, they may be confronted with delaying tactics.  If that patient can be delayed long enough, they may not be able to legally get the abortion.   That patient will most certainly be pressured by an avalanche of lies and misinformation.  Examples: getting an abortion will cause cancer, rob you of the ability to have more children or even cause death.. That patient will likely be coerced into having an unnecessary ultrasound, then show it and guilt the patient with the heinous idea that having an abortion will be killing a baby. And YOU – the taxpayer – are paying for it.

Because many (CPC’s) are not even medical facilities, there are no uniform licensing requirements.  Unsurprisingly most are religiously affiliated – a blatant affront to the separation of church and state.  Under the guise of “pregnancy counseling”, they deceive people into believing  they actually provide care when, in fact, they do not.  They are a part of an anti-abortion culture that perpetuates violence against patients and providers.  Additionally, CPC’s drain on the available tax dollars has caused comprehensive healthcare clinics to scale back their services.  The tax dollars are going to the “fake” clinics.  The result: there might not be money for healthcare you may need.  Nonetheless YOU – the taxpayer – are paying for it.

TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ARE SPENT EVERY YEAR ON “FAKE” ABORTION CLINICS and YOU ARE PAYING FOR IT.  You are paying for all the lies and deceit;  for all the violence against patients and providers; for all the horrible waste of taxpayer dollars that could be spent for healthcare for the hundreds of thousands who don’t have any.

"Wait a minute", you may be thinking.  "Why just women?"  The answer: in communities around the world women play a critical role in managing natural resources of the family and the community.  The role of women's voices and perspectives is critical in sustainable development.  Many women around the world are not only lending their voices to addressing this critical issue but are finding real solutions to the problems created by all of us.

While the problems demand that governments make their solutions a priority and make major financial commitments sooner, rather than later, we, as individuals, can make changes in personal behavior that can have a very real impact on saving our planet.

For starters here are two things you can do.  (1) Stop using plastic straws.  (2) Stop using plastic grocery bags.  Carry re-usable bags in your vehicle so you will always have them handy when shopping.  These two actions on our part are not difficult to manage and can make a profound difference to our planet.

It is estimated that, if we do not clean up the plastics in our oceans, by 2050 the amount of plastics will out-weigh the amount of fish in the ocean.  You understand that plastics are an environmental issue but do you also realize plastics are a women's issue?

Chemicals from plastics that get into our bodies are endocrine disruptors.  They mimic our hormones.  Plastics can cause early puberty in girls as well as interfering with hormones during pregnancy.

This is not to suggest we do not need men to do their share in cleaning up and protecting the planet.  We all share this earth and we need a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approach to solving the problem.  We all need to work together.  Stay informed and make smart choices.

 

Frito-Lay & PepsiCo need to be taught what social justice and corporate responsibility mean.  The following report by ODAction shows just how irresponsibly and inhumanly they are treating their workers.  Please read the report.  Then you know what to do.  Show Frito-Lay & Pepsico their actions have consequences.

Today’s Action: Boycott Frito-Lay!

Hundreds of workers at the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas, are striking to protest slave-like working conditions. Workers at the plant had been subjected to mandatory overtime, 80+ hour work weeks, and unsatisfactory working conditions during the pandemic. Increased demand for snack food has made Frito Lay work their employees to the bone, not allowing any time for their families or personal life between twelve hour a day work weeks. 

Despite the union begging for Frito Lay to hire more workers, executives refused -- pinning the entirety of the shifts required for new demand on the original 550 employees. There was even a time in which an employee died from a medical emergency on the job and workers were simply instructed to move the body and replace it so as to not disrupt the line.

Until the company properly negotiates with the workers’ union, Boycott Frito-Lay and PepsiCo products in solidarity with those on strike in Topeka, Kansas! You can spread awareness about the boycott on social media using the hashtag #BoycottFritoLay.

Frito-Lay and PepsiCo products were already widespread throughout American homes, but then the pandemic hit and increased demand all the more. What did not increase in tandem was the treatment of workers and balance of workload. Instead, working class people like those striking in Topeka, Kansas, bore the weight of working to keep food on the table while risking themselves in inhumane conditions.

As one of the signs at the protest put on by striking Frito-Lay workers put: it is not the shareholders that make their products, it’s the employees that do. Those employees deserve every bit of our support as their union fights for their right to an organized, safe workplace. 

Refuse to cross the picket line and boycott Frito-Lay and PepsiCo products until workers’ rights in Kansas are secured by their union! Use the hashtag #BoycottFritoLay to spread awareness.

NEW YORK -  A new study into the representation of women in media says news organizations should do more to include female perspectives.   

The first step to achieving that equity is for journalists to acknowledge that imbalance exists in newsrooms and news production, Luba Kassova, who authored the report, told VOA. 

The report, “The Missing Perspectives of Women in News” — commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — focused on India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Britain and the U.S. It looked at four indicators: diversity in the workplace, newsroom leadership, women as sources and as figures in news stories, and coverage of gender equality issues.  

Overall, marginal progress has been made in the past 10 years, the report found. It challenges policymakers and newsroom leadership to double female representation in coming years to present more balanced perspectives of issues.   

When it comes to workplace diversity, “there are no success stories” in any of the countries the study examined, Kassova, who is director of AKAS, said at a media briefing Tuesday. AKAS is an international audience strategy group commissioned to carry out the study.

Top positions in the newsroom remain largely a reserve of the men, and the absence of female voices in the decision-making process means news about women and for women is mostly decided by men, Kassova said. 

The world “is missing out on the perspective of half of its population,” Pamella Makotsi Sittoni, executive editor of Kenya’s Daily Nation, told VOA   

Women will continue to be denied their right to be heard or to take up leadership or influential positions in the media if the imbalance persists, Makotsi Sittoni said. 

“There is an opportunity when you have equality to tap from both sides and to tap from both perspectives, and that is what we are missing out on by leaving out women,” the Kenyan journalist said.  

The study found an imbalance in the news gathering process, which continues to give preference to male voices. Between 2005 and 2015, “fewer than one in five experts globally in the news were women,” and today, the report said, men are quoted in online news five times more often than women in Nigeria, and six times in India.

The report analyzed news content and academic articles to create a database, and it used Google trends and surveys to collect data in the six countries. More than 2,000 articles and three case studies were considered, and the content of nearly 12,000 publications and more than 56 million stories were analyzed.

The researchers found that women have the best coverage in lifestyle stories, where their voices are captured more than in news linked to policymaking or current affairs. 

Similarly, of the 19 beats analyzed, lifestyle reporting was where female journalists have most parity. Women tend to be assigned coverage of education, environment, and issues of poverty and development, with fewer assigned to investigative reporting, the economy, or politics within newsrooms, the study found.

When it comes to expert sources cited in politics coverage, men’s voices were up to seven times more likely to be heard than that of women. This further dwindles in economic issues where male experts were up to 31 times more likely to be featured than women. In all six countries, women were two to 15 times more likely to appear in the arts and media news genre than in articles on the economy, researchers found. 

The study found that with the exception of India, “gender representation in political news coverage is lagging behind women’s actual position in political life in Kenya, the U.S., South Africa, and the UK.”

The researchers found no indication that the Me Too movement had an impact on coverage of women’s issues in the U.S. and Britain, Kassova told VOA. The campaign against sexual harassment and abuse gained prominence in 2017 when Hollywood celebrities and others spoke publicly about their experiences. 

Generally, researchers found that the more rooted the patriarchal norms, the bigger the barrier to gender equality. In such countries, both sexes appear to believe that women must be subservient to men — a perception mirrored in the news environment.

The report’s findings should be addressed holistically and intentionally, Makotsi Sittoni said. The Kenyan journalist said those in the media should be more proactive and inclusive in eliminating gender biases in newsrooms. 

Report author Kassova agreed, saying change is possible but only if newsrooms push for it.

Voice of America News

By Keminni Amanor

December 04, 2020 04:59 PM

A shield. A ghoul. A great decision. A survivor. A misad­venture. A clear structure. A checkered career. Doctrinal chaos. A grand unified theory. Crucial. Alive and kicking. On life support.

All have been used to describe the Lemon Test, the three-pronged analysis established 50 years ago this month by the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether a government action violates the separation of church and state.

The test marked a watershed moment for religious freedom and church-state jurisprudence. For the first time, courts had comprehensive guidance for analyzing whether a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause had occurred.

“In the decades leading up to Lemon, the Supreme Court issued a string of decisions that provided important protections for church-state separation. What the court hadn’t done was to provide a legal test – a clear, organized way to analyze and decide cases,” said Richard B. Kats­kee, vice president and legal director at Americans United.

“Lemon changed all that,” Katskee said. “It collected, organized and explained what was important for litigants and courts to take into account, and it provided a clear structure for doing so. So not only did courts all across the country have the tools to decide cases more consistently and correctly, but government officials better understood what was required of them. And the rest of us knew how to hold them responsible when they didn’t live up to their constitutional obligations.”

Sadly, some Supreme Court justices in the half-century since that decision haven’t appreciated the Lemon Test as much as proponents of church­-state separation have. Or more accurately, conservative justices haven’t liked applying the test when the obvious answers would mean stopping government from endorsing or supporting religion. Those justices have increasingly gone out of their way to ignore the test.

As the Lemon Test turns 50 this month, here’s a look at its origins, where it stands and where it might end up.

The Case: Challenging Aid To Religious Schools

The name of the Lemon Test was derived from the case Lemon v. Kurtzman, which was one of a trio of cases dealing with government aid to religious schools heard by the Supreme Court in 1971.

The lead plaintiff was Alton Lemon, an Army veteran, government employee and father from Philadelphia. Active in both the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, Lemon told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he was attending an ACLU meeting when he first learned of a potential legal challenge to Pennsylvania’s Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Enacted in 1968, the legislation was described as the first state law in the nation to divert taxpayer money directly to private religious schools to pay for teachers’ salaries, textbooks and instructional materials. Ostensibly, the aid was to be used only for “secular” education at private schools. In the first year of the program, the Supreme Court noted that Pennsylvania funneled $5 million to more than 1,100 private schools – at least 96% of which were religious (most were affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church).

A year after Pennsylvania passed its law, Rhode Island enacted a similar statute – the Salary Supplement Act, which funneled tax money directly to private school teachers. Participating educators had to affirm they taught no religious subjects and used only secular educational materials that were used by public schools. At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion two years later, about 250 private school teachers had applied for the money – all of them employed by Roman Catholic schools.

Alton Lemon said he agreed to join the suit challenging Pennsylvania’s law because sending public money to private schools was “an issue around which I have some strong feelings,” he told the Inquirer in 1991.

Lemon, who was Black, feared that funding private schools with taxpayer money would especially erode the quality of public education for minority children: “If a lot of public funds are siphoned off, Blacks and minorities are going to suffer.”

Joining Lemon were several organizational plaintiffs – including Americans United. Others included the  AC­LU, NAACP, Pennsylvania Council of Churches, the Pennsylvania Jewish Com­munity Relations Conference and the state’s largest teachers’ union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

When Lemon v. Kurtzman was filed in 1969, it’s unclear whether those involved realized the magnitude it would someday have. In the July-August 1969 issue of Church & State, the filing warranted all of one paragraph. But the case was mentioned many more times in the following months, especially after a federal court ruled 2-1 in favor of Pennsylvania officials, a decision that was appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, a different federal court ruled against Rhode Island in DiCenso v. Robinson, the case challenging that state’s private school funding law. And a third federal court ruled against a group of Connecticut taxpayers in Tilton v. Richardson, which challenged provisions of the federal Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 that allowed taxpayer money to fund construction of secular buildings at religious colleges and universities.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in all three cases at the beginning of March 1971 and issued opinions in all three on June 28, 1971.

 

The Test: A Three-Pronged Bulwark

“The Wall Still Stands” was the headline in Church & State after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Lemon.

“What the Court has done is reaffirm faith in the time-tested American plan of separation of church and state,” exclaimed Dr. Glenn L. Archer, then the executive director of Americans United.

In 8-0 and 8-1 decisions respectively (Justice Thurgood Marshall did not participate in Lemon), the Supreme Court struck down both the Pennsylvania and Rhode Island laws because, as Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote in the majority opinion, they resulted in “excessive entanglement between government and religion.”

Burger noted that while the states had tried to take precautions to prevent public money from funding religious instruction, those precautions included review of school records – crossing the church-state line that prevents government from intruding on how religious schools operate.

“[T]he very restrictions and survei­llance necessary to ensure that teachers play a strictly nonideological role give rise to entanglements between church and state,” Burger wrote. “The Pennsylvania statute, moreover, has the further defect of providing state financial aid directly to the church-related school.

“Under our system, the choice has been made that government is to be entirely excluded from the area of religious instruction, and churches excluded from the affairs of government,” Burger concluded. “The Con­stitution decrees that religion must be a private matter for the individual, the family, and the institutions of private choice, and that, while some involvement and entanglement are inevitable, lines must be drawn.”

While the outcome in Lemon was a noteworthy victory for church-state separation, Burger’s conclusion – that it was unconstitutional to entangle religion and government – wasn’t novel. Indeed, he noted in his opinion that he was applying the standard the court had described a year earlier in Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York, in which the court had ruled that tax exemptions for houses of worship were permissible.

Rather, what was seminal was the comprehensive analysis and summary of the court’s previous church-state rulings that Burger laid out in Lemon – creating clear guidance for future courts to weigh potential violations of religious freedom. Lemon identified and clarified three criteria a government action must meet to pass constitutional muster:

• It must have a secular purpose;
• It must neither advance nor inhibit religion;
• It must not excessively entangle government with religion.

The three individual tests collectively became known as the Lemon Test; and if a government action failed any of the three prongs, the action should be deemed unconstitutional.

The Aftermath: The Court Starts To Sour On Lemon

At first, the Lemon Test seemed to be a straightforward guide to resolving many church-state disputes. It was applied just two years later in a second case that also bears Alton Lemon’s name: Sloan v. Lemon, which challenged a Pennsylvania law that allowed tax dollars to pay for private school tuition. Alton Lemon was victorious once again. In a 6-3 decision, the court struck down the law, using the Lemon Test’s second prong to determine the funding had “the impermissible effect of advancing religion.”

But fractures developed on the court pretty quickly, especially when it came to strictly applying the Lemon Test to cases involving public aid for private religious schools. By the late 1980s, the high court, now more conservative thanks to appointments during the Ronald Reagan presidency, had begun to ease up and allow more indirect-aid programs that gave public money to students and families to use at private schools (rather than directly to the private schools), even if that money was ultimately spent at religious schools.

This line of reasoning led to the watershed ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, in which the court determined that a private school voucher program in Ohio did not violate the Constitution because parents chose whether to use the tuition money at secular or religious schools (even though 96% of the students participating in the program were enrolled in religiously affiliated private schools).

The application of the Lemon Test is not limited to cases involving funding for private religious schools. The court has also used it when deciding cases involving religion in public schools, government-sponsored religious displays and other areas of church-state law.

In 2000, the court stopped a public school district in Texas from sponsoring student prayers at high school football games in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe; it found the prayers violated the first prong of Lemon that requires a policy to have a secular purpose. The court applied the same reasoning in 2005 when it narrowly found that Ten Commandments displays at two Kentucky courthouses were unconstitutional in the case McCreary County v. ACLU.

But in a clear display of the justices’ differing views of the Lemon Test and church-state separation, the court narrowly allowed a Ten Commandments monument to stand outside the Texas capitol building on the same day the court invalidated the Kentucky displays. In the Texas case, Van Orden v. Perry, Justice Stephen Breyer provided the needed fifth vote to maintain the monument.

Breyer cited the monument’s donation by a predominantly secular group; its placement in a park amid nearly 40 other historical, mostly secular monuments; and its more than 40-year history of unchallenged existence. “Where the Establishment Clause is at issue, tests designed to measure ‘neutrality’ alone are insufficient,” Breyer wrote, noting that strict “devotion” to secularism can transcend into “hostility to the religious.”

In the Supreme Court’s most recent case involving a religious display on public land – American Legion v. American Humanist Association, which involved a towering, 40-foot cross in Bladensburg, Md. – the court majority in 2019 similarly pointed to the cross’s nearly 100-year-old history, that its intent as a war memorial conveyed a secular message, that it was located near other secular monuments and that removing it could be interpreted as hostility toward religion.

Writing in the Catholic University Law Review later that year, Americans United Associate Vice President and Associate Legal Director Alex Luchenitser and Madison Legal Fellow Sarah Goetz cautioned against the reliance on a historical test for which some justices seem to be advocating.

Unlike in legislative prayer cases like Marsh v. Chambers and Greece v. Galloway, in which the court upheld invocations during government meetings by pointing to the unbroken tradition of Congress having invocations and funding legislative chaplains since 1789, Luchenitser and Goetz noted there are few other modern church-state issues that can be traced back to the same time period as the creation of the First Amendment – the only appropriate historical test, Luch­enitser and Goetz argue.

“Instead of making the law clearer, abandoning existing Establishment Clause jurisprudence in favor of a historical-practice test … would provide courts much less guidance than they have now,” Luchenitser and Goetz wrote. “That is principally because there are very few historical practices to which current practices can properly be compared.”

It’s been 50 years since Lemon was decided. And nearly 20 years since Justice Antonin Scalia notoriously referred to the Lemon Test as “some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried, … stalk[ing] our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys …” And yet, despite the hostility many conservative justices have aimed at Lemon, there has been no consensus for how to craft a better test.

“Courts across the country have had no trouble applying Lemon,” AU’s Katskee said. “What’s really going on is that conservative justices and judges often don’t like the results. They don’t like having to rule against governmental support for religion or special privileges for favored religious groups.

“The real problem for the lower courts is that the members of the Supreme Court who have tried over the years to weaken, scale back, and cast doubt on Lemon haven’t been able to agree on an alternative. It turns out to be really tough to craft a useful, workable legal test other than Lemon,” Katskee said.

Alton Lemon died in 2013 at the age of 84. Late in his life, he wasn’t feeling optimistic about the future of the test that bears his name. “Separation of church and state is gradually losing ground, I regret to say,” Lemon told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003.

A year earlier, Lemon sat unrecognized in the back of a federal courtroom listening to arguments over a Ten Commandments plaque on the wall of a Philadelphia-area courthouse. Upon learning Lemon was in the audience, the judge introduced him.

That judge, correctly applying the Lemon Test, ordered the plaque to be removed. But a year later, a federal appeals court reversed that decision and allowed the plaque to stay, citing the plaque’s historical significance.

“Lemon is still the law,” Katskee added. “But as some members of the Supreme Court have worked overtime to create the impression that it isn’t, lower-court judges have felt ever more free to decide cases based on their personal biases rather than upholding constitutional protections. In other words, the conservative justices have been trying to push us back to the days when there was genuine confusion about how to apply the law, leaving the protections for religious freedom uncertain, unequal and unstable. That’s not just unfortunate but dangerous.”   

June 2021 Church & State Magazine | Featured

by Liz Hayes