National impact expected from New York gay marriage law: experts
When New York became the sixth and by far the largest state to legalize same-sex marriage, following a grueling overtime session in the state legislature, it immediately transformed the national debate over the issue, legal experts said.
With a population over 19 million — more than the combined population of the five states that currently allow gay marriage, plus the District of Columbia, where it is also legal — New York is poised to provide the most complete picture yet of the legal, social and economic consequences of gay marriage.
“I think that having same-sex marriage in New York will have tremendous moral and political force for the rest of the country — in part because New York is a large state, and in part because it hasn’t come easily,” said Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School.
The New York Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation twice before, in 2007 and 2009, but in both cases it stalled in the state Senate, as it nearly did again this week. The bill passed late on Friday after legislators agreed on language allowing religious organizations to refuse to perform services or lend space for same-sex weddings.
The new law’s impact can be measured in part by the numbers at play: New York is home to more than 42,000 same-sex couples, according to an analysis of U.S. census data conducted by the Williams Institute. This means, among other things, that the number of same-sex couples living in states allowing same-sex marriage has more than doubled overnight.
Read the full story by Jessica Dye here.
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Distraught family of DSK accuser looks to God
In a living room bare but for a few family photos and Islamic texts, the African man who says he is the brother of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser says he has not slept or eaten properly for days.
“I heard the news on the radio and honestly I do not know what happened. I want to speak to my sister,” the man, called Mamoudou, told Reuters at a village in the Labe region of Guinea, a hard day’s drive north of the capital Conakry.
Mamoudou, whose family name and home village are withheld to protect the identity of the alleged assault victim, said he had not heard from his younger sister for several years. But he had no doubt that she was the 32-year-old Guinean widow who filed the complaint in New York. Her name has appeared in local media.
In the community of devout Muslims, religion provides solace for those with troubles far away, and for poverty at home.
A hamlet of 20 dwellings lost in the rural depths of this impoverished West African country, Mamoudou’s village is a world away from the luxury suite of the Times Square Sofitel where the now former chief of the International Monetary Fund and French presidential contender is accused of trying to rape the maid.
“In our family, we are above material things,” said Mamoudou, who is aged about 50. “Even if you are a billionaire, we don’t care. The most important thing for us is how you follow God’s path.”
The names of both the victim and the accused should be withheld until an indictment. The name of the vitim should never be publicized. We would be back in the dark ages when victims were afraid to report rapes, and rapists got away with it.
New York mosque project site faces legal challenge
A New York building set to be demolished for an Islamic cultural center and mosque should be preserved as a monument of the September 11 al Qaeda attacks, opponents of the mosque project have said in court. A lawsuit by a New York firefighter who survived the attacks in 2001 seeks to overturn a decision by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission last August denying landmark status to the Lower Manhattan building, clearing the way for the 16-story, $150 million center.
U.S. conservatives and many New Yorkers have spoken out against the proposed center, still at least six years from completion. Opponents of the project argue it would be insensitive to put an Islamic cultural center and mosque so close to the site of the toppled World Trade Center twin towers, considering those responsible for the September 11 attacks were Muslim militants.
The American Center for Law and Justice, or ACLJ, argued during a hearing in New York Supreme Court that the site should be deemed a landmark because it was struck by the landing gear from one of the hijacked planes flown into the World Trade Center.
“That building is a monument to that day,” attorney Jack Lester told the court on Tuesday. He and the ACLJ, founded by U.S. conservative Christian preacher Pat Robertson, are representing firefighter Tim Brown, who brought the suit.
Judge Paul Feinman raised the question as to whether that argument meant every building in the area damaged on September 11 needed to be landmarked. “No … and that’s why this case is unprecedented,” Lester said. Attorney Adam Leitman Bailey, representing building owner Soho Properties, said the reason for the legal action was the intended use of the site as an Islamic cultural center.
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U.S. atheists and Catholics in holiday billboard fight
U.S. Catholics and atheists are doing battle over the holiday season with dueling billboards on opposite sides of the Hudson River separating New York and New Jersey.
The American Atheists organization fired the opening shot the Monday before Thanksgiving with its billboard on Route 495 in North Bergen, New Jersey. It tells drivers: “You Know It’s a MYTH,” a slogan set against a traditional nativity scene with three wise men and two figures in a manger.
The Catholic League fired back with its own billboard on the Manhattan side of the Lincoln Tunnel saying: “You Know it’s Real. This Season, Celebrate Jesus,” set against a picture of the infant Christ with his parents, Mary and Joseph. The league, a Catholic civil rights organization, said it responded to the atheists’ billboard because it wanted to counteract what it sees as a negative view of Christmas.
David Silverman, president of American Atheists, said its billboard, costing $20,000 for about a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, is the organization’s first to directly challenge what it believes are many atheists who go to church at Christmas but don’t believe in God. Jeff Field, a spokesman for the League, said its billboard is designed to counteract any doubts raised by its opponent on the other side of the Hudson.
That is so sad. “Can we all get along?” If you can’t say Merry Christmas, then just make it Merry Solstice and have a hot toddy. Geez…
“MOOZ-lum” film depicts challenges for black U.S. Muslims
The makers of a new movie about family life for black Muslims in America want to highlight challenges facing followers of Islam, just as Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” revealed the racism and harsh realities facing black youth in Brooklyn two decades ago.
“MOOZ-lum” was filmed in Michigan, which has a large Muslim population, and premiered to packed theaters at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York last Friday.
“I hope people can walk out of the theater thinking more and trying to understand what we’re facing here,” said director Qasim Basir, adding the movie’s portrayal of discrimination mirrored his own Muslim-American experience. “I’m hoping to give Muslim-Americans a film that reflects them. I want it to be something the audience can look at and say, ‘This represents me,’” he told Reuters in an interview.
The movie, which has yet to find a distributor and so is not in commercial cinematic release, emerges amid a heated dispute over a planned Muslim cultural center in New York. Urbanworld founder Stacy Spikes said the buzz surrounding “MOOZ-lum” had been helped by the debate.
Read the full story here. Below is the official trailer from YouTube andhere’s a link to the film’s Facebook page, which already has over 66,000 fans:
U.S. monitoring 11 sites for possible discrimination against Muslims
The U.S. Justice Department has said it is monitoring 11 cases of potential land-use discrimination against Muslims, a sharp increase in cases under a federal law designed to protect religious minorities in zoning disputes.
In a report on discrimination against mosques, synagogues, churches and other religious sites, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said on Tuesday it has monitored 18 cases of possible bias against Muslims over the past 10 years.
Eight of those have been opened since May, around the time when plans for a Muslim community center and mosque near the former site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan seized media attention and caused a national political uproar. “This fact is a sober reminder that, even in the 21st century, challenges to true religious liberty remain,” the report said.
The report made no mention of the planned Muslim center in New York, known as Cordoba House. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to discuss monitoring activities but stressed that no investigations were under way in those cases.
Read the full story here. Here is the link to the Justice Department report.
Fears rise over growing anti-Muslim feeling in U.S.
Amid threats of Koran burning and a heated dispute over a planned Muslim cultural center in New York, Muslim leaders and rights activists warn of growing anti-Muslim feeling in America partly provoked for political reasons. “Many people now treat Muslims as ‘the other’ — as something to vilify and to discriminate against,” said Daniel Mach of the American Civil Liberties Union. And, he said, some people have exploited that fear in the media, “for political gain or cheap notoriety.”
The imam leading the project to build the cultural center, including a prayer room, near the site of the September 11, 2001 attacks said there was a rise of what he called “Islamophobia” and the debate had been radicalized by extremists. “The radicals in the United States and the radicals in the Muslim world feed off each other. And to a certain extent, the attention that they’ve been able to get by the media has even aggravated the problem,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in an interview with ABC news aired on Sunday.
Mistrust of Muslims has grown in recent years. A Pew poll released in August found the number of Americans with a favorable view of Islam was 30 percent, down from 41 percent in 2005. American feelings about Islam are partisan — 54 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Islam compared to 27 percent of Democrats. In November 2001 there was not the same partisan divide of opinions on Islam.
Some believe Obama could convert minds were he to mount the type of public relations campaign which saw Bush attend mosques and talk with Muslim leaders back in 2001. Alan Cooperman of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said, “Americans’ opinions of Muslims became more positive after 9/11 than they were before 9/11.”
Pew polls from 2001 found 59 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Muslim Americans two months after the attacks compared to 45 percent in March of that year, and that the biggest improvement was among conservative Republicans. Cooperman credited the increase to Bush’s outreach to show the Muslim community as a religion of peace.
Read the full story here. Click for a slideshow of photos of the 9/11 commemorations here.
New rabbi for Mumbai Jewish centre attacked in 2008
It was almost two years ago that Islamist militants attacked Mumbai and killed at least 166 people. Among them were six Jews, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. Most non-Jewish readers probably had no idea what a Brooklyn-based Jewish couple was doing there. Many Jews would have known right away — they were running the Chabad House, one of a worldwide network of Jewish centres run by Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement devoted to supporting Jewish life wherever it may be found.
The news angle to this story is that the Mumbai centre has a new rabbi, just in time for the High Holidays, as reported in my feature here. Rabbi Chanoch Gechtman arrived there recently with his wife Leiky to take up the challenge of filling Holtzberg’s shoes. “I still can’t quite fathom that they are not here, they were such extraordinary people,” he said in an email from Mumbai. After all the damage to the original building, they’ve moved to another building not far away, but the address is not advertised on their website for understandable reasons.
This could be a daunting assignment, but Gechtman, 25, seemed eager to get to work. “People really believe in this city. It’s a place with a lot of energy; it’s full of life,” he said. “There is really an endless amount of work to be accomplished. And the Holtzbergs set the bar very high.” The work is literally endless — a couple that goes out on an assignment like this is expected to stay permanently. The commitment for the “shluchim,” as these emissaries are called, is supposed to be for life. And it’s a job for both the rabbi and his wife. Running a Chabad House means offering services such as kosher Sabbath dinners, Torah classes, youth programmes, day care facilities, summer camps and women’s ritual baths. It’s an open house for any Jew who wants to participate — locals, expatriates or tourists passing through the city.
“The Mumbai Jewish community definitely wants to move beyond 26/11. While we will obviously never forget what happened, we need to focus forward on helping the many people who need our assistance, so that Jewish life flourishes here,” Gechtman said.
On a recent visit to New York, I went to the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch to find out more about this network, which has expanded dramatically over the past few decades. The Crown Heights section of Brooklyn seems an unlikely place for the world headquarters of anything, but the house at 770 Eastern Parkway has been Chabad’s base since 1940, when the then leader, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland. The last Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, worked there until his death in 1994. Chabad also has a large building next door.
Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, the movement’s spokesman and director of its extensive Chabad.org website, told me the first emissary went to Morocco in 1951. The network grew both in the United States and abroad, popping up on American university campuses as well as increasingly far-flung foreign destinations. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the region where the Lubavitchers originally came from, opened up many new opportunities in Russia.
Now, there are about 4,000 married couples working in around 3,500 institutions the movement runs in 77 countries around the world. Check out the directory of centres around the world here — it’s hard to say which location is the most far-flung or unlikely. How about Luang Prabang?
NYPD interfaith Holy Land tour, a different kind of New York religion story
There used to be a television series about the New York Police Department that ended with the voiced-over sign-off: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” We’ve been hearing mostly about only one of the religion stories in New York these days, the controversy surrounding the planned Islamic center and mosque near the World Trade Center site. On a recent visit to New York, I had the pleasure of hearing a very different type of New York story when I interviewed the NYPD officers who led the unusual interfaith tour of the Holy Land described in my feature here.
I met Sgt. Brian Reilly, Detective Ahmed Nasser and Detective Sam Miller at Reilly’s Lower East Side office and spoke to Detective Larry Wein by phone because he was out investigating a case. The Lower East Side has traditionally been so diverse that it’s almost tailor-made for the kind of interfaith cooperation they highlighted with this trip. “I’ve worked here in the Lower East Side and East Village for 29 years and been exposed to people from all over the world,” said Miller, who is Jewish. “It’s just a melting pot of every race, religion and ethnicity.” The NYPD reflects the city’s diversity, he said: “This is the most diversified police department in the world. I’m an investigator. When we need a translator, I don’t have to go outside. We have members of the service who can speak any language in the world.”
Reilly is commanding officer of the NYPD chaplains’ unit (4 Catholics, 2 Protestants, 1 Jewish and 1 Muslim) but these men are not chaplains themselves. Instead, they are leaders in faith-based fraternal organizations for NYPD officers. The Holy Land tour was a completely private initiative. “We weren’t working on somebody’s suggestion,” explained Reilly, a Roman Catholic. “We paid it all ourselves. There was a price for the tour and people decided to go or not. We’re fraternal organizations and we decide how to run our yearly trip.”
After Christians joined the annual Jewish trip to Israel that Miller organized in recent years, the expansion of the group to include Muslim officers was the new element this year. Nasser, the head of the Muslim Officers Society, was enthusiastic despite the fact he and two Palestinian-born officers were held up by Israeli security for two hours on arrival. “It was a very wonderful experience to go there and experience for yourself, to see the Holy Land and be able to share such time with friends,” he said. “It gave me a different way of looking at that region. We focused on what’s common among our members. We’re all brothers in uniform. We wanted to go there and see what’s common in our faiths.”
Nasser said the trip gave rise to conversations about Islam with his non-Muslim colleagues. “When I mentioned some things, like we in Islam say all prophets are the same from Adam to Mohammad, some people looked and said — really? When I said Mary has a chapter for herself in the Koran and Jesus has a chapter for himself, people started to think — oh wow. So they see we have a lot of things in common.”
Nasser also explained to them his take on religion and politics in the Middle East: “People often blame religion but I think it’s more politics than religion. I’m a Muslim and speak Arabic. But I can’t go to Saudi Arabia without a visa because I’m not a Saudi. Politics plays a big role but people like to play with religion and say it’s the cause of everything.”
Great story Tom ! Coming from a family of cops, I am especially proud of these guys. I would like to join their next trip…
NY Islam uproar shows lack of Muslim leaders, prompts more interfaith support
Among the most visible supporters of a proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque near the World Trade Center site have been the city’s Jewish mayor and a libertarian congressman from faraway Texas.
Notably absent from the controversy has been a nationally recognizable Muslim American leader in the style of the late Martin Luther King Jr. who spoke for blacks in the civil rights movement, Cesar Chavez who represented Latino migrant workers or, however briefly, Harvey Milk who stood up for gay rights.
Muslim scholars and political groups have spoken up forcefully in defense of the proposed $100 million cultural center, saying it should be protected by basic tolerance and the constitutional right to freedom of religion. But the Muslim statements have failed to capture national attention, much the way their repeated condemnations of terrorism and specific attacks by Islamist extremists have failed to reverberate in the American consciousness.
In the meantime the void has been filled in part by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has consistently defended the mosque project on the grounds of religious freedom, and U.S. Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a Republican whose libertarian views sometimes put him at odds with his party.
Muslim, Jewish, Christian and civic groups formed a coalition on Wednesday to back a plan for a Muslim center near the site of the World Trade Center attacks in New York that has sparked heated national debate.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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@Stephen1949,
Please don’t be ignorant and patronizing.
This may come as a shock to “progressive” circles in America, but all those “backwards” and “ethnic” immigrants actually couldn’t care less about same-sex marriage.
The vast majority of immigrants don’t give a damn about same-sex marriage -neither for nor against. Many may have an opinion on the matter, but the vast majority never vote on this issue (IF they even have the legal ability to vote), because it doesn’t affect them.
Of the Latinos in California that *did* vote (the vast majority of whom are American-born, not naturalized immigrants), their voting patterns on California’s prop 8 was equally divided.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the fact that gay Americans cannot marry in California and most of the US, then look at your own nationality: native-born Americans are far more likely to vote based on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. Immigrants (like my parents) just don’t care about social issues (and my parents, BTW, are loyal Democrats, as are MOST IMMIGRANTS).
It was the African-American and WASP-Evangelical demographics that were most in favor or Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage, and the Prop 8 campaign received a massive amount of campaign money from native-born red-state WASP Americans through the Mormon Church.
So please stop scapegoating those “backwards” immigrants. They’re not as backwards as you think, and they don’t fall for the “God bless…” “I pray to God” “faith in God” rhetoric that AMERICAN politicians constantly spew.