by Eugene Kiely, USA Today Reps. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., co-chairs of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, today released the text of a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi that they are circulating on the abortion provision in the health care bill. USA TODAY’s John Fritze says the House bill would prohibit people who receive government subsidies from getting insurance coverage for an abortion procedure even through a private health insurance plan. It also would prohibit the government-run insurance plan from offering abortions.
read moreReuters by John Whitesides. WASHINGTON – After a landmark win in the House of Representatives, President Barack Obama’s push for healthcare reform faces a difficult path in the Senate amid divisions in his own Democratic Party on how to proceed. On a 220-215 vote, including the support of one Republican and opposition from 39 Democrats, the House backed a bill late on Saturday that would expand coverage to nearly all Americans and bar insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions.
read moreBOB ABERNETHY, anchor: As Congress assembles a health care reform package, a longtime expert on medical ethics writes in a recent issue of Commonweal magazine that there has been an important idea missing from the debate–the concept of the common good. The expert is Daniel Callahan, founder and now president emeritus of the Hastings Center. His new book is Taming the Beloved Beast. He joins us from New York.
read moreBy Bob Chaundy (BBC, October 30, 2009) London, UK – Witches remain a significant cultural presence centuries after thousands of women, and men, accused of sorcery were burned at the stake. But what caused the craze for burning witches, and why did it stop?
read moreBerlin, Germany – Germany’s Lutheran Church has elected a woman to lead the nation’s Protestants for the first time in its history.
read moreBy Abby Goodnough, The New York Times. Less than a week before Maine voters decide whether to repeal the state’s new same-sex marriage law, donations and volunteers are pouring in to sway what both sides call a nationally significant fight. Supporters of the marriage law, which the Legislature approved in May, have far more money and ground troops than opponents, who have been led by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet most polls show the two sides neck and neck, suggesting that gay couples here, as in California last year, could lose the right to marry just six months after they gained it.
read moreNew Orleans – President Barack Obama jetted to this hurricane battered city Thursday to deliver a fiery call to action, vowing to rebuild to the Gulf Coast area as a boisterous crowd chanted “yes we can!”
read moreROME (Reuters) – An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake.
read moreReuters.com The first ever comparative surveys of U.S. conservative and progressive (or liberal) religious activists has just been published by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and Public Religion Research.
read moreBy Lauri Lebo. ReligionDispatches.org Comparing Obama to Hitler and Al Qaeda, and claiming to be agents of God, protesters in Washington-supported by a coalition of conservative Christian groups, as well as pharmaceutical lobbyists-raise the bar on unreasonable discourse.
read moreThe Obama administration has gone from indifference to actively promoting religious opposition to the civil rights of gay Americans, comparing same-sex marriage to incest and pedophilia. Only when “pink dollars” were pulled did the president approach the …
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