* WHEN YOU SEE A CHRISTIAN YOU DON'T SEE A BAD THING
* COURT UPHOLDS DEATH SENTENCE FOR CHILD RAPE
* PLANNED PARENTHOOD THREATENS TO SUE UNDERCOVER ACTIVIST
* CREATION LEADER THANKS CRITICS
* SAUDIS ARREST CHRISTIAN FOR ENTERING MECCA

* WHEN YOU SEE A CHRISTIAN YOU DON'T SEE A BAD THING - When I was going through my mail, after getting home from Israel, I found my most recent VOM magazine from June 2007 and the following line really caught my attention.

"When you see a Christian you don't see a bad thing." - A statement that should be self evident if everyone believed Christians are good and loving people, however, that unfortunately isn't the case.

Dr. Tom White, the Director for The Voice of the Martyrs, wrote a great piece in the VOM June edition of the VOM magazine called "Vietnam - Perfect Love Casts Out Fear". In this article, he tells a story about a police officer who came to faith in Christ because he saw the love of Christians. He testified that he is now an evangelist and that he now tells the police that Christians are not a bad thing. And he goes on to say that "he defends the church."

This sounds a lot like St. Paul after his conversion and my prayer is that all of us who have a steadfast faith in Christ Jesus would pursue the spirit of unity and let the world know that when people see Christians they are indeed seeing a good thing and also a group who will love and defend her own. (PersecutionBlog.com, 29 May 2007) (to index)

* COURT UPHOLDS DEATH SENTENCE FOR CHILD RAPE - Louisiana's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a man may be executed for raping an 8-year-old girl, and lawyers say his case may become the test for whether the nation's highest court upholds the death penalty for someone who rapes a child.

Both sides say the sentence for Patrick Kennedy, 42, could expand a 1977 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held the death penalty for rape violated the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The high court said then that its ruling applied only to adult victims.

Kennedy was convicted in 2003 of raping a relative as she sorted Girl Scout cookies in the garage of her home in suburban New Orleans.

In Tuesday's opinion, Justice Jeffrey Victory wrote, "Our state Legislature and this court have determined this category of aggravated rapist to be among those deserving of the death penalty, and, short of a first-degree murderer, we can think of no other non-homicide crime more deserving."

Victory wrote that the Louisiana law meets the U.S. Supreme Court test requiring an aggravating circumstance -- in this case the age of the victim -- to justify the death penalty.

The governors of South Carolina and Oklahoma signed laws last year allowing the death penalty for people who repeatedly rape children. Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said he doesn't know of any successful prosecution under either of those laws.

A bill that would allow the death penalty for a second offense of child rape is awaiting the governor's decision in Texas.

Georgia law allows death as a penalty for rape. Dieter said Florida and Montana also have such laws, but authorities have said the penalty would be invoked only for rape of a child.
(CNN, 23 May 2007) (to index)

* PLANNED PARENTHOOD THREATENS TO SUE UNDERCOVER ACTIVIST - Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles is threatening to sue a student pro-life activist who recorded an abortion clinic employee encouraging her to lie about her age to avoid being reported as a victim of statutory rape.

Lila Rose, an 18-year-old sophomore at the University of California Los Angeles, is the founder of a pro-life magazine on campus. In March, she entered a Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles (PPLA) clinic, posing as a pregnant 15-year-old and said her boyfriend was 23 years old.

A girl in that position would be considered a victim of statutory rape because she was under 16, and California law requires clinics such as Planned Parenthood to report cases of statutory rape. In hidden camera video of the encounter, a PPLA employee tells Rose that she could "figure out a birth date that works" to avoid having PPLA notify police.

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California President Kathy Kneer criticized the undercover investigation as "manipulative," but admitted that the PPLA employee had violated the organization's policy to follow all applicable laws.

Following news of the undercover operation, Kneer said the organization had reminded all of its employees of the law and its own policies. (CNSNews, 15 May 2007) (to index)

* CREATION LEADER THANKS CRITICS - "Blessed were the protestors, for without them, the Creation Museum would not have been so big", Answers in Genesis leader Ken Ham said before the controversial building's ribbon cutting today.

The $27 million museum, which officially opens Monday, would have been far smaller and would have had less impact, without its opponents, Ham said.

Circling overhead, an airplane working for protestors pulled a banner with the message: "Thou Shalt Not Lie."

"This is partly their legacy, too" Ham told hundreds of supporters. "When we first started to research property in 1996, they caused all sorts of problems, and they stirred up trouble, and there were all sorts of things that went on.

"Anyway, as a result of all that, we lost that piece of property - it was 20 minutes off the freeway, and we were going to build a 30,000-square-foot building," Ham said.

Instead, "The Lord directed us to this piece of property, right on a major freeway at a major interchange. And we decided to build a far bigger building (nearly 60,000 square feet), and a far bigger vision and a far bigger impact around the world - and I just want to thank, sincerely, the local secular humanist group."

Outside the high-security event, parked in tall grasses beyond the museum's mechanized gates, Union resident Edwin Kagin of Rally for Reason scoffed: "Bronze Age ideas inside Iron Age gates," he said.

His wife, Helen Kagin, said she doesn't oppose the right to build the privately funded museum.

"We're not interfering with their First Amendment rights," she said. "They raised enough money to build it - all private donations - so they have every right to do that.

"The problem is, these are not just people who are content to live in their own La La Land and be content with that," she said. "They want to get 'creation science,' which really isn't science, taught in the classroom - the younger age, the better, to try and present that view, instead of evolution."

Ham wants the museum to help people read the Bible literally.

"A facility like this, right now, with cutting-edge technology, to take on a particular paradigm that's permeating the world, and to deal with that at a foundational level, and to do it in a gracious way, but to do it in a way to challenge people concerning the truth of God's word in the Gospel," Ham said. "That's what the museum's all about."

Inside, the museum contends that man lived at the same time as dinosaurs - a contention most experts believe is wrong by millions of years. A scale model of Noah's Ark, for example, shows two stegosauruses and a triceratops inside.

"When I travel around, and you see a facility like this, a lot of artwork went into this," Kentucky Commerce Secretary George Ward said before the ribbon-cutting. "Obviously, the history's there. On the tourism side, it's going to be a great complement to what we have at Big Bone Lick State Park.

"I envisioned when I was here (a year ago) that every Christian school - probably in the country - is going to have a field trip to the Creation Museum." Ward said, "And we're really happy to have those visitors." (The enquirer, 26 May 2007) (to index)

* SAUDIS ARREST CHRISTIAN FOR ENTERING MECCA - Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims.

Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca's Great Mosque.

After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.

"The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims," Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. "The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals," he said.

Similar restrictions apply to the Saudi city of Medina. In a section entitled, "Traveler's Information," the Web site of the Saudi Embassy in Washington states that, "Mecca and Medina hold special religious significance and only persons of the Islamic faith are allowed entry."

Highway signs at the entrance to Mecca also direct non-Muslims away from the city's environs.
(The Jerusalem Post, 24 May 2007) (to index)