Life After Death

In New York, a schoolgirl was given contraceptive pills without parental consent or knowledge, and the school falsified documents to enable her to attend a local 'planned parenthood' clinic. The girl subsequently became seriously ill. Throughout the United States religious advertisments have been barred from classified sections of newspapers and telephone directories. A pastry shop in Pennsylvania was refused an entry in the business pages of the local directory, explaining its decision not to trade on Sundays: "God's Service is Better than Ours". Liberal-led organisations are not merely obstructive. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, has sued a West Virginia Board of Education because the Board allowed businessmen to donate bibles one day a year to students who requested them. In Michigan, the State Bar Association has told the Christian Legal Society it must give up its articles of faith if it is to be admitted to membership. In Missouri, a fourth-grade student has been disciplined and subjected to ridicule by his school because he was attempting to a say a private and voluntary prayer of thanks before eating his lunch in the school cafeteria. In Massachussetts, a school hired a comedienne to give a school assembly presentation entitled "Hot, Sexy and Safer".

Students were brought to the stage and asked to participate in explicit simulation.

The doors to the hall were closed and students refused permission to leave. In Oregon, a prison official was sacked for providing the name of a clergyman to a terminally-ill inmate who had requested religious counselling. In New York, the authorities have attempted to stop two groups of Orthodox Jews from gathering for religious purposes, and in Hawaii two Buddhist nuns have had to file law suits to be allowed to continue long-standing religious worship in their own homes.

The Maginot Line However, in the United States, as in Britain, the main theatre of conflict between the values of secular humanist liberals and Jews and Christians has been over bioethic15:02 03/08/01al questions and medical ethics, particularly abortion. This is the American Maginot Line. One case involves a young woman who sat at the entrance to an abortion clinic and read her bible. The clinic itself produced video material which showed that she was not causing an obstruction, talking to everyone, or behaving in any way violently. The judge who tried the case heard charges of criminal trespass. He said that if the woman had been wearing a button or holding material supporting abortion, he would not have sentenced her to prison.

For reading her bible she was jailed and served several months in prison. The abortion issue, in the run-up to the Presidential elections, became a major political question. First, President Clinton fuelled the debate by refusing to sign a new bill passed by Congress outlawing partial-birth abortions. Congress also debated the Administration's continuing policy of financing overseas abortion. Attacking from right-wing positions, the Republican contender, Pat Buchanan, turned these issues to his advantage and mounted a major challenge against Bob Dole - finally extracting from the successful Presidential candidate promises to modify the present laws. Many claimed that his views were not sincerely held and inevitably unravelled during the campaign. Clinton, meanwhile, campaigned on a no-change,