Did you know that the same Christian-right legal organization responsible for drafting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which bans federal recognition of same-sex marriage in the U.S., also supports the constitutional criminalization of homosexuality in Kenya and Zimbabwe and has now set its sight on Brazil, home of the world's largest LGBTQ Pride parade?

Televangelist Pat Robertson founded the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) to counter the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which he saw as undermining "family values." With an annual budget of $16,746,496 to pursue its agenda, the center's anti-LGBTQ credits include defending the Boy Scouts' ban on openly gay scouts and scoutmasters and defending its creation, DOMA, now under constitutional review by the Supreme Court. Seeking to insert a Christian-right worldview into law, the ACLJ's other issues include defending anti-choice clinic harassers, stirring up fear about "Sharia law," and challenging "Obamacare" as an assault on religious liberty.

ACLJ exports its agenda overseas through affiliate offices in Europe, Africa and now Brazil, with father-son leadership team Jay (chief counsel) and Jordan Sekulow (executive director) forging alliances with key evangelical power brokers to gain access to government officials -- and seeming to lack any qualms about working with unsavory leaders and inflaming already dangerous situations for LGBTQ people.

The offices in Africa launched during the 2009/2010 controversy over Uganda's (now-resurrected) Anti-Homosexuality Bill (the so-called "kill the gays" bill) introducing the death penalty for homosexuality, as discussed in Political Research Associates' Colonizing African Values.

Goodwill Shana, president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ), helped ACLJ gain direct access to the administration of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, a dictator sanctioned for human rights abuses who considers LGBTQ rights "madness" and launched a brutal police raid on activists last year. In 2010 EFZ and ACLJ distributed pamphlets, uncovered by journalist Sarah Posner, pushing the new constitution to ban abortion and same-sex marriage and insisting that homosexual relations "remain a criminal activity." The new constitution, finished earlier this month and approved by referendum vote on March 16, prohibits same-sex marriage and does not otherwise reference LGBTQ rights, meaning that ACLJ was successful, because penal code laws criminalizing sodomy and homosexual acts stand.

In Kenya the East African Center for Law and Justice (EACLJ) secured the support of Bishop Mark Kariuki, presiding bishop of Deliverance Church Kenya's 700 Pentecostal churches. In tandem with Human Life International, an anti-choice Catholic organization, the EACLJ fought to endanger women's lives by vehemently opposing the new constitution's narrow health exception to the existing abortion ban.

Filipe Coelho, director of the newly formed Brazilian Center for Law and Justice (BCLJ) and a friend of the Sekulows from his time studying in the U.S., says ACLJ decided to open an office in his country after discovering last year "how strong evangelical power is within Brazilian politics." A well-connected evangelical in the rapidly growing Assemblies of God church, Coelho was able to arrange a meeting for Jordan Sekulow with Brazil's vice president on 48 hours' notice. With more than 40 million people identifying themselves as evangelical in Brazil, the world's second-largest predominantly Christian country (after the U.S.), it presents a tempting prize for ACLJ expansion.

Though Brazil boasts the largest Pride parade in the world, it may come as a surprise that same-sex couples cannot marry or adopt and lack constitutional protections. In 2011 Rev. Silas Malafaia, pastor of the nearly 20,000-member Victory in Christ Assemblies of God church and vice president of the Interdenominational Council of Evangelical Ministers in Brazil (CIMEB), mobilized thousands to march through the capital city of Brasilia against a bill that would have extended protections to cover sexual orientation. After the Pride parade the same year, Rev. Malafaia, a family friend of the Sekulows and Coelhos, told listeners of his television show that the Catholic Church should "beat [literally 'stick'] down those gay activists" for using saints' images on posters.

Facing language like this, for 11 years Brazil's LGBTQ movement has unsuccessfully promoted an anti-homophobia bill that would make discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity an aggravating factor in hate crimes and speech. Evangelicals perceive this as a threat to their "religious liberty" to preach on national television that homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of God. When Rev. Malafaia, who calls himself "public enemy No. 1 of the gay movement" and leads "crusades," asked his audience in 2009 to vote against the anti-homophobia bill, in a poll posted on the Senate's webpage, there were half a million "no" clicks in less than a week. His Twitter followers number close to half a million.

Televangelists like Rev. Malafaia and ACLJ founder Pat Robertson access large audiences and wield influence in Africa and Brazil. Jay Sekulow appears as a regular guest on Robertson's 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network, an enterprise Robertson founded that is watched across sub-Saharan Africa. (A 2010 survey found that 74 million people in Nigeria, one of the largest audiences, watched at least one CBN show in the past year.) In Brazil televangelists own communications empires that include print, radio and television, often hosting American evangelical leaders (like Jordan Sekulow) promoting books and DVDs, encouraging people to join the church or warning of a "new threat" to the family, tradition or religious liberty.

In April 2011 Rev. Malafaia asked his TV audience for about $50,000 to help broadcast his show all over the country and abroad. He got it. Later he told Piaui Magazine, "People in Brazil think all evangelicals are poor and stupid. Evangelicals are donating BRL [Brazilian real] 100,000, people don't have a clue of what's going on within the evangelical world."

The ACLJ typically hires local staff for its international offices to mask the U.S. origins of their assault on LGBTQ and reproductive rights, while hypocritically using that façade to attack human rights advocacy as a neocolonial enterprise imposed on the country in question. Coelho demonstrated this tactic when he told PRA that Brazilian activists witnessed the LGBTQ rights movement in America and "imported" its tactics to Brazil (conveniently ignoring BCLJ's own outside origins). While in the U.S., Coelho says he heard a lecture about how homosexuals want to become the new blacks in society, with similar legal protections. He explained, "[H]omosexuals are trying to treat homosexuality as if it were a race, while it is really an attitude, a behavior."

Alleging attacks on "religious freedom" or "religious liberty" is a long-time popular argument among the Christian right in the U.S. (addressed in a forthcoming Political Research Associates report, "Redefining Religious Liberty"): "If you are a God-fearing Christian, then powerful forces in our culture say YOU are the dangerous radical that needs to be censored, chastised and even punished!" writes Jay Sekulow in a 2009 direct mail appeal providing an "Anti-Christian Bigotry Alert." "It is as if 'open season' has been declared in the courts on Christians."

Rev. Malafaia and Jay Sekulow both talk about freedom of expression and religious liberty from a conservative Christian frame that often means a right to discriminate, and Brazilian televangelists share a common message: the defense of life, traditional values, freedom of expression and religious freedom. Coelho joins other conservative evangelicals in seeing a threat to these areas. While democracy is not yet being menaced, he says, the anti-homophobia bill "may" move in that direction:

    Let's say I hire someone to work in my house as a nanny or a maid, and let's suppose I find out she's homosexual, and she's taking care of my baby girl all day. So I think I have the right to decide who to have inside my home. Let's say I find out she's homosexual, and I tell her I don't want her to work within my family anymore. I can be arrested because of that. So there's no more freedom of expression; in your own home you have to be careful.

During the 2012 election cycle, Rev. Malafaia voiced his lofty political goal to "make one Assembly of God's alderman in every city of the country" (about 5,600). This ambitious agenda provides a strategy to empower the evangelical community and build, region by region, the base for an evangelical candidate in national elections. Coelho revealed to Political Research Associates that CIMEB is tapping another family friend, Rev. Everaldo Dias da Silva, co-founder of the evangelical caucus in Parliament, to run for president in 2014.

Prof. Maria das Dores Campos Machado of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who researches religion and politics in Brazil, explains evangelicals' increased focus on using politics and legal battles to take back social arenas. "When you have problems at home or in your personal life, you look for a judge or lawyer ... but no longer a priest," she said to PRA. "More and more, even the moral regulators within communities are judges rather than priests or pastors. ... It's a search for an institutional space for the church in modern society."

The American Center for Law and Justice and its affiliates epitomize this new focus on using legal means to assert a right-wing Christian control of society. Its specific goals shift in correspondence with the audience it faces, or rather what it can get away with; in the U.S. opposing same-sex marriage is a prominent goal, while in Africa the center can further assault human rights and argue for the criminalization of homosexuality. Conservatives, moderates and liberals alike in the U.S. should find these global actions by an American group appalling.


SOURCE http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-kapya-kaoma/making-anti-gay-christian-right-views-law-at-home-and-abroad_b_2901650.html

Egypt’s anti-Israel and anti-American Muslim Brotherhood government is implementing Shariah Law. Its new constitution strips religious liberty from Egypt’s Christians and is on the verge of passing. In response, the Obama Administration is going to give Egypt 20 new American-made F-16 fighter jets and 200 new American-made tanks.

The ACLJ and their founder Jay Sekulow is demanding that President Obama suspend all aid to Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. All support must be cut off until Congress can certify that such aid supports U.S. national security and the security of the Israeli people.

Petition to Stop Funding Egypt & Defend Israel

To: President Obama and Congress

A Shariah dictatorship on Israel’s border – armed with American weapons – is a deadly threat to Israel and America. All U.S. funding to Egypt must be cut off until we can certify that aid to Egypt will help the national security interests of the United States and Israel.

Sign the petition at: http://aclj.org/middle-east-turmoil/stop-funding-egypt-defend-israel?sf10143740=1


SOURCE http://www.jewocity.com/blog/aclj-jay-sekulow-demand-obama-stop-funding-egypt/7748

It's an issue that's getting a lot of attention - especially since it was discussed last week at a confirmation hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan. There's debate over the use of remote-controlled drones to attack those who are threats to America.

Many are asking – does the President, who serves as Commander-in-Chief, have the authority to order drone attacks to protect our national security?

I do believe that the President must have this authority to act. However, it’s difficult to ignore something else - President Obama's double standard. This is a President and an Administration that refused to use the phrase "war on terror" for years - at a time when this nation was facing terrorists who were trying to strike at our freedoms here at home and abroad. Now, with the release of the Justice Department's memo on the use of unmanned drones, it's a different story - the Obama Administration now uses the "war on terror" as legal justification for the use of drones.

At the same time, some members of Congress and others want to interject the court system into the use of drones. There's a growing call for the creation of a secret court along the lines of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) - which reviews requests for wiretaps against suspected foreign agents.

As I told Megyn Kelly on FOX News today, the courts have no business running a war - and that includes approving and rejecting the use of military drones.

The question about oversight and the use of a secret court when it comes to unmanned drones is likely to continue. After all, during his confirmation hearing, the CIA nominee - John Brennan - said he thinks this troubling concept is "worthy of discussion."

Here's the bottom line: remote-controlled drones are vital in protecting our national security and targeting terrorists. The Commander-in-Chief must have the ability to utilize this important resource. And, while there needs to be oversight, this should not be the role of a secret court.

Jay Sekulow


SOURCE: http://aclj.org/war-on-terror/jay-sekulow-no-secret-court-for-military-drones

WASHINGTON (RNS) Religious freedom activists scolded the U.S. State Department for not appearing at a hearing Friday (March 15) on Iran’s treatment of religious minorities, and called for greater government action to secure the release of people imprisoned there for their faith.

“The State Department is AWOL – they are absent without leave,” complained Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative law firm that represents the wife of Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-American minister in Tehran’s Evin prison.

“They act as if they are embarrassed about Mr. Abedini’s faith.”

In comparison, he said, members of the European Union have called at the United Nations for Abedini’s release.

Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., a member of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, which held the hearing on Capitol Hill, criticized the State Department for “such a deafening and almost cowardly silence” about the case.

Evan Owen, a press officer with the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, said department officials who focus on Iran had “scheduling conflicts” on Friday, but Suzan Johnson Cook, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and other officials were scheduled to meet with Naghmeh Abedini Friday afternoon.

“We believe we are doing everything we can publicly and privately,” Owen said in an emailed response to a request for comment. “We work closely with Congress on all efforts to support religious freedom around the world and would be happy to discuss our efforts with them in the future.”

Naghmeh Abedini testified tearfully about having to explain to her children, who live with her in Idaho, why her husband is no longer calling them from Iran.

He was convicted in January of undermining Iran’s national security by working with house churches from 2000 to 2005 and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

“Saeed is not a political person,” she said in an interview after her testimony. “His passion is for Christ, for Jesus. So it’s ridiculous that it’s being related to national security.”

More than 515,000 people have signed an online ACLJ petition urging U.S. and international leaders to press for Abedini’s release.

Saeed Abedini’s plight bears echoes of Youcef Nadarkhani, an Iranian pastor who faced the death penalty after being accused of apostasy. He was released last year after U.S. leaders, from House Speaker John Boehner to megachurch pastor Rick Warren, rallied for his release.

“We certainly didn’t expect that it’d be harder to get help for Saeed Abedini, an American, from the American government than it would have for Youcef Nadarkahi, someone that they’ll likely never have a chance to meet,” said Jordan Sekulow, attorney for the Abedini family and executive director of ACLJ.

The hearing also addressed the mistreatment of other religious minorities in Iran, including Zoroastrians, Jews and Baha’is.

“In recent months, the Iranian government has managed to stoop to a new low by incarcerating young infants along with their Baha’i mothers,” said Katrina Lantos Swett, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Ken Bowers, secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States, testified 436 Baha’is are awaiting trial, appeal or sentencing in Iran, up from 230 in January 2011.

In 2010, seven Baha’i leaders were sentenced to 20 years in prison.


SOURCE http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2013/03/critics-state-department-is-awol-on-saeed-abedini-iran-religious-freedom.html

As an attorney who’s spent more than a dozen years protecting the right of both America and Israel to wage war against international terrorism, including appearances before the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, I’m stumped.

My American Center for Law & Justices colleagues at our offices all over the world from Jerusalem, to France, to Washington, D.C. --who are even at this moment at an anti-terrorism conference in Israel -- are puzzled.

Here’s our question for the Obama administration: are we at war or not?

On the one hand, the administration has steadfastly defended its drone war – which rains sudden death on enemy combatants, American and non-American alike – as a necessary instrument in an ongoing military conflict against Al Qaeda.

In making this argument, the administration is extending Bush administration legal policy that was first implemented immediately after September 11, when the Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force against those organizations responsible for the worst enemy attack on foreign soil in our nation’s history.  In short, under international law, we have declared war.

But then the administration captured Abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti member of Al Qaeda -- a member of Usama bin Laden’s family, no less -- and brought him to the United States for a civilian trial in a Manhattan courtroom one mile from Ground Zero. In fact, he’s already appeared in that courtroom to plead not guilty to charges of conspiracy to kill Americans.   

How does this make any sense?  How is this consistent with any principled approach to fighting our War on Terror?

Senators Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte – and a number of other lawmakers – have rightly raised serious objections to Ghaith’s civilian detention and civilian trial.  

Enemy combatants should be interrogated relentlessly, not given Miranda warnings.  

Enemy combatants shouldn’t be tried in civilian courtrooms in the middle of a densely populated city – creating a much softer target for a spectacular and symbolic terrorist attack than a fortified military base like Guantanamo Bay.

Moreover, if we’re going to make the legal argument at home and abroad that we’re at war, why play right into our critics’ hands by suddenly and arbitrarily treating our war like an episode of “CSI: New York”?

Our enemies, working with their allies on the international left, want America’s hands to be tied, for us to use police methods and – more importantly – police weapons and tactics even while they arm themselves to the teeth and work tirelessly to kill as many Americans as they can.

Already our military is under extreme pressure, even from some of our allies, to adopt a law-enforcement approach even in the conduct of our military operations in Afghanistan.  

Our rules of engagement are sometimes so restrictive that they can lead to loss of American life and grant actual battlefield advantages to the Taliban.  

While we’re in the midst of an international argument over the law of armed conflict, we just handed our ideological opponents something more than a significant propaganda victory – we handed them a real-life example to use as the foundation for a new “customary international law” that is the form of binding international law created by nations’ actual policies and practices in fighting terror.

In addition, the Obama administration is demonstrating that it exists as an “imperial presidency.” One that is more arbitrary than the Bush administration it so self-righteously criticized.  Under this Obama doctrine, the ultimate questions of war and peace, life and death, appear to follow no principle or pattern beyond the administration’s own whims.  

This administration has failed to articulate a coherent approach to fighting deadly enemies.  It brags about its “kill list” during a presidential campaign, yet after the campaign it doesn’t seem to mind when Egypt denies us access to the Benghazi suspects (by the way – where is the retaliation for that dreadful attack?).  

Simply put, Bin Laden family members should not get their day in court in Manhattan.

The only coherent, common thread amongst this confusion is the apparent absolute power of a president of the United States – relying on Congress’s bipartisan declaration of war when he wants to and ignoring it when he doesn't want to.

If I could speak with President Obama here’s what I would tell him: Mr. President, we are at war, and our legal and military actions should consistently reflect that fact.  Any other approach endangers American lives, confuses our allies, and encourages our enemies.  

Jay Sekulow is Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). Follow him on Twitter@JaySekulow.

SOURCE: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/03/08/obama-doctrine-kill-american-terrorists-overseas-try-foreign-terrorists-in-new