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Today's Top Five

1. Tom Fox's body discovered
Tom Fox, who had worked as a Quaker youth leader and as a musician in the United States Marine Band before joining the pacifist Christian Peacemaker Teams' efforts in Iraq, was found dead in Baghdad Thursday evening. A group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigades had held him and three other Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) activists hostage since November 26. The three others remain captive.

Not everyone has been sympathetic. Columnist Cal Thomas called the death "doubly tragic … because the likelihood that the presence of Mr. Fox and his colleagues would change the attitude or behavior of their captors was zero to none." He also criticized CPT's theology, noting the group's statement about Fox having "firm opposition to all oppression and the recognition of God in everyone."

"Perhaps if Christian Peacemaker Teams had gone to Iraq during Saddam Hussein's murderous regime, or to China while Mao Tse-tung was slaughtering millions, or to Moscow while Josef Stalin practiced genocide on his people, or to any number of other capitals of carnage, they might be taken more seriously, though under those regimes they might have disappeared much quicker," Thomas wrote. "Was God 'in' these mass murderers, or was it Lucifer?"

In a sense, Fox addressed this question in an item he wrote the day before his abduction. Even our enemies—and there are indeed enemies in this world—bear the image of God, he wrote. And we're called to show them radical love:

Why are we here? If I understand the message of God, his response to that question is that we are to take part in the creation of the Peaceable Realm of God. Again, if I understand the message of God, how we take part in the creation of this realm is to love God with all our heart, our mind, and our strength and to love our neighbors and enemies as we love God and ourselves.

2. Fight over religious adoption exemption grows
The op-ed pages were ablaze over Friday's decision from Catholic Charities in Boston to withdraw from all adoptions because of a new state law requiring it to place children in gay and lesbian homes. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says his staff is drafting a "very narrow" bill to give Catholic Charities an exemption. "They have within their religion the belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that children should not be sent into homes without a mother and a father," he said. "We'd like them to be able to be true to their religion." Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey disagrees: "I believe that any institution that wants to provide services that are regulated by the state has to abide by the laws of this state, and our anti-discrimination laws are some of the most important."

Everyone seems to acknowledge that this isn't just about homosexual sex. "Why, on a matter of public policy, should a religion's practices trump the state's?" The Boston Globe says in an editorial, which calls on Catholics to abandon the archdiocese and form their own social services group. "What if a well-meaning group wanted to discriminate against blacks, or against a religious group such as the Catholic Church? Would Romney file a bill to protect that bias?"

Let's pose the question a different way, says Globe columnist John Garvey. Why not treat sexual orientation the same way we treat gender? "Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids employment discrimination on the basis of gender. It doesn't make an exception for churches. However, courts have interpreted Title VII to exempt churches. This is not surprising. Catholics, Mormons, and certain Orthodox Christians do not ordain women as priests. Orthodox Jews do not ordain women as rabbis. Traditional schools of Islam do not allow women to act as imams. The Constitution would not permit the government to change these church rules even if it wanted to."

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50