North American Scene from October 16, 1987

TENNESSEE

A Woman As Senior Pastor

On November 1, Nancy Hastings Sehested will become senior minister of the 235-member Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis. When she assumes that post, she will become the only woman to pastor a church affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Convention.

Prescott Memorial is dually aligned with the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Women’s ordination has been a controversial issue in the SBC, which in 1984 passed a resolution opposing women pastors.

Sehested, currently associate pastor of a Southern Baptist congregation in Georgia, will become one of only four women to serve as senior pastor in the SBC, and one of only 11 to serve as either pastor or copastor of an SBC-affiliated congregation. However, there are an estimated 450 ordained women in the denomination.

A native of Texas, Sehested is the daughter and granddaughter of Southern Baptist clergymen. Her husband, Kenneth, is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.

“Women are finding it more and more difficult to find positions in SBC agencies, in churches, on campuses,” she told the Memphis Commercial Appeal. “These aren’t easy times for women.”

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Failing Grades—Again

The National Endowment for the Humanities, in a study requested by Congress, says the nation’s public schools are failing to adequately teach history and literature. The agency said the situation is caused by an overemphasis on the process of learning at the expense of content.

“Instead of preserving the past, they [educators] more often disregard it, sometimes in the name of’ progress …,’ ” said Lynne Cheney, National Endowment for the Humanities chairman. The agency cited a National Assessment of Educational Progress report that found that more than two-thirds of 8,000 American 17-year-olds tested this year were unable to place the Civil War within the correct half-century. In addition, a majority of the 17-year-olds were unable to identify a number of writers whose works are considered classics.

The National Endowment for the Humanities said reading textbooks used in many public school classrooms contain few selections from classic children’s literature. In addition, the agency said history textbooks “are poor in content, and what content they do contain is not presented in a way to make anyone care to remember it.”

ABORTION

A Significant Lie

The woman who challenged a Texas abortion law, leading to the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion on demand, has admitted she lied when she claimed her pregnancy was the result of a gang-rape.

Norma McCorvey, called “Jane Roe” in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case, said in a television interview that she lied about being raped because Texas law at that time allowed abortions only to save the life of the mother. McCorvey hoped the rape story would somehow enable her to circumvent the restrictive abortion law.

However, she was unable to obtain an abortion, and eventually placed her child for adoption. McCorvey’s lead attorney, Sarah Weddington, said rape was never an issue when the case reached the Supreme Court.

Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, said McCorvey’s lie “should not cloud the discussion about the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy.… It was her life circumstances that created the conditions that mitigated [sic] against her being straightforward about the fact that she was pregnant and wanted to terminate that pregnancy.”

But members of the prolife movement say McCorvey’s admission is a significant development. Dan Donehey, of the National Right to Life Committee, said this adds “another piece of strong evidence” for the Supreme Court to take into account if it reconsiders Roe v. Wade. “Now that the original case has been shown to be a situation that did not involve any of the hard cases [like rape],” Donehey said, “we would hope the members [of the high court], especially those who voted in support of Roe in 1973, would have their eyes opened.”

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

Declining: To the lowest level since record keeping began, the percentage of Americans who smoke cigarettes. In 1986, less than 27 percent of the adult population smoked, down nearly 4 percentage points from the 1985 level. A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control found that an estimated 24.6 percent of U.S. adults are former smokers. In 1964, the year the U.S. surgeon general issued the landmark health warning about smoking, 40 percent of the adult population smoked.

Increasing: The percentage of the U.S. population that is made up of Hispanics. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the number of Hispanics in the United States has grown by 30 percent since 1980, five times as fast as the rest of the population. The bureau set the Hispanic population at 18.8 million as of March 1987.

Set: By the nation’s state and federal correctional institutions, a record high prison population. The number of inmates grew 4.7 percent during the first half of this year, as 570,519 convicts jammed correctional facilities. Prison officials were forced to add about 1,000 new beds each week to keep up with the influx. Criminologists attributed the increase to more stringent sentencing by judges.

Sought: By one in five adult Americans, medical or other professional help to combat a drinking problem involving the individual or a member of his or her family. According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who have sought such help is up sharply from 1984, when 9 percent sought assistance. The current survey found that 41 percent of adult Americans say they have suffered physical, psychological, or social harm because of someone else’s drinking. Seventeen percent said they have suffered because of their own drinking.

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