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When Bishop Eddie Long was accused of sexual misconduct by former church members, his congregation rallied around him and his wife stood by his side. About a year later, the Atlanta megachurch pastor is headed for divorce and stepping away from the pulpit.
Long announced Sunday at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church that he needed a break from preaching to focus on his family. The hiatus leaves New Birth, which once boasted 25,000 members, at a crossroads, its reputation battered and membership dwindling. Their pasts inextricably linked for nearly a generation, both Long and his church face an uncertain future.
“A church is bigger than its pastor,” said Goldie Taylor, who has attended New Birth in the past. “For too long, the New Birth family has acted as if it is smaller than its pastor. Its challenge going forward will be its ability to flip that and become a church without walls again.”
For many members, Long has been the only pastor they have ever known. He became senior pastor in 1987, taking the helm of a flock of only a few hundred members. Not long after he arrived, the former Ford salesman and Honeywell executive dismissed New Birth’s board of directors and took unilateral control of the church, ensuring that he would be the one to determine the date of his departure.
New Birth grew quickly under its charismatic, dynamic young leader, swelling to 8,000 members in five years. A decade later New Birth boasted 18,000 members and the church paid cash for the land and sprawling property it currently occupies in DeKalb County — including a 10,000-seat sanctuary. In addition to its Lithonia, Ga., headquarters, the church has satellites in several cities including Miami, Charlotte and Denver and television and international ministries.
Many who joined the church under Long’s tenure were attracted to the prosperity gospel that he preached and practiced. It was a message that mirrored an emerging black middle class in and around Atlanta. Unlike the traditional Southern Baptist preacher, Long owned a $350,000 Bentley and private jet, lived in a $1.4 million house with six bedrooms and nine bathrooms, adorned himself with diamond jewelry and read his sermons on an iPad.
U.S. Roman Catholic bishops vowed Monday to defend their religious liberty in the face of growing acceptance of gay marriage and what they called attempts by secularists to marginalize faith.
Bishop William Lori, leader of a new national religious liberty committee, condemned federal and state policies that he said interfered with the church’s ability to provide social services, from health care to immigrant support to international aid.
In Illinois, government officials stopped working with Catholic Charities on adoptions and foster-care placements after 40 years because the agency refused to recognize a new civil union law. Illinois bishops had sued the state but on Monday said they would stop the legal fight and no longer provide state-funded services.
In New York, the bishops, along with Orthodox Jewish leaders and others, have complained that the religious exception in this year’s law allowing gay marriage is too weak to be effective.
On the federal level, the bishops have been pressing the Health and Human Services Department during its public comment period for a broader religious exception to part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul that mandates private insurers pay for contraception.
“We should not be obliged to provide services or other initiatives that are contrary to our conscience,” said Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, Conn. “We don’t need the government forcing our hand.”
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the bishops are not just reacting to Obama’s policies, but to a broader society in a “drive to neuter religion” and “push religion back into the sacristy.”
“That’s a cultural issue that the church has been concerned about forever, not just in the United States,” Dolan said.
But Dolan said he discussed the church’s concerns with Obama when the two men met last week in the Oval Office. The archbishop said Obama was “extraordinarily friendly” and “very ardent” in reassuring Dolan that the administration would look into the problems.
“I left there feeling a bit more at peace with this issue than when I entered,” Dolan said.
Religious freedom was the main focus at the fall meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has public sessions through Tuesday.
The new religious liberty committee that church leaders formed met for the first time. Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the conference, will oversee that work, which will include hiring a lobbyist and another attorney.
Picarello had worked for seven years at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public-interest law firm based in Washington, and also served on an advisory committee for Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Bishops hope to persuade federal lawmakers to retain the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed in 1996, and launched a new website called Marriageuniqueforareason.org. Obama has said his administration would no longer defend the law, calling it “counter to the Constitution.” Bishops said it was wrong to describe their religious convictions as discrimination.
“The church has nothing against compromise, but we can’t compromise principle,” Dolan said.
The bishops are confronting the Health and Human Services Department on another front. The government agency recently decided not to renew a contract held since 2006 by the bishops’ refugee services office to help victims of human trafficking.
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing to stop the agency from making grants to groups who “impose religiously based restrictions on reproductive health services” for human trafficking victims. The women are often raped and forced into prostitution by their captors.
The bishops’ conference has called the decision biased against Catholic beliefs. Agency officials vehemently deny any bias and say the sole criteria for evaluating potential grantees was which group could best serve the victims. Administration officials note that the vast network of Catholic social service nonprofits, including the bishops’ conference, receives hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding in amounts that have increased in the last couple of years.
From the outside, Holly Finn certainly looks fertile.
With shoulder-length dark hair, smooth skin and a slim but curvaceous figure, the San Francisco-area writer could be any young mom with a baby on her hip.
But at 43, Finn says, her ovaries know better — and she would have, too, if not for what she believes is society’s widespread ignorance about infertility.
“I really feel that there are important pieces of information that don’t get passed along,” says Finn, who has now tried for four years to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. “I actually think it’s quite a brutal dishonesty.”
Most women aren’t taught — and don’t learn — basic facts about fertility and aging, says Finn, author of the e-book “The Baby Chase.” Instead, celeb moms the likes of Salma Hayek (a baby girl at 41), Marcia Cross (twins at 44) and Mariah Carey (twins at 41) make being an older mom look easy — and glamorous.
“It’s not that we’re stupid,” she says. “It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”
As proof, she points to a new survey conducted on behalf of RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, and presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s recent annual meeting.
The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages.
“We were not at all surprised,” says Barbara Collura, executive director of RESOLVE. “This is what we experience every day.”
Most women simply don’t realize that at 30, a healthy woman has about a 20 percent chance of conceiving and by the time she reaches 40, her odds drop to about 5 percent per month, Collura said.
Instead, many of those surveyed thought that a 30-year-old woman would have a 70 percent chance of conceiving and that a 40-year-old’s chances could approach 60 percent.
They also believed that a 20-year-old woman might get pregnant in less than two months of unprotected sex, rather than the five months that is the average.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“They don’t even come in for fertility treatment until they’re literally in their 40s,” he said. “Some come in and they have run out of time.”
In a country where sex education focuses primarily on avoiding pregnancy and preventing sexually transmitted diseases, most women believe that having a baby is inevitably easy.
But that neglects the reality that infertility affects some 7.3 million women in the United States, or 12 percent of the child-bearing female population, and about 1 in 8 couples, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After about age 35, fertility plummets, Schoolcraft said.
So when women decide they want to get pregnant and can’t, they’re stunned. Some of the shock is because of advances in health and beauty that allow women to look — and feel — younger, even as their reproductive systems march on.
“People kind of think now at 40 what they used to think at 30,” Schoolcraft said. “People do yoga and they run and they do all these healthy things. They assume that means ‘I’m not aging.’ But their eggs don’t know that.”
Part of the disconnect is because of advances in infertility treatment, which have helped boost the rates of births among women in their 40s, even as rates have dropped for younger moms. Between 2008 and 2009, births in women aged 20 to 24 reached a record low, falling 7 percent. At the same time, the rates for women aged 40 to 44 jumped 3 percent and births to women older than 50 climbed 5 percent.
Those numbers are exemplified by a series of high-profile births in older celebrities, including icons such as Kelly Preston (son at 48), Holly Hunter (twins at 47) and Jane Seymour (twins at 44.)
A heavenly ad is turning hellish for Axe.
The deodorant brand has seen its latest campaign banned in South Africa because its depiction of gorgeous angels falling from heaven offends Christians, the Daily Mail reports.
Carrying the tagline “Angels will fall,” the 60-second commercial sees models sporting wings and halos crashing down from the sky as a man walks down an Italian street. The smitten angels then throw their halos down as they chase after their fresh-smelling prey.
Following a complaint from a male Christian viewer, who said he was upset by “the suggestion that God’s messengers could literally fall for a man on the basis of his shop-bought fragrance,” the country’s Advertising Standards Authority moved to ban the ad on the presumption that other viewers would also be offended.
“The problem is not so much that angels are used in the commercial, but rather that the angels are seen to forfeit, or perhaps forego their heavenly status for mortal desires,” the ASA ruled.
“This is something that would likely offend Christians in the same manner as it offended the complainant.”
Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.
Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany[4] and actually, U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter.[5][6][7] Stefan Kühl has stated the Consensus between Nazi Race Politicians and Eugenicists in Other Countries, including the United States, and pointed that eugenecist understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.
In a blog entry at News One, Dr. Boyce Watkins examines Ann Coulter’s recent sound bite of “our blacks are better than their blacks” and disparages the treatment of African Americans by liberals and conservatives alike. Ultimately, Watkins says, black politics must go beyond choosing the better pimp.
Ann Coulter, the woman who makes her money with silly soundbites, decided to offend half the world by stating that “our blacks are better than their blacks,” referring to conservatives vs. liberals. I wasn’t surprised to hear this kind of banter from Coulter, who is smart enough to know how to sell books by saying things that most decent human beings would not. Sadly for poor Ann, she is an embarrassment to serious conservatives, but all the while seems content engaging in the political promiscuity of a woman desperately seeking out her next gig.
“Nanny Annie” Coulter’s remarks (which make her sound like a character from “Gone with the Wind”) also spoke to the peculiar fight between liberals and conservatives, who are trying to toss around the Black community like two pimps arguing over a prostitute. Rather than adjusting their platforms to fit issues that matter to Black America, each party is only able to point out the fact that they believe the other group abuses Black people more than they do. In that regard, neither conservatives nor liberals are innocent when vying to put Black folks on their own plantation.
When Coulter makes reference to “her Blacks,” which include the always-entertaining Herman Cain, she is referring to Black folks who embody the values that Coulter and her friends believe to be true. When someone like Cain attempts to genuinely lead the party in a different direction, he is spit out like a sex offender at a debutante ball. An example is when he challenged Rick Perry over the “niggerhead” controversy and was quickly told to sit down and shut up. Political analyst Yvette Carnell described things beautifully when she said, “The rendering of Black people as the ornaments of diversity, rather than incarnations of it, is one of the essential reasons why Blacks clash with conservatism.”
SIDEBAR: Ann Coulter can kiss my grits sideways to the 2nd power!
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They’re after Bishop Eddie Long once again. They, meaning anyone whose got something against the guy.
The head of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga. is in trouble again. A lawsuit was filed against the scandalous preacher for allegedly scheming church folk out of millions of dollars, via a business Long endorsed.
According to the Atlantic Journal-Constitution, the allegations stem from a three-day investment seminar Long held at the church in October 2009, at which church members were encouraged to invest in a company named City Capital Corporation, according to the suit. The company’s then-CEO, Ephren Taylor, attended and was heralded by Long, attorney Jason Doss told the AJC. Doss, of Marietta, and attorney Quinton Seay are co-counsels in the suit.
“I am responsible for everyone I bring before you and what they say,” Long said at the seminar, according to the lawsuit. “The gentleman that I am going to bring before you is an ordained minster. That gives me great pride to bring him for you.”
The preacher’s latest allegations are just another thing to add to his long list of scandals and schemes.
SIDEBAR: What does it take for a person to step down, they are pretty good at it in the Middle East!