Agendas: Looking to see who's out there
Looking around, I saw a piece over on Mark Gibson's blog, dealing with a park official interrupting a baptismal ceremony in the park. Go over and read it, and the article it links to - leave comments if you've anything to add.
The rest of this post is a tangent from the above piece.
What I ended up focusing on was the references to The Rutherford Institute, a Charlotte, VA-based organization with a public mission of protecting civil liberties. I'd never heard of them before, so I thought I'd take a look. Here's their website. Articles on their main page include an action to protect a Muslim girl's right to wear religious headgear, and a commentary piece by the founder on how "Bush's War on Privacy Is a War On Personal Freedoms," both of which are made prominent by being placed at the top of columns.
A little searching around the web quickly pulled up a piece critical of the Rutherford Institute and its founder, John W. Whitehead. While the piece is damning, it's centered in anti-Clinton fiascos, is mostly backwards-looking, with no references to anything post-1998. It could very well be the truth that they've reevaluated their position and drawn back from political partisanship.
So far my impression is that they're making a point of presenting themselves as a politically unbiased organization with obvious interests in public expression of religious beliefs. Nothing wrong with that, but it does give me an idea of why they were johnny on the spot for the baptism in the park fiasco, and where they're likely to pop up. After all, there has to be some reason why this is a separate institute and not a group of legal professionals who've simply gone to work for the ACLU. Presumably, they have a more focused agenda or feel the ACLU itself is biased, politically or otherwise. If not, it's sheer redundancy.
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