Word: baptiste
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Liberal Protestants have long been among the most ardent supporters of a woman's right to abortion. Consider the Rev. Howard Moody of Manhattan's Judson Memorial Church. In 1967, more than five years before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws that prohibited abortions, the Baptist pastor organized a referral and counseling service for women seeking the then illegal procedure. Moody was a minister in the American Baptist Convention, a confederation of congregations that was adopting its own high-profile prochoice position. In 1968 the denomination officially sanctioned abortions during the first three months of pregnancy...
Last week, in an unprecedented change of heart, the American Baptist Churches (membership: 1.6 million; the name was changed in 1972) became the first Protestant denomination to abandon its eager embrace of the prochoice position. After a three-year task force study, the A.B.C.'s decision-making General Board, meeting at Green Lake, Wis., voted 161 to 9 to revise its 1981 policy statement. The former position had asserted that having an abortion should be a "responsible, personal decision." The denomination now acknowledges a "diversity of deeply held convictions" in its ranks, from the prolife view that "abortion is immoral...
Depending on whom you ask, the Rev. Herman Fountain's Bethel Home for Children is either successful therapy for troubled youths or a Dickensian nightmare. Last week a bizarre standoff between Fountain and state officials climaxed when police raided his Lucedale, Miss., Baptist school and church, rounding up 72 children between the ages of ten and 17. Earlier, a state judge had ruled that the children had been subjected to "physical abuse, medical neglect and detention amounting to imprisonment," and ordered that the state department of public welfare take them into emergency custody...
...will not accord justice to blacks, the trio of advisers has manipulated the case into a long-running multimedia sensation. Last week the affair was the centerpiece for an extraordinary episode of TV's Phil Donahue show. The one-hour broadcast was shot on location in Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist Church, where Brawley's mother Glenda, 33, had ensconced herself to avoid arrest on a contempt-of-court charge resulting from her refusal to obey a grand-jury subpoena...
...Glenda Brawley had not been arrested. Moreover, Mason and two other radical Brawley advisers -- Attorney Alton Maddox Jr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton -- had contrived the events that turned her into a fugitive. Nothing could have made the trio happier than the spectacle of police charging into the Ebenezer Baptist Church to capture her. Sharpton, 33, a minister-at-large with a rock-star haircut and a vituperative style, gave voice to their fantasy. "Show the nation the moral beast you are," he challenged the attorney general. "Come through these doors and arrest her." But police made no moves...