Free Republic

The Senate Finance Committee must be participating in a prison rehabilitation program. It obviously has a former Enron accountant dummying up the Baucus health care bill, which has enough phony accounting procedures to get someone in the private sector sent to jail.

Observations of the 32nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion opened Friday in Atlanta with a Catholic Mass and a separate news conference at which abortion rights advocates vowed to fight any attempts by the state Legislature to reduce women's access to abortions. "This is a wakeup call to the legislators of Georgia," Errin Vuley, executive director of Georgians For Choice, said at a morning news conference marking the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. "You do not have a mandate over women's lives." The press conference came hours before thousands of anti-abortion protesters descended...

House of Prayer parents refuse to sign 'safety plan'. A tenuous deal to release most of the House of Prayer children still in state custody fell apart Thursday. Child welfare officials again insisted that the church members, some of whom are accused of abusing their children, accept limits on their disciplinary practices. Church members again refused. "We're not giving in to any of their demands," the House of Prayer's pastor, the Rev. Arthur Allen Jr., said late Thursday. "We're demanding that they turn our children loose." As an impasse over the children's fate escalated, a lawyer for the state suggested ...

To the Editor of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution: May 11, 2001 Richard Jewel was the bomber of the Centennial Olympics. The FBI said so--they had the perpetrator. Everyone read as much in the AJC over their morning coffee. And the whole city believed. Only one thing wrong: Richard Jewel was innocent. Don’t we all wish, in retrospect, that our home-town, Atlanta paper would have questioned the authorities more closely? It’s happening again with respect to the House of Prayer. On March 29, 2001, Richard Matthews, esteemed member of the Journal’s editorial board, laid down the official line that “It is, frankly, ...

Charles Ogletree Jr. stops squirming for a moment and listens to his mother's question. "Who's coming to get you?" Kim Ogletree asks, not looking up from the potatoes she's peeling on the front porch where Charles is playing with a younger sister. The 3-year-old answers without hesitation: "The devil." To Charles, one of about 30 children remaining with families that attend the House of Prayer, the devil is in the social workers who have taken his friends and cousins, his playmates and baby sitters in an investigation of systematic abuse at the northwest Atlanta church. Now, those same social workers ...

The devotional part of the service was in progress when I arrived at the House of Prayer on Friday night at 8:30 pm. Although there are exceptions, the men seem to sit pretty much together and the women likewise. All the women wear dresses and a head covering. The pastor was absent--I think it’s his custom to come in about 9:00 pm or so. The people sing songs accompanied by the occasional tambourine and an electronic keyboard. The service has an easy-going formality about it. There are no song books. Many folks appear to have Bibles, but at this ...