Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church In Kentucky Revisits Interracial Couple Ban After Uproar

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- When Stella Harville brought her black boyfriend to her family's all-white church in rural Kentucky, she thought nothing of it. She and Ticha Chikuni worshipped there whenever they were in town, and he even sang before the congregation during one service.

Then in August, a member of Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church told Harville's father that Chikuni couldn't sing there anymore. And last Sunday, in a moment that seems from another time, church members voted 9-6 to bar mixed-race couples from joining the congregation.

The policy has drawn a firestorm of criticism in just a few days and sent church leaders scrambling to overturn it, perhaps as early as Sunday. The executive secretary of the church's national organization said he has been inundated with angry phone calls, and had an inch-high stack of emails printed out on his desk.

"We are not a group of racist people," said Keith Burden of the National Association of Free Will Baptists. "We have been labeled that obviously because of the actions of nine people."

The resolution approved by the Gulnare church says it does not condone interracial marriage and "parties of such marriages will not be received as members, nor will they be used in worship services and other church functions, with the exception being funerals."

Ballots were cast after the service, attended by about 35 to 40 people, but it wasn't clear why so few people voted.

The church member and former pastor who pushed for the vote, Melvin Thompson, wouldn't tell The Associated Press why he did it.

"I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil" about a race, Thompson said earlier this week in a brief interview. "That's what this is being portrayed as, but it is not."

Thompson stepped down as pastor earlier this year for health reasons, according to Harville's dad, Dean Harville. He said it was Thompson who told him that Chikuni couldn't sing at the church, a small, one-story red brick building with few windows and a white steeple.

After giving interviews earlier this week, the church's current pastor, Stacy Stepp, and several other church members did not return phone calls Friday. One of the members said they were shocked. Stepp said he voted against the measure and would work to overturn it.

The national group distanced itself from the resolution in a statement Thursday, saying it "neither condemns nor disallows" interracial marriage.

It said the church was working to reverse its policy and added, "We encourage the church to follow through with this action."

Harville, who is now engaged to Chikuni, said earlier this week that she felt betrayed by the church.

"Whether they keep the vote or overturn it, it's going to be hard for me go back there," she told AP.

Gulnare is a small town in Pike County, in eastern Kentucky. The county celebrates its Appalachian heritage in the spring with the Hillbilly Days Festival in downtown Pikeville, the county seat, and the Apple Blossom Festival in Elkhorn City, according to a tourism website.

Harville is working on her master's degree in optical engineering at an Indiana college. She met Chikuni, who is from Zimbabwe, at Georgetown College in central Kentucky.

"It's like we were kind of blindsided," Harville said of the church's action.

More than 40 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites, overturning bans in 15 other states. But while interracial marriages have soared since then, many churches remain largely segregated.

Curtiss Paul DeYoung, a professor at Bethel College who has studied interracial churches, said church members opposed to a more diverse church usually just go somewhere else.

"Rarely today do you see it so blatantly come to a vote. Usually people just leave but they don't say much about it," DeYoung said. "I think this is still one of the last hurdles around race for a lot of folks in this country. It's just rarely stated this bluntly."

The Free Will Baptists trace their history to the 18th century. They emphasized the Arminian doctrine of free will, free grace, and free salvation, in contrast to most Baptists, who were Calvinists and believed Christ died only for those predestined to be saved.

There are some 4,200 churches worldwide. The National Association of Free Will Baptists organized in Nashville, Tenn., in 1935 and is now based in Antioch, Tenn.

The group said in its statement that the denomination has no official policy regarding interracial couples "because it has not been an issue."

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/03/gulnare-free-will-baptist-church-revisits-ban_n_1126836.html

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The week in iPhone for November 30, 2011

Missed a compelling piece of iPhone news, a great review, or a killer how-to? We’re not collecting absolutely everything in iPhone here — you can hit up TiPb.com/iPhone for that! — but we’re carefully picking what we think is the best of the last 7 days and presenting...

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Just Show Me: How to use iMessage on your iPhone or iPad (Yahoo! News)

Welcome to?Just Show Me on Tecca TV, where we show you tips and tricks for getting the most out of the?gadgets in your life. In today's episode we'll show you how to use iMessage?on your iPhone or iPad once you've upgraded to?iOS 5.

iMessages are just like text messages, only they're sent via the internet instead of over your cell phone provider's text message services. You can send iMessages to other compatible iOS 5 devices, and you'll know when you're able to because their name will show up with a blue background when you send them a message. We'll go over all the details with you in our video.

For more episodes of Just Show Me, subscribe to Tecca TV's YouTube channel and check out all our Just Show Me episodes. If you have any topics you'd like to see us cover, just drop us a line in the comments.

This article originally appeared on Tecca

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Barry Lando: Egyptian Military: State Within a State

On Friday, Washington added its voice to Egyptians demanding that the Egyptian military give way to civilian rule. It's instructive, however, to consider why the Egyptian brass are so reluctant.

Their resistance stems not just from a fear of an ultimate takeover by radical Muslims. There is also the fact that real civilian rule could spell an end to the system of massive military corruption and patronage that has gone on for decades in Egypt, a system that has given the military unimpeded control over a huge sector of the Egyptian economy: "a state within a state" as a well-informed Egyptian friend of mine puts it.

That's the state that's now being challenged.

For years, Egypt's top military ranks have enjoyed a pampered existence in sprawling developments such as Cairo's Nasr City, where officers are housed in spacious, subsidized condominiums. They enjoy other amenities the average Egyptian can only dream of, such as nurseries, bonuses, new cars, schools and military consumer cooperatives featuring domestic and imported products at discount prices. In other areas, top officers are able to buy luxurious apartments on generous credit for 10 percent of what those apartments are actually worth.

But we're not just talking about sensational official perks. Many of Egypt's brass are notoriously corrupt. Vast swathes of military land, for instance, were sold by the generals to finance some major urban developments near Cairo -- with little if any accounting.

Other choice military property ran on the Nile Delta and Red Sea coast boasted idyllic beaches, and exquisite coral reefs. In return for turning the land over to private developers, military officers became key shareholders in a slew of gleaming new tourist developments.

The reason Egypt's military became so involved in non-military activities was because, after peace was signed with Israel in 1975, the military lost much of its raison d'etre, as did its military factories. The problem, though, was how to keep those factories going and employ the hundreds of thousands of young men who would otherwise flood the domestic market?

The answer was the military would also produce for the civilian market. Thus the generals came to preside over 16 enormous factories that turn out not just weapons, but an array of domestic products from dishwashers to heaters, clothing, doors, stationary pharmaceutical products, and microscopes. Most of these products are sold to military personnel through discount military stores, but large amount are also sold commercially.

The military also builds highways, housing developments, hotels, power lines, sewers, bridges, schools, telephone exchanges, often in murky arrangements with civilian companies.

The military are also Egypt's largest farmers, running a vast network of dairy farms, milk processing facilities, cattle feed lots, poultry farms, fish farms. They've plenty left from their huge output to sell to civilians through a sprawling distribution network.

The justification for all this non-military activity is that the military are just naturally more efficient that civilians. Hard not to be "more efficient" when you are able to employ thousands of poorly paid military recruits for labor.

Many civilian businessmen complain that competing with the military is like trying to compete with the Mafia. And upon retiring, top military officers are often rewarded with plum positions running everything from factories and industries to charities.

Whatever the number, Robert Springborg, who has written extensively on Egypt, says officers in the Egyptian military are making "billions and billions and billions" of dollars."

But there's no way to know how efficient or inefficient the military are, nor how much money their vast enterprises make, nor how many millions or billions get skimmed off since the military's operations are off the nation's books. No real published accountings. No oversight. Just as there is no civilian oversight of the entire military budget, and that's the way the current military regime have said they aim to keep things

Of course none of the above is a surprise to U.S. officials who dole out some 1.3 billion dollars a year in military aid to the Egyptian Army, and hope that sum and the neat weapons it provides will keep the army in line. [One of the most detailed studies of the military's non-military activities was done by a U.S. military researcher at Fort Leavenworth.]

A perceptive look into all this comes via a 2008 U.S.diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. The writer in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo ticked off the various businesses the military was involved in, and considered how the military might react if Egypt's then president, Hosni Mubarak, were to lose power.

The military would almost certainly go along with a successor, the cable's author wrote, as long as that successor didn't interfere in the military's business arrangements. But, the cable continued, "in a messier succession scenario, it becomes more difficult to predict the military's actions."

Thus, the messier scenario today.

?

Follow Barry Lando on Twitter: www.twitter.com/barrylando

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barry-lando/egyptian-military_b_1114132.html

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