aljazeera--2019-09-25--Free but not free Tortured ex-Bagram inmates struggle to cope

'Free, but not free': Tortured ex-Bagram inmates struggle to cope

Karachi, Pakistan - Hamidullah Khan, born and raised in Karachi, was 15 years old and off on a great adventure.  Days earlier, he had run away from his family while they were on a trip to their ancestral village of Ladha, in Pakistan's northwestern district of South Waziristan.  Accompanied by a Muslim scholar who had mentored him - the two had met at a market near Ladha - he was heading to a religious school in neighbouring Afghanistan, to, as he puts it, pursue his interest in getting a religious education.  It was 2008, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) armed group was fighting Pakistani forces from its stronghold of South Waziristan, while the Afghan Taliban were - as they still are - battling the US-led NATO coalition in neighbouring Afghanistan.  The war needed soldiers, on either side of the border.  Two days into the journey, Khan was beginning to lose his resolve. They had spent all their time trekking or camped out on rocky mountainsides, with no schools in sight, he says.  Suddenly, one night, a helicopter appeared over the village they were camped near, in Afghanistan's eastern Khost province.  Days earlier, NATO forces had shelled the area, and the appearance of the helicopter panicked residents, who began to run out of their homes. Khan fled too and happened upon an Afghan army checkpoint.  "I thought this is my chance to be rid of [the cleric]," he says. "I went to the soldier and asked him how I could get home."  It would be six years before he made it back to Karachi.  Arrested by the Afghan soldiers at the checkpoint, he was handed over to the US military who detained him without formal charge, access to legal counsel or recourse to challenge his detention, in the country's infamous Bagram prison.  Today, it has been five years since 43 Pakistanis - including Khan - were released and repatriated from the Bagram facility.  For many, the scars of the torture and abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of US and Afghan forces continue to haunt them, while reported harassment by Pakistani security agencies and police under anti-terrorism legislation has crippled their ability to lead a normal life.  Built by the United States in the 1950s, Bagram Airfield, located about 50km (31 miles) north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, was expanded into a large detention facility after the US-led invasion of the country following the September 11 attacks in 2001.  At its height, the facility held more than 3,200 detainees without formal charge or access to legal recourse, most of them Afghans. The detainees included dozens of citizens of other countries, referred to as "Third Country Nationals (TCNs)", some were captured in Afghanistan, others as far afield as Somalia or Iraq.  In 2005, the New York Times obtained a classified US military report that documented the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram due to torture.  Since then, allegations of widespread torture and abuse at the facility - including beatings during interrogations -  have regularly surfaced from prisoners who were released either during or after a 2014 handover of the facility to the Afghan government.  When contacted by Al Jazeera about this story, a US Department of Defense spokesperson said since Washington no longer controlled Bagram, this reporter would have to file a freedom of information request for any further details.  For the TCNs, the handover brought the first ray of hope for release that they had seen in years. Legally, the Afghan government ruled it could not hold them without formal charge, prompting the repatriation of most of the remaining 60 or so to their home countries within months.  Of those, at least 43 were Pakistanis like Hamidullah Khan, according to Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), a Pakistani legal aid organisation that represents several former detainees.  On Wednesday, JPP released a new report detailing the allegations of abuse by prisoners and accounts of how they have struggled to reintegrate since being released.  The Pakistani prisoners were held without charge, for as long as 11 years in one case, with many alleging physical and mental abuse while in Afghan and US custody.  "They took me to a place called the 'black jail'," says Khan, now 26, sitting on the floor at his home in Karachi. "It was very harsh. We had no idea of time [there].  "They would beat me. They would bang my head against the walls while moving me. When they took me for a shower they would beat me or kick me," he says, demonstrating the motions with his hands.  For Haleem Saifullah, who was captured by Afghan police in 2005 in the eastern district of Zabul while on his way home to Karachi from collecting a family debt, the abuse was even worse.  "They beat me with guns, gun butts, with ropes and other things," he says, recalling how he was interrogated by Afghan forces at a US-run facility in Zabul district. "I was beaten for 10 days … I was in such bad condition that I was praying to Allah for death."  After being handed over to US forces, Saifullah alleges that he was subjected to sleep deprivation for more than 10 days.  "The Americans, they would not let us sleep," he said. "They would keep me standing, and pour cold water on me … they would make noise [to keep me awake]. They had a metal bar which they would strike against the bars of the cell in order to keep us awake."  At Bagram, both Khan and Saifullah said that, aside from physical abuse, they were forced to live in difficult conditions and were often mistreated by guards.  In cramped communal cells housing more than 20 detainees, they said, the guards would keep the rooms extremely cold in the winter, using air conditioning, and so hot as to be "unbearable" in the summer.  "It used to be so cold that my bones would hurt," said Khan.  If someone complained, former detainees told Al Jazeera, a disciplinary report would be written and sent to solitary confinement in a cell no larger than a moderately sized coffee table, a practice called "segregation".  "When they took us to segregation, it would be for 40 or 45 days," said Saifullah. "The minimum time was for 28 days, for completely mundane things."  US military regulations state that the duration of segregation for detainees "[would] not normally be for a period longer than 30 days", according to 2013 US Department of Defense memo on detention operations in Afghanistan.  Saifullah, Khan and Fazal Karim - another Pakistani detainee who was released and repatriated in 2014 - told Al Jazeera they were not informed of their rights or the specific charges against them until years into their detention.  "There was nothing," says Khan, simply, when asked if he knew what law or system he was being held under. "They would never talk about our release, nor would this enter our minds."  Lawyers representing former detainees from Pakistan and other countries say the November 2001 executive order signed by US President George W Bush that authorised the US to hold "enemy combatants" without charge provided few rights for detainees or rules on how they were to be treated.  Sarah Belal, the executive director of JPP, called the resulting legal memos and policies that flowed from that document "a freakish manifestation of whatever was left over of the law".  "International humanitarian law and international [conflict] law categorically failed in this scenario," she told Al Jazeera. "All these exceptions were carved out, and compromises were made."  For example, the US declared the war in Afghanistan a "non-international armed conflict" - a designation agreed to later by the International Committee of the Red Cross - meaning large sections of the Geneva Conventions were no longer applicable to those detained by US forces in its so-called "global war on terror", depriving them of guarantees of rights, protections and liveable prison conditions.  For detainees, this often meant that they did not hear the accusations against them until years into their detention, when they were finally presented before US military Detainee Review Boards (DRBs), theoretically for a chance to prove their innocence.  "About four years after I had been arrested, I was told during a [DRB] that the Afghans had told the US forces that I was captured in a battle," says Khan.  Khan alleged that local translators had mistranslated a written statement made and signed early in his detention. That statement was written in Pakistani Pashto, a dialect different from the Pashto spoken in Afghanistan.  "When we would say that we have not done something, [the translators] would say that we are confessing," said Khan. "What I had written, he translated it as me confessing to being captured in battle."  In 2011, he says, he was finally able to gain access to translators who spoke his dialect, who then verified to US authorities that his "confession" as translated into English was not accurate.  At this point, he had already spent three years detained and being interrogated by US officials, who, based on that document, believed him to have confessed to being a member of the Afghan Taliban.  Saifullah, held for nine years, said he had a similar experience with mistranslated statements that made it appear that he had confessed his guilt.  "In the beginning, we had no idea [what was in our files]," he said. "We would deny something and [the translator] would say we confessed to it during interrogations."  Asked if this allowed Khan or Saifullah to demand release at the time, Belal said there were no rules for that under US detention policy.  "There is no legal system. There's nothing. This is not a court, this did not have prescribed rules," she said.  Another lawyer, who represents three TCNs who were held at Bagram, confirmed the unclear and unfair process.  "When they were held by the US, they did not need to be charged with a crime," said the lawyer, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.  "They were just held without hearing."  It "was not clear" what constituted fair grounds or evidence for detention or release by US forces, the lawyer said.  For many, however, even when release came, it was not without cost.  Saifullah, now 35, sits on a small bed, the only piece of furniture in his two-room apartment in an illegally constructed working-class settlement in Karachi's Metroville area, his clothes stained with sweat.  "Since I have returned, I have driven a rickshaw, I have run a push-cart, sometimes doing this, sometimes doing that, but because I am on the Fourth Schedule everything is disturbed," he says. "They can call me at any time. They track my mobile location. It's difficult for a man to work."  The Fourth Schedule is part of Pakistan's Anti-Terrorism Act, which gives the police wide-ranging powers to detain, question and restrict the movements of people suspected of links to armed groups.  Most of the detainees repatriated from Bagram in 2014 were placed on the Fourth Schedule, and several served prison sentences upon their return, ranging from several months to up to three years.  Saifullah spent six days in police custody without charge as recently as this month, he says, a result of tightened security following threats by armed groups in Karachi. Such detentions were "routine", and made it impossible to find regular work, he said.  Other former detainees also said it was difficult to make ends meet when they could be called up to report to the police at a moment's notice.  Khan says his scars from Bagram run far deeper than affecting his ability to earn a living for the family of six he supports. He has nightmares, he says, and often finds himself forgetting what he is doing, where he is, or why.  His father, the family patriarch, passed away soon after his return. The experience left him shaken.  "I had never known in life how much sugar costs, how much flour costs … it was a huge burden [to support the family]," he said, pointing out that he had been detained when he was just 15.  "I have to take care of everyone, I have to run the whole house. And often I would think maybe it would be better to be in [Bagram], where I had a certain kind of life."  For Saifullah, he found it "very strange" to adjust back to being a free man after nine years in detention.  "Sometimes I would call out 'cell guard!' [when] I wanted water," he says, of the months after his release. "My family members would laugh, saying this isn't Bagram, you are home."  At night, he would dream of Bagram.  "Sometimes when I was sleeping I would dream that I was in Bagram, and that that was my home. It was very strange, this stayed with me for a long time," he says.  "Sometimes I felt like I was dreaming, that none of this was real."  For others, the cost Bagram has extracted is even higher.  "Before he went [to Bagram], he was perfectly fine," says Fazal Naeem, Karim's younger brother. "[When he returned] it was somewhat bad, but now [his mental state] has gotten much worse."  Karim speaks erratically, flitting from subject to subject and often repeating himself. He chews on tobacco as he speaks, talking one moment about how he "wants to forget it all", and in the next narrating stories of abuse or how he attempted to escape the prison.  His brother Naeem sits next to him, watching for any sudden violent movements, he says.  For all three former detainees, the inability to find steady work seemed an abiding concern.  Sitting in his dilapidated flat, green paint peeling off the walls, Saifullah spoke of how he had accrued more than 300,000 Pakistani rupees ($1,900) in debt since his release.  He married soon after his return, fathering four children. Each of them, he says, died because he was not able to afford hospital treatment for them when they were ill.  "We are free, but we are not free," he says. "We have only stress [in our lives]. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to still be in [Bagram]."  Asad Hashim is Al Jazeera's digital correspondent in Pakistan. He tweets @AsadHashim.


bbc--2019-01-18--Pence condemns offensive LGBT criticism of his wifes job

Pence condemns 'offensive' LGBT criticism of his wife's job

US Vice-President Mike Pence has called criticism of his wife's decision to resume teaching at an anti-LGBT school "deeply offensive".  In an interview with a Catholic TV network, Mr Pence said it amounted to an "attack" on religious education.  The school that Mrs Pence chose bars staff from engaging in or condoning "homosexual or lesbian sexual activity" and "transgender identity".  She previously taught art there for 12 years while Mr Pence was in Congress.  Many US social conservatives cite their religious beliefs to justify opposition to gay marriage.  Mr Pence, a Christian evangelical, told Eternal Word Television Network on Thursday: "My wife and I have been in the public eye for quite a while. We're used to the criticism.  "But I have to tell you, to see major news organisations attacking Christian education is deeply offensive to us."  According to a teaching application for the Immanuel Christian School - the private school in Springfield, Virginia, that Mrs Pence chose - employees are required to sign a pledge opposing LGBT lifestyles.  "I understand that the term 'marriage' has only one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman," teachers are required to affirm.  In an agreement with parents on their website, the school says they can "refuse admission" or "discontinue enrolment" of a pupil if "the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home, the activities of a parent or guardian, or the activities of the student are counter to, or are in opposition to, the biblical lifestyle the school teaches".  Mr Pence told the TV network on Thursday that there is "a rich tradition in America of Christian education, and frankly, religious education broadly defined".  "We celebrate it," he said, adding: "We'll let the other critics roll off our back, but this criticism of religious education in America should stop."  After the decision was first announced on Tuesday, the second lady's spokeswoman Kara Brooks said in a statement: "It's absurd that her decision to teach art to children at a Christian school, and the school's religious beliefs, are under attack."  Before becoming vice-president, Mr Pence expressed support for the controversial practice of gay conversion therapy.  As governor of Indiana he signed a bill that critics said amounted to state-sponsored discrimination of LGBT people. But supporters of the legislation said it simply upheld religious beliefs.  Mr Pence became the first vice-president to speak at the openly anti-LGBT Family Research Council's annual conference in 2018.


bbc--2019-03-14--China foreign investment How doing business will change

China foreign investment: How doing business will change

China is rushing through a foreign investment law in an apparent attempt to placate Washington as negotiators try to dig the world's two largest economic powers out of an ongoing trade war. But will it work?  The 3,000 or so delegates to China's annual National People's Congress (NPC) will endorse the new law on Friday. They don't oppose legislation. That's not how it is done here.  When a vote is taken there are normally only a handful who vote against. Some of them potentially for show, because 100% "yes" votes one after another would look ridiculous.  If there is pushback against a draft bill and amendments made, this happens well before the NPC sits, at a series of standing committee meetings behind closed doors. The process can take years.  This time it took three months.  The Chinese government appears to have rushed through the investment law as an olive branch to the US amid trade war negotiations.  However, many in the business community here in China see this law as a kind of sweeping set of intentions rather than a specific, enforceable set of rules. They fear it could be open to different and changing forms of interpretation.  The big-ticket items it is said to address, in terms of the concerns of foreign companies, include intellectual property theft, the requirement for international firms to partner up with a local entity, and unfair subsidies to Chinese companies.  It will also address the preferential treatment in awarding contracts to Chinese companies, and forcing foreign firms to hand over their technological secrets as the price of entry to the massive Chinese market.  But this law isn't going to help everyone.  There is a "black list" of 48 sectors that will not be open to foreign investment or, in some cases, not open without conditions or special permission.  For example, there is a complete ban on investing in fishing, gene research, religious education, news media, and television broadcasting.  Partial investment is allowed in oil and gas exploitation, nuclear power, airlines, airport operation, and public health, amongst others sectors.  Non-renewable energy automobile production will require partnerships for a few years but then be phased out.  For industries not on the list, the principle is that foreign companies will receive the same treatment as their Chinese counterparts.  But should foreign companies also be wary?  One of the provisions will include a requirement for the local subsidiaries of international firms to report various details of their operation to Chinese officials.  This could include performance indicators relating to labour relations, overall staffing numbers, pollution records and the like.  That sounds fine except that foreign companies have asked for - and not received - legal guarantees that this data will not be passed on to their Chinese competitors.  Then there is the promised complaints procedure should you seek redress following any perceived violations of the new law.  If this system is run through the normal Chinese courts, which routinely guarantee results favourable to the Communist Party, then to many this would not seem like a satisfactory enforcement mechanism.  One part of the law specifies that there is to be a ban on "illegal government interference" in the activities of foreign business.  The further you go up the government ladder the more implausible it would be to win in such a dispute.  Over the years we have reported on many cases of foreign businesspeople, especially ethnic Chinese, who have been sent to prison on highly questionable charges following a commercial dispute with a local business person who enjoys the backing of low-level Communist Party cadres.  Those here with long memories know this and are approaching the new law with an understandable level of caution.


bbc--2019-03-30--Pope calls on Moroccans to fight fanaticism

Pope Francis has called on Moroccans to fight fanaticism during a visit to promote inter-faith dialogue.  He was met at the airport by King Mohammed VI and driven to the capital Rabat, where he gave a speech.  The pontiff is to meet migrants and Muslim leaders, and hold a Mass for the country's small Roman Catholic community this weekend.  The Vatican considers the papal visit a continuation of last month's historic trip to the United Arab Emirates.  Islam is the state religion in Morocco.  To a crowd of thousands, Pope Francis said it was "essential to oppose fanaticism" and for the faithful to "live as brothers".  He defended "freedom of conscience" and "religious freedom" as fundamental for human dignity, and said it was "necessary" to make the "appropriate preparations of future religious guides".  Since 2015, 1,600 young Moroccans are estimated to have been radicalised and joined jihadists fighting for the Islamic State group.  King Mohammed said the key to tackling radicalisation of young people was to increase religious education.  The spiritual leader of the world's 1.3 billion Catholics was invited to the North African nation by its king, Moroccan authorities said, as part of the "development of inter-religious dialogue".  But Christians - who make up less than 1% of the country's 33 million people - say they are not allowed to worship openly and face discrimination.  Under the penal code, you can be put in prison for trying to convert a Muslim to Christianity.  The pontiff is also visiting a school for imams and a migrant centre run by a Catholic charity, as Europe and North Africa continue to wrestle with the issue of migration.


bbc--2019-11-08--Turkish religious authority's video prompts sexism outcry

A video shared on Twitter by Turkey's top religious authority to warn against mobile phone addiction has triggered accusations of sexism and stirred debate about gender equality.  The Presidency of Religious Affairs' (Diyanet) video, released on 6 November, shows a woman serving tea to her husband, who is seen staring at his mobile phone without paying attention to her.  She also brings him two pieces of cake and a fork as he drinks his tea and seems unaware of her presence.  After sitting on a sofa next to her husband, she texts him: "If only you paid more attention to your wife!"  The husband then sits next to her and shares his cake. A caption reads: "Don't look at your phone. Look at your wife's face instead!"  The video prompted anger on social media about its portrayal of the role of women in Turkey, which ranked 130 out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 Gender Gap Report.  "The woman brings tea. The woman brings cake. When will we completely destroy these stereotypical role models? Especially in this day and age... The year is 2019," journalist Menekse Tokyay tweeted on 6 November. • Women not equal to men, says Erdogan  "In my opinion, the ugliness here is not just that the man is constantly looking at his phone. It is also that he is having the the woman constantly serve him. I hope this critical message from the Diyanet is against this male-dominated culture too," wrote commentator Mustafa Akyol.  Booker Prize-nominated Turkish author Elif Shafak has also joined the debate, appealing to Turkish women to reject the message.  Turkish feminist group Mor Dayanisma shared an altered screen shot of the video on its Instagram account on 7 November, quoting the wife as saying: "Don't look at your phone, get up and pour your own tea."  Hours after the video was released, Diyanet head Ali Erbas said the authority "was open to criticism".  "But it is upsetting when the criticism turns into insults and attacks," he tweeted. It was not clear if he was referring to the criticism over the video.  Other commentators praised the video, which was released as part of a series of family-themed clips. Turkey's ultra-conservative Yeni Akit newspaper hailed the video as "meaningful" on its website.  "I really liked it. We must be attentive. Women and men [should] nurture each other in all kinds of ways. This is the only way for marriage to endure," said one Twitter user.  Pro-government columnist Hilal Kaplan took aim at critics of the video, suggesting that feminism should not look down on women who chose to be housewives.  Some pointed to divorce rates in Turkey, which have risen in recent years according to the country's official statistics agency.  "[People ask] why divorce rates are going up. This is one of the reasons. There is no conversation with your spouse, no attention," another Twitter user said.  Turkey founded the Diyanet in 1924, a year after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, to manage all mosques and oversee religious education.  The religious affairs authority often comes under fire from government critics due to its expanding budget under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  President Erdogan has often said he aims to "raise religious generations".  The Diyanet triggered controversy in 2018 when it said girls as young as nine could marry.  BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.


bbcuk--2019-10-03--Sex education Right to remove pupils from class set to end

Sex education: Right to remove pupils from class set to end

Parents are set to lose their right to remove their children from sex and relationship classes under Welsh Government plans.  Education Minister Kirsty Williams said she was also "minded to" abolish the right to remove children from religious education (RE) lessons.  The plan will be put to an eight-week consultation.  In a previous consultation, 89% of respondents backed the right of parents to take children out of the classes.  But Ms Williams said it had always been an "anomaly" that pupils could be withdrawn from certain subjects.  The proposed measure will be brought in along with the new curriculum, which will be introduced in primary schools and the first year of secondary in 2022, before being rolled out up to 16-year-olds in 2026.  The revised approach for relationships and sexuality education (RSE) will be "fully inclusive of all genders and sexualities and meets the needs of LGBTQI+ learners", Ms Williams has previously said.  It will place an emphasis on forming and maintaining healthy, happy and fulfilling relationships, giving pupils a much broader understanding of sexuality.  Ms Williams said all teaching would be developmentally appropriate and parents would be kept informed about what they were learning.  "I am minded to ensure all pupils study RE and RSE in the new curriculum, just as they will study science, maths and languages," she said.  "Children should be provided with access to information that keeps them safe from harm and allows them to navigate the world in which we live…  "It must be easy for parents to engage in dialogue with schools about this and other parts of the curriculum."  Sian Rees, director of the Evangelical Alliance in Wales, said they wanted parents to retain the right to take their children out of RSE lessons.  "We believe that age isn't an indication of maturity and that these conversations are conversations that should perhaps be occurring within the home," she said.  "The [new curriculum] framework as it stands is very vague. We would ask the minister to provide more clarity and explanation as to what exactly she would like teachers to cover."  Abdul-Azim Ahmed, deputy general secretary of the Muslim Council of Wales, said it was important to maintain trust between parents, the state and schools.  "A move that withdraws the right for parents to withdraw their children may undermine that trust," he said.  "[With religious education] there's a well-established curriculum... so removing the right to withdraw there may be less controversial because parents know what's anticipated.  "That's less clear when it comes to relationship and sexuality education where the guidance is still being developed."  On Monday, the Welsh Government's advisers on domestic violence said lessons about sexuality and relationships should be compulsory in schools.  Teaching on issues related to relationships and sex is usually delivered through personal and social education, which is part of the curriculum for seven to 16 year olds.  Younger children are taught about relationships as part of the foundation phase.  All secondary schools are required by law to provide the sex education element to pupils, and primary schools can teach it if they wish.  Jane Cope, a mother of two teenage children from Caerphilly, said: "I don't feel that it should be mandatory that all children should have to attend [sex education], but it should also perhaps be provided to those children in a safer zone with somebody from their own culture that can speak to the children."  Sarah Day, who has three children, said: "I think that part of the curriculum is just as important as maths, science, English, IT. It's part and parcel of how we live our lives.  "It should most definitely stay, it's how the school engages with parents who may have an issue with their child accessing that part of the curriculum."


birminghammail--2019-07-25--LGBT teaching row blamed on academisation and broken school system

LGBT teaching row blamed on academisation and 'broken' school system

Academisation and a 'broken' education system have been blamed for the on-going LGBT teaching row in Birmingham.  Education and diversity expert Dr Karamat Iqbal has claimed the controversy shows that the city has 'gone backwards' when it was once a leader in the field of multi-faith teaching.  The consultant, who runs Forward Partnership, has compared the dispute to the Trojan Horse affair in 2014 , arguing that a 'community disconnect' between parents and schools has been a driving force in both situations.  Dr Iqbal called for greater partnership working and says while schools should have the 'final say' the voice of the community should not be excluded.  But he says a 'particular problem' with the move towards more academies is that school governing bodies are not as 'representative' as they should be.  " Quite a number of governing bodies will have people who may have certain skills, but may not be local people representing a local voice," he said.  He called for the bodies to have proper roles for parents, religious leaders, community activities, MPs and councillors claiming that politicians in particular are increasingly 'not allowed to speak' despite the fact they are well placed to express a 'community view'.  Further, Dr Iqbal emphasised the need for greater understanding around religious literacy.  He said: " I would advocate a city-wide programme on religious literacy so we all understand the importance of religion, what it means for different people for different communities.  "There are people who do and don't have religious beliefs and we need to understand both.  "It's not preaching at them. It's not telling them to believe it, it is simply understanding that if one person says 'I'm religious' and the other says 'I'm not', we are a society that has freedom for both and we need to understand .  "The key thing is we as a city need to take on board this religious literacy because it will continue to impact on issues."  But asked about who should be tasked with leading such a programme he admitted the solution was no longer straight-forward.  Dr Iqbal said: " There was a time when there were schools and local authorities.  "If it was a one-school issue you would go to the school, if it was more than one school you would go to the local authority and they would deal with it as an area-wide thing .  "We have a broken system. Local authorities have suffered from cuts and they have been shifted aside in the current education system."  He added that the council could still take the lead on such a scheme if it was funded sufficiently and said the city's Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) could have a role while Birmingham's religious schools should be consulted as to how they approach LGBT and other equality issues.  Dr Iqbal expressed particular disappointment over the current controversy where the religious beliefs of many Muslim parents have clashed with primary schools' will to promote LGBT and the Equality Act.  He highlighted that Birmingham was one of the first to teach about different religions in the 1970s and 1980s, whilst groups such as the Muslim Liaison Committee would often produce various publications around different aspects of teaching.  He said: " Birmingham education was a leader when it came to multi-faith Religious Education, English as a second language and addressing under-achievement.  "What happened here was emulated by others including central government.  "It's sad to see it all forgotten. We've gone backwards.  "Many of the current teachers in post- academisation schools are not even aware of the pioneering practise of the past."


breitbart--2019-09-27--Pope Francis Endorses Essay Trashing US Conservative Christians

Pope Francis Endorses Essay Trashing U.S. Conservative Christians

On Thursday, La Civiltà Cattolica journal released the transcript of a meeting between Pope Francis and a group of 24 Jesuits on September 5, 2019, during his recent trip to Mozambique in which the pope suggested that certain Evangelical Protestants in the United States “cannot really be defined as Christian.”  “Two important articles in Civiltà Cattolica have been published in this regard. I recommend them to you. They were written by Father Spadaro and the Argentinean Presbyterian pastor, Marcelo Figueroa. The first article spoke of the ‘ecumenism of hatred.’ The second was on the ‘theology of prosperity,’” the pontiff said.  “Reading them you will see that there are sects that cannot really be defined as Christian. They preach Christ, yes, but their message is not Christian,” the pope said. “It has nothing to do with the preaching of a Lutheran or any other serious evangelical Christianity.”  In the first essay recommended by the pope, the authors, who are both friends of Francis, slammed conservative Christians in the U.S. as ignorant, theocratic, Manichean, war-mongering fanatics.  For the “Evangelical right,” the authors proposed, the panorama of threats to the American way of life “have included modernist spirits, the black civil rights movement, the hippy movement, communism, feminist movements and so on. And now in our day there are the migrants and the Muslims.”  The authors did not hesitate to suggest that many Evangelicals are southern racists who reject climate change.  “Another interesting aspect is the relationship with creation of these religious groups that are composed mainly of whites from the deep American South,” the article stated. “There is a sort of ‘anesthetic’ with regard to ecological disasters and problems generated by climate change. They profess ‘dominionism’ and consider ecologists as people who are against the Christian faith.”  Throughout the essay, the authors criticize a string of exclusively Republican presidents as being tainted by the teachings of Evangelical Protestantism. The list of those mentioned includes Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and, of course, Donald Trump.  One of the most serious evils of American Evangelical Christians, the article stated, is “the defense of religious liberty,’” which takes the form of “a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state.”  The authors went on to denounce the ecumenical alliance between conservative Catholics and Evangelical Christians who align behind certain moral issues in the public square.  “Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. They are defined as value voters as far as attracting electoral mass support is concerned,” the article asserted.  This poisonous alliance over shared objectives “happens around such themes as abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values,” the essay claimed, which unite Catholics and Evangelicals in “the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state.”  At the time of its publication, the article triggered an avalanche of critical responses denouncing the ignorance and political ill-will underlying the essay.  Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, for instance, wrote a sharp criticism of the essay, saying that the authors were guilty of “dumbing down and inadequately presenting the nature of Catholic/evangelical cooperation on religious freedom and other key issues.”  “Dismissing today’s attacks on religious liberty as a ‘narrative of fear,’” as the La Civiltà Cattolica article does, Chaput said, “sounds willfully ignorant.”  In his critique of the article, Dr. Samuel Gregg called the article “disturbing,” while lamenting the tacit anti-Americanism and “distinctly amateur grasp of American religious history.”  As Dr. Gregg noted, to describe “Marxism-Leninism, Islamist jihadism, or National Socialism” as evil is not evidence of a Manichaean worldview. “It is simply recognition that some ideas are indeed wicked and lead to many people, even nations, engaging in gravely evil acts.”  Moreover, Gregg wrote, if one looks at statements put together by various scholars and intellectuals involved in movements such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together, “they contain not a shred of theocratic aspiration.”  “The ecumenical discussion between those involved in these endeavors have led over time to genuine fruit in terms of clarification of points in common, removing misconceptions, identifying real doctrinal road-blocks, and identifying areas where practical work to promote the common good can be pursued together,” Gregg observed.  It is not a theocratic nostalgia that leads Evangelical and Catholic Christians in America to make the argument that “unborn human beings are entitled to the same protections from the unjust use of lethal force as any other human being, or that religious liberty is more than just freedom of worship, or that parents are entitled to insist that their children not be subjected to the nonsense of ‘gender theory’ at school,” Gregg added.  The published criticisms of the original article by serious scholars, both Christian and secular, ended up being so numerous they could fill a book. The article was eventually dismissed as simply an embarrassing attempt at political propaganda by overly zealous Italian and Argentinian clerics who were completely out of their depth.  Which could lead one to wonder what Pope Francis could possibly be thinking when he dredges up this ill-begotten essay out of the swamp of oblivion to recommend it as a useful aid for understanding America’s complex religious landscape.


cbsnews--2019-01-28--Trump backs push for Bible classes in schools

President Trump appeared to endorse efforts by legislators in several states to allow public schools to offer Bible classes.  "Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!" Mr. Trump tweeted Monday morning after "Fox and Friends" ran a segment on the topic.  Christian lawmakers in six Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country are pushing for legislation that would allow public schools to offer elective classes on the New and Old Testaments.  The push by conservative legislators in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia has stirred some controversy. Critics of the proposals, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), argue that public school classes on the Bible would jeopardize the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.  Alabama, Iowa and West Virginia have also considered Bible literacy bills, but all of the measures were voted down, according to the Fox News report.  But in Kentucky, Republican Gov. Matt Bevin signed legislation in 2017 to allow public school students to take Bible and Hebrew scriptures classes. A year ago, in January 2018, the ACLU of Kentucky expressed concern to the Kentucky Board of Education after an Open Records Act investigation found that many courses violated constitutional requirements that say that religious texts used in classrooms must be secular, objective and not promote any specific religious view.  The ACLU said it found "public school teachers using the Bible to impart religious life lessons" and use of Sunday school lessons and worksheets for source material. These are not academic approaches to objective study of the Bible and its historical or literary value, the ACLU pointed out.  In June 2018, the Kentucky Board of Education approved standards for the classes, but the ACLU was still worried about what was being taught in Bible literacy courses.  "Without more specific guidance, we fear some classrooms will once again be filled with preaching, not teaching," the organization wrote in a statement last August. "The ACLU-KY reminds students and parents that 'Bible Literacy' courses may not promote religion or a particular religious viewpoint, test students on matters of religious faith, nor be designed to instill religious life lessons."  "Religious education is best left to parents and churches, not school or government," the ACLU added.  Evangelicals and other Christian groups were an integral part of the president's electoral coalition during the 2016 election and have largely remained supportive of his administration — particularly because of his stance on social issues like LGBT rights and abortion, and his appointment of conservative judges to the Supreme Court.


conservativehome--2019-02-14--Interview Look this is a Christian country says Hinds But he adds that the cap on new faith sc

Interview. “Look, this is a Christian country”, says Hinds. But he adds that the cap on new faith schools’ admissions should stay.

Damian Hinds says that as Conservative Education Secretary, the post he has occupied since January 2018, “there are always arguments to be won”, and you have to face up to the “forces of small-c conservatism”.  He adds that “if you stand still, you will go backwards”. But Hinds, described by his fellow parliamentarians as a man who has entered the Cabinet on merit, has an aversion to extravagant language and cannot be regarded as a publicity seeker.  In this interview, he sets out to show how reasonable his policies are. When he declares “this is a Christian country… it still has, at the core of its institutions, traditions which are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition,” his tone is studiously reasonable.  Hinds defends his refusal to lift the 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions for new free schools by insisting there are there are “good community and integration reasons” for keeping it. His decision has angered the Roman Catholic Church, to which he himself belongs.  Before becoming a minister, he opposed the cap, and his appointment raised hopes in Catholic circles that he would use his power to sweep it away.  The Education Secretary instead says his “number one priority” is “to bear down on workload for teachers”, so fewer of them leave the profession.  He wants to accelerate the academies programme and urges ConHome readers to come forward as governors.  On Brexit, he says the Prime Minister has reached “a very good deal”, a point which tends to be forgotten amid “legitimate” concerns about the backstop. He observes that rapid progress is needed, and declines to say whether the Cabinet would continue to “hold their nerve” if the Prime Minister informed ministers she could only get concessions on the backstop at the EU summit on 21st March.  A paradox of his career is that he has risen higher than his good friend and contemporary Jacob Rees-Mogg, while remaining much less well known.  ConHome: “How did you beat Jacob Rees-Mogg and become President of the Oxford Union?”  ConHome: “I think actually our readers are intensely interested. You were in the same college…”  Hinds: “We were in the same college [Trinity College, Oxford].”  ConHome: “I’m not suggesting the Pope had anything to do with it.”  Hinds: “Actually, Jacob was the first person I met at university, literally the first person. It’s one of those things you do when you arrive, and you have all the first years in a room, and I turned to the bloke next to me and said ‘Hello, I’m Damian’, and it turned out to be Jacob.  “He wasn’t dressed the same as all the other undergraduates. He just happened to be standing next to me. And we’ve been friends ever since.  “And the answer to your question about elections. As you know, there are lots of undergraduate elections, and I was lucky enough on that occasion. There’s not much more to it than that.”  ConHome: “Well actually, oddly enough, the most candid thing Boris Johnson ever wrote about politics was an essay about how to become President of the Oxford Union, in a book, The Oxford Myth, edited by his sister, Rachel.  “He said that what you need is ‘a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges’ who will get the vote out for you in their respective colleges.”  Hinds: “‘Stooges’ is one of those words you only ever actually hear in student politics.”  ConHome: “Michael Gove has admitted he was a Johnson stooge in those days. So you too had a collection of disciplined and deluded stooges? They weren’t deluded in your case.”  Hinds: “Lovely people. Actually there were three of us in that election, all three from the same college, and I think that was very, very unusual.”  Hinds: “Stephanie Young, now Stephanie Tyrer. That was a very unusual set-up. There were many other elections that Jacob won while we were undergraduates, but on that occasion I was lucky enough to come out on top.”  ConHome: “And did you enjoy being President?”  ConHome: “And who were your most famous visitors?”  Hinds: “I had the summer term. My favourite visitors, we had Alvin Stardust, who also sang, and Will Carling, the Rugby player.”  ConHome: “And who are your political heroes?”  Hinds: “It’s so clichéd to say Mrs Thatcher is your political hero, but point me to the person on our side of the Chamber who wouldn’t say that.  “As it happens, I’m a child of the Eighties [he was born in 1969], grew up in Manchester, it was a difficult time, proper divides in politics, and in the earlier part of that period I was a Leftie.  “I came to my realisation aged 16, 17 and joined our party, so I’ve got a reasonable pedigree given I’m now 49. But it was a realisation rather than something automatic.”  ConHome: “And how did you realise?”  Hinds: “Well I think the Eighties was an amazing time to grow up, partly because there was so much politics. Everything from the Iron Curtain and communism versus capitalism through the Miners’ Strike and privatisation.  “Some things we got wrong as well as some things we got right of course. But as a teenager you couldn’t help but be politically very conscious of what was going on around you.  “And I came to the conclusion, first of all that I was a very lucky boy, coming from a strong family and going to a good school [Saint Ambrose College, a Roman Catholic grammar school].  “But I came to the conclusion that the way to make more boys and girls lucky boys and girls was to have a strong economy with enterprise but also with social responsibility, and with people looking out for each other. And sometimes we got on the wrong side of that, towards the end of the 1980s, of course, in terms of how people perceived us.”  ConHome: “And of her predecessors, of whom there are 39 including William the Conqueror?”  Hinds: “Are there only 39, all the way back to 1066?”  ConHome: “Yes, it’s not that many. Of course there were various people like Queen Victoria and George III..”  Hinds: “…who upped the average. Wow. I didn’t realise that. So I’m not going to profess to have a favourite monarch, other than of course Her Majesty. I do think the Queen is just so off the scale of amazingness and a role model for us all.”  ConHome: “When I put the same question to your predecessor but one, Nicky Morgan, she said Henry VIII. But when I and her special advisers expressed amazement, she switched to Elizabeth I.”  A division bell rang, and Hinds went off to vote. When he got back, the interview continued with a question about Brexit.  ConHome: “If Theresa May came back to Cabinet and said, ‘I can get something on the backstop, but not until the EU summit on 21st March,’ would you be happy to hold your nerve until then?”  Hinds [after a pause]: “I think the Prime Minister needs all of us to be behind her in this. Only she can know the exact dynamic of the negotiation, and exactly what is the best route forward.  “I won’t rehearse all the stuff about we need to get a deal, because clearly we do – I say clearly, it’s clear to me we absolutely do. Clearly already time is very short, and we need to make good and rapid progress.  “Obviously there are real worries about the backstop and it’s very legitimate for people to have worries about that, and legitimate to be seeking assurances.  “It is also true, and we must remember to keep saying it, that the deal overall is a very good deal. There’s been so much talk about the relatively I’m not going to say small issues that sometimes we don’t talk about the thing itself.”  ConHome: “But would you hold your nerve, and would your Cabinet colleagues hold their collective nerve, until 21st March?”  Hinds: “I think everybody is holding their nerve.”  ConHome: “Now on education, how important is it for an Education Secretary to be talked about? There have been some, people like Tony Crosland, who’ve gone on the offensive, who have been talked about – since Rab Butler, there’s been Crosland, Thatcher, Baker, Blunkett, Gove, and probably a few others, probably people like Boyle. Do you think that’s important, or not really?”  Hinds: “I actually think what’s really important is for the system to be working well, not letting down any of our children anywhere, and for the person doing my job, and all our ministers, and the whole department, to be making sure that happens.  “And sometimes that does require, and it certainly did when Michael [Gove] was doing this job, a bold and vociferous and constant presence, at other times less so.  “But there are always arguments to be won in this sphere, because there are forces of small-c conservatism – which is definitely not the same as our Conservatism – in the education world.  “And as a Conservative Education Secretary, you need to be facing up to those. If you stand still, you will go backwards.”  ConHome: “Would it be fair to say you’re more focussed on heads and teachers than on parents?”  Hinds: “It wouldn’t be fair to say I’m more focussed on heads and teachers. But without heads and teachers the parents would be very upset.  “And we have had a problem in the last few years with making sure we have enough teachers. So we haven’t recruited quite enough, and we’ve had too many leaving. And the biggest reason they leave is because of workload.  “So I’ve made my number one priority to bear down on workload for teachers. Which turns out to be not nearly as simple a task as people might expect.  “Because although in a popular image there’s all these forms that you’re making teachers fill in, I’ve tried very hard to find those forms and they basically don’t exist.  “It’s a much more endemic, complex set of circumstances that makes teachers work on average 50 plus hours a week, which again is much more than people would expect to hear.  “And I think from a parent’s point of view they don’t want to know that teachers are spending a huge amount of time other than teaching their children. It’s all the other stuff.”  ConHome: “If it’s not form-filling, what is it?”  Hinds: “The three biggest things are very large amounts of lesson-planning…”  Hinds: “No, not necessarily. It depends on what you do. Obviously I want teachers planning lessons. And schools do much better lesson-planning than when we were at school, and that is a very good thing.  “But if you are producing lesson-plans because you think the Ofsted inspector is going to see them, and stockpiling ring binders full of these things – this does happen in many schools, this is not a productive use of time.  ConHome: “Another problem is that good teachers are intelligent and capable people. If the economy’s doing well, they can go off and do other things.”  Hinds: “That’s true. If you’ve got four per cent unemployment that’s a bad time for anybody to be recruiting, because it’s a very competitive market. But I just say our vacancies are more important than everybody else’s.”  ConHome: “You did a piece on ConHome saying you firmly believe in academies. But are they being created quickly enough, do you think? Do you have enough sponsors? Or has your department been gradually reducing the financial incentives?”  Hinds: “Well it shouldn’t be about financial incentives. It is possible to help with the costs of conversion, but actually the big advantage of being an academy is about autonomy, and about being able to combine with other schools.  “We’ve just passed a really important milestone of more than half the children in the state sector being in academies, which is a great thing. We’re still seeing more coming forward for conversion. I would like to see that pace continue and accelerate.  “We also need more people, I hope ConHome readers will step up to this, to be governors and trustees. When you’ve got a devolved system, with lots of autonomy, the role of a governor can become a much bigger thing.  “And the academies programme is now for the first time since early Blair under threat from the Labour Party. It was originally a Blair invention.  “Michael Gove and Nick Gibb put turbo-chargers under that programme, massively increased the numbers, and actually I hear from Members of Parliament on all sides what a difference academisation has made.”  ConHome: “You gave a speech the other day about children’s character. How do you build children’s character without some ethical or religious input?”  Hinds: “Well I don’t think you do do it without some ethical input. I distinguish character and resilience from values and virtues, but they go together. So character and resilience, I talk about ‘believe you can achieve’, “be able to stick with the task in hand’, ‘understand the link between the effort I put in today and the reward I do or might get in the future’, ‘being able to bounce back when things go wrong’.  “All those things would also make you a really good criminal, and I don’t want you to be a criminal. So I also want you to be grounded in friendship, kindness, community spirit, all those values.  “Some people will get those through a religious education, others will get it through a non-religious but still an ethically based education.”  ConHome: “So what in your opinion is the role of Christianity in politics, both generally and for you personally? I asked Nicky Morgan this.”  ConHome: “She said the Anglican Church is very important to her.”  Hinds: “Well the Anglican Church is very important to me too. I’m going to go a wee bit further. Look, this is a Christian country. I mean these days it is a multicultural country as well, and there are many different faiths represented, and vast numbers of people who have no religious faith.  “But it still has, at the core of its institutions, traditions which are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And in Parliament you find – I’ve never actually done the maths, but it’s always felt to me that there’s a disproportionate number of people of some religious faith. Not necessarily Christian, but some religious faith.  “We start every day with Prayers, this little segment of the day, three minutes, the only part which is not broadcast, and I think whether people are Anglican or some other denomination, or an atheist, actually the majority of Members of Parliament I think appreciate that as a moment of reflection and thinking about the day ahead, thinking about why we’re here.  “Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Chaplain, does this prayer about remembering not to put personal self-interest in the way of what we do.”  ConHome: “What’s your view of free schools? It’s gone a bit quiet on free schools.”  Hinds: “We’re still doing this. We’ve got hundreds in the pipeline. Free schools are a type of academy, but brand new. They’ve brought a great deal of innovation. By bringing something different to an area, they create diversity and choice and a bit of competition with other schools.”  ConHome: “Is the Catholic Church still opting out of free schools – they were very cross, weren’t they, about the admissions cap?”  Hinds: “And that is still there. We’ve got a 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions for new free schools. But they can now – and others can as well – open new voluntary aided schools.”  ConHome: “Why have you got the cap on free schools?”  Hinds: “There are good reasons for wanting to be able to ensure diversity in school provision. But the voluntary aided school route has always been there. The process for application is different from that for a free school, it has to have the backing of the local authority, but it’s been around since 1944 and has worked well.  “It’s mostly associated with the Catholic Church but actually there are Anglican VA schools as well, and indeed other faiths. It’s actually never technically stopped being possible to open a VA school. There just wasn’t any money available.”  ConHome: “But is there a lobby within the Conservative Party against lifting this cap on faith-based admissions to free schools? Is that part of the trouble?  “Because oddly enough, you seem to be standing up for the more traditional socialist way of doing things, even if it goes back to 1944. The Labour Party would have less to disagree with – local democratic control and all that.”  Hinds: “Free schools came in under the Coalition Government and there is obviously a reason why they came in as they did, and they’ve been a great addition to the schools system, including by the way having schools of religious character coming in, but with a cap of 50 per cent when oversubscribed.  “There was one large denomination which did not feel able to open free schools, which was the Catholic Church. And I was keen that every denomination should be able to open new schools. And of course the voluntary aided route isn’t only open to them, but it is open to them.”  Hinds: “There’s a round of applications that’s just happening as we speak.”  ConHome: “I still don’t understand why you refused to get rid of this cap. You don’t need legislation. You can decide, can’t you?”  Hinds: “There are good community integration reasons why the cap is as it is.”  Hinds: “It applies to all faiths, in the same way that the opportunity to open a voluntary aided school applies to all faiths. We don’t make things specifically for individual religions.”  ConHome: “But would that be a worry, that you would then get some purely Muslim schools?”  Hinds: “There are purely Muslim schools, there are Jewish schools, there are Catholic schools, there are Anglican schools and they all play an important role. The key thing is that there is no significant religion in this country that wants to be able to open faith schools and can’t.”  ConHome: “I still haven’t got to the heart of your objection to lifting the cap.”  Hinds: “As I say, there are good community and integration reasons.”  Hinds: “It means it is right, and this is why the system was set up as it was initially, to be able to say, ‘Yes, we want to be able to have faith schools, but we also want to be able to have multiple ways, this is one of the ways, to make sure that we have full integration of communities. And that’s one of the ways we do it.”  ConHome: “And did you change your mind about this? Were you in favour of lifting the cap?”  Hinds: “If you looked hard, I think you would probably find a record of me somewhere in Parliament speaking about the cap before I was in a ministerial position.”  Hinds: “I wasn’t aware of all the considerations at the time.”


drudgereport--2019-04-04--Corporations special interests wrote bills Politicians introduced them 10000 times

Corporations, special interests wrote bills. Politicians introduced them. 10,000 times...

Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks.  Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state Capitol after another, quietly advancing the agenda of the people who write them.  A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic  and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation.  USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.  The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.  The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.  Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters.  In all, these copycat bills amount to the nation’s largest, unreported special-interest campaign, driving agendas in every statehouse and touching nearly every area of public policy.  The investigation reveals that fill-in-the-blank bills have in some states supplanted the traditional approach of writing legislation from scratch. They have become so intertwined with the lawmaking process that the nation’s top sponsor of copycat legislation, a member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, claimed to have signed on to 72 such bills without knowing or questioning their origin.  For lawmakers, copying model legislation is an easy way to get fully formed bills to put their names on, while building relationships with lobbyists and other potential campaign donors.  For special interests seeking to stay under the radar, model legislation also offers distinct advantages. Copycat bills don’t appear on expense reports, or campaign finance forms. They don’t require someone to register as a lobbyist or sign in at committee hearings. But once injected into the lawmaking process, they can go viral, spreading state to state, executing an agenda to the letter.  •Models are drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent. The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. The “HOPE Act,” introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps.  •Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.  •Bills copied from model legislation have been used to override the will of local voters and their elected leaders. Cities and counties have raised their minimum wage, banned plastic bags and destroyed seized guns, only to have industry groups that oppose such measures make them illegal with model bills passed in state legislatures. Among them: Airbnb has supported the conservative Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which pushed model bills to strike down local laws limiting short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods in four states.  •Industry groups have had extraordinary success pushing copycat bills that benefit themselves. More than 4,000 such measures were introduced during the period analyzed by USA TODAY/Arizona Republic. One that passed in Wisconsin limited pain-and-suffering compensation for injured nursing-home residents, restricting payouts to lost wages, which the elderly residents don’t have.  “This work proves what many people have suspected, which is just how much of the democratic process has been outsourced to special interests,” said Lisa Graves, co-director of Documented, which probes corporate manipulation of public policy. “It is both astonishing and disappointing to see how widespread ... it is. Good lord, it’s an amazing thing to see.”  The impact of model legislation is undoubtedly larger than the 10,000 copied bills identified by USA TODAY/Arizona Republic.  Because the investigation relied on matching identical text, it flagged instances where legislators copied model legislation nearly verbatim, but it did not detect bills that adapted an idea without using the same language.  Sherri Greenberg, who spent 10 years in the Texas Legislature and is now the Max Sherman Chair in State and Local Government at the University of Texas at Austin, said bills used to spring from lawmakers’ experiences, constituents, or lobbyists representing long-established industries. Model legislation has flourished as gridlock in Congress forced special interest groups to look to the states to get things done, she said.  Not all model legislation is driven by special interests or designed to make someone money. Some bills were written to require sex offenders to register with law enforcement, while others have made it easier for members of the military to vote or increased penalties for human trafficking.  Charles Siler, a former external relations manager for the Goldwater Institute, which has pushed copycat bills nationwide, said it's a fast way to spread ideas because with little modification lawmakers can adapt it to their state.  “It’s not inherently bad, one way or the other," said Siler, who now works for a political action committee. “It depends on the idea and the people pushing it. Definitely people use model legislation to push bad ideas around."  Allison Anderman, managing attorney at the pro-gun-control Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said model bills are simply how the system works now.  “This is how all laws are written,” she said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a law where a legislator sits in a chamber until a light bulb goes off with a new policy.”  The Asbestos Transparency Act sounds like the kind of boring, good-government policy voters expect their representatives to hammer out on their behalf to safeguard public health.  Better transparency was one reason Colorado state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg said he introduced the bill in 2017, and again last year, at the urging of a tort reform group called the Colorado Civil Justice League and backed by insurance companies, including Nationwide Insurance.  “Whenever you add transparency to the mix, it helps all consumers,” said Sonnenberg, a Republican.  But the bill had nothing to do with requiring companies to disclose to consumers what products contained asbestos or informing those who had been exposed to the cancer-causing mineral how to get help.  It, in effect, cast corporations as victims of litigation filed by people harmed by asbestos. The model bill requires people battling the asbestos-triggered disease mesothelioma to seek money from an asbestos trust, set up to compensate victims, before they can sue a company whose product might have caused their cancer.  That process can take months or even a year.  Many mesothelioma victims die within a year of their diagnosis. Their families can still sue on their behalf, but for far less money.  “I can tell you for a fact that families don’t have time for all these hoops they want you to jump through,” said Chris Winokur, whose husband Bob was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2015 and died nine months later. “They’re trying to make it more difficult to sue.”  Bob Winokur, who worked for the U.S. Forest Service and served as mayor of Fort Collins, Colorado, never pinpointed where he came in contact with asbestos. And he never filed a claim to help pay his medical bills. The disease progressed too rapidly to allow it, even without the additional requirements proposed by the model bill, Chris Winokur said.  The model legislation was the work of corporations seeking to limit their exposure to billions of dollars in litigation associated with asbestos. Insurance companies Nationwide, AIG, Travelers, Hartford and CNA Financial Corp. together hold more than half the nation’s asbestos claim exposure totaling over $870 million.  USA TODAY/Arizona Republic found the Asbestos Transparency Act, a product of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an industry-supported model bill factory, has been introduced in at least 17 states since 2012.  It became law in at least 11 states.  Sonnenberg, the lawmaker who introduced it in Colorado, said he didn’t write the bill and relied on “my experts” to explain it during a February 2017 hearing.  One of those experts was Mark Behrens, who logs thousands of miles a year testifying before lawmakers about ALEC's model asbestos legislation. He has done so in at least 13 states, where he was billed as an objective authority.  Behrens is an attorney with Shook, Hardy and Bacon, which represents companies in complex civil litigation.  He is a co-chairman of ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force and is a paid consultant for the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, an arm of the nation’s largest business lobby, which has the stated goal of reducing litigation.  During the hearing, Behrens testified: "The only thing the legislation does is accelerate the timing of when the trust claim is filed. It's not putting any new burdens on plaintiffs."  A Democratic legislator pressed Behrens on why the 26-page bill needed technical language that could confuse victims trying to be compensated. She called it, "a gift to defendants," before voting against it.  Sonnenberg told USA TODAY he didn’t know Behrens worked for the Chamber of Commerce when he called him to testify. “I just knew they were experts and they indeed understood the legal issues and process much better than I,” he wrote in an email.  Behrens said the Asbestos Transparency Act seeks to hold wrongdoers accountable, while exonerating innocent companies paying for harm they didn’t cause.  “These companies don’t get a vote; all we can do is make our case,” Behrens told USA TODAY. “I don’t care who I’m there for, I still have to be credible and honest.”  Graves said special interests have "so-called experts who aren't neutral. They go around the country and testify about those bills as if they're good for that state or even as if they're products of that state."  Colorado lawmakers rejected the Asbestos Transparency Act in 2017 and 2018, and Sonnenberg said he doesn't plan to introduce it this year.  “It would be wise,” he said, “for someone with a better understanding of these types of issues to carry the bill in the future.”  Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of ALEC, said supporters of the asbestos model believed it did create more transparency, "but it's up to each individual state to choose how they would name" the bill when they copy ALEC's model.  USA TODAY found more than 4,000 bills benefiting industry were introduced nationwide during the eight years it reviewed. More than 80 of those bills limit the public's ability to sue corporations, including limiting class-action lawsuits, a plaintiff's ability to offer expert testimony, and cap punitive damages for corporate wrongdoing.  "No citizens are saying, 'Hey, can you make it harder to sue if ... low-paid (nursing home) orderlies happened to kill or injure my parents,' " Graves said. "That's not a thing citizens are clamoring for. But you know who is? The nursing home industry, and big business in general."  Many of the bills USA TODAY found were copied from models written by special interests were couched in unremarkable or technical language that obscured their impact. Bans on raising the local minimum wage were dubbed "uniform minimum wage" laws. Changes to civil court rules to shield companies from lawsuits were described as "congruity” or reforms to make laws consistent. Repealing business regulations was  disguised under the term "rescission."  A moderate Republican from the Philadelphia suburbs shows how copycat bills in some states set the legislative agenda.  Rep. Thomas Murt has sponsored more model legislation than any other state lawmaker in the nation, according to USA TODAY's database.  Murt, whose biggest campaign donors include the Pennsylvania Republican Party and labor unions, said he was stunned to learn that he was listed as a sponsor on 72 bills substantially copied from model legislation from 2010 to late 2018.  “I had no way of knowing unless it’s put in the … memo,” Murt said of the bills he helped sponsor.  Murt’s situation highlights how critical bill titles and summaries are – especially when it comes to copycat legislation – because lawmakers, even sponsors, often don’t read bills.  Had Murt probed further, he would have seen the bills he signed onto came from ALEC, its liberal counterpart ALICE, the State Innovation Exchange, Council of State Governments, Goldwater Institute and other groups that specialize in writing copycat bills.  They dealt with cities’ ability to take action against blighted properties, prohibitions on businesses banning guns in employees' vehicles, and a call for the U.S. president to be elected by popular vote, among many others.  USA TODAY provided Murt with a list of all 72 bills, 13 of which became law, and asked questions about his support for them. He was the primary sponsor of only one: a ban on smoking in workplaces written by the liberal State Innovation Exchange.  Murt said he would reconsider his support for two of the bills that were copied from ALEC, after learning more about their impact. One was a call for a constitutional convention to curb federal spending, backed by the controversial Koch brothers conservative political network. The other was a bill protecting Crown Cork & Seal from asbestos liability.  "I would be suspect of such a proposal," Murt said of the constitutional convention model. "But bear in mind that when that co-sponsor memo was circulated, I'm sure it never mentioned the Koch brothers, because for some people that would have been a show-stopper."  Murt also said he would never support limiting asbestos victims' ability to sue.  USA TODAY interviewed more than 50 sponsors of model legislation nationwide. Half said they knew they had sponsored model legislation. But 20 legislators said they didn’t know the source of their bill or claimed they wrote at least part of the bill.  Five insisted the bill was their own work, even though the wording of each included multiple passages that matched model legislation nearly verbatim. Almost all of the sponsors defended the practice of copying model legislation or had no opinion of it.  In Michigan, Republican state Sen. Joe Haveman said he worked with a lobbyist from a Lansing law firm to draft his state’s version of the law aimed at shielding Crown Cork & Seal from asbestos liability stemming from a corporate merger in the 1960s. The law firm, Clark Hill, has donated $1,800 to his campaigns since 2012, according to state records.  Haveman said he had no issues with relying on model bills and said even though Crown Cork & Seal is not a Michigan company, he said he saw it as a “fairness issue.” He said he was approached by a lobbyist and agreed with the bill when he saw a draft.  “It really had nothing to do with my passion for anything. They had to do this in all 50 states,” Haveman said. "Somebody targeted me, and I had to do it.”  It’s not just legislators circulating copycat bills. In Pennsylvania, the nonpartisan service that drafts all bills for the state Assembly – the Legislative Reference Bureau – frequently copies directly from model legislation, said director Vincent DeLiberato. But the legislator ultimately decides whether to use it, he said.  In Wisconsin, the Legislature’s nonpartisan legal staff is similarly tasked with converting lawmakers’ ideas into bills. A March 1, 2017, email to that staff from the office of Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos requested that an attached document be “drafted as stated.”  The document contained the Campus Free Speech Act, which prevents universities from blocking controversial speakers and imposes penalties on students, including expulsion, for disrupting such events. The measure, written by the Goldwater Institute, is a reaction to liberal protesters at Middlebury College, UC-Berkeley, University of Florida and other campuses who have disrupted speeches by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and white supremacist Richard Spencer, among others.  Vos did not respond to questions about the origin of his bill, which was copied nearly verbatim from Goldwater's model. It didn’t pass, but the ideas were incorporated in new university rules adopted by Wisconsin.  USA TODAY’s algorithm found the same model was introduced in 13 states, becoming law in Arizona and North Carolina. A similar version passed in Colorado.  The relationship between groups writing model legislation and the lawmakers introducing them is a marriage of convenience, experts said.  Special interests give lawmakers fully conceived bills they can put their names on and take credit for. And those special interests can become dependable donors to their campaigns.  Conservative groups like ALEC nurture those relationships at annual conferences where lawmakers and corporate lobbyists discuss policy and mingle over meals and drinks paid for by corporate sponsors.  This arrangement is particularly appealing to new lawmakers, said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor at Columbia University who has studied the influence of ALEC and other conservative groups.  His research showed less-experienced lawmakers are more likely to use copycat legislation.  They “know they are conservative, they know they are pro-business, but ... they don’t really know what it means to translate that into different bills,” he said. “These networks are able to fill in what it means to be a conservative Republican who wants to support business.”  Meierling, ALEC's chief marketing officer, said there are checks and balances on corporate influence within the organization "just like our government structure."  Companies join ALEC because they want feedback and insight from a variety of legislators, he said.  "Sure they (companies) are going to share their perspective, but a legislator is there to represent their constituents and if they don't they'll be held accountable at the ballot box," Meierling said. "ALEC ... has proven it’s an asset to society."  Progressive groups, meanwhile, have failed to replicate conservatives’ success because they’ve not invested in facilitating the relationships between lawmakers and special interests, Hertel-Fernandez said.  “What ALEC does is more than provide the model bills: They provide relationships. They approach you when you are first elected and build these enduring social connections with you at recurring events that happen every year,” he said. “You really need that social connection in addition to the model-bill resources that you’re getting, the research help.”  “Countless American lives will be saved. ... I don’t want to say thousands because I think it’s going to be much more – hundreds of thousands,” President Donald Trump said at a signing ceremony for the national “Right to Try” bill in May 2018.  “It is such a great name. From the first day I loved it. It’s so perfect: Right. To. Try.”  With the stroke of a pen, Trump made a bill that had circulated in statehouses for four years the most successful copycat bill in history. Not only did it pass in 41 states, it also had conquered Congress.  The version passed by Congress allows terminally ill individuals a right to try experimental medications that have not been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration.  The bill’s title left the public with the impression it was spurred by a groundswell of patients demanding lifesaving treatment.  Instead, it was a focus group-tested name, coined by a consultant to a for-profit corporation.  That corporation, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, a chain focused on alternative cancer treatments, wanted access to experimental drugs.  Right to Try illustrates another finding of USA TODAY’s investigation: Some copycat bills amount to little more than marketing and posturing, with organizations behind them highlighting a perceived problem and then offering a solution with little or no measurable impact.  The point is seemingly to score political points, draw attention to the organization behind the model, and raise funds off the effort.  Former Goldwater President Darcy Olsen parlayed this campaign into the book “Right to Try.” In it, she said Cancer Treatment Centers of America approached Goldwater for help addressing a “national medical emergency”: the government blocking terminally ill patients from receiving potential lifesaving treatments.  When asked, Goldwater could not produce any of those patients.  Chuck Warren, corporate consultant to Cancer Treatment Centers of America, said he came up with the bill’s name.  Goldwater and CTCA paid for focus groups to make sure the name struck the right chord. “It was always our favorite name and it was the name that resonated the most with focus groups,” Warren said.  While the marketing was cutting edge, its policy largely had been implemented decades earlier.  Alison Bateman-House, an assistant professor of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Health, said Right to Try is “an effort to address a problem that did not actually exist.” Patients have been able to access experimental drugs since the 1970s, she said.  Through the FDA’s compassionate-use program, about 1,000 patients a year have gained access to non-approved drugs in recent years. The FDA approves more than 90 percent of those requests, often within days and, in emergencies, sometimes more quickly.  “The Goldwater Institute was taking advantage of a very heart-rending and sympathetic issue to push for their pet policy, which is basically to roll back regulations,” Bateman-House said. “They did pick a winner of a name. ... Unfortunately, it’s a lie.”  It’s unclear how many people have received experimental drugs through Right to Try. Bateman-House said she’s heard of two. Goldwater points to those same two patients, and a Texas doctor who ran a trial involving 200 patients.  Goldwater CEO Victor Riches said those were only the individuals who informed his organization about their success using the law.  Riches said Goldwater crafts legislation it sees a need for in Arizona, where it's based. It then considers the “exportability” of its model legislation to other states, he said.  Goldwater’s strategy for Right to Try was to get it passed in as many states as possible to pressure Congress to enact a version, Riches said.  “When you are in 41 states and you've had literally thousands of legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike, it is hard for the federal government not to take notice,” he said.  It’s even harder to pin down what problem the American Laws for American Courts bill is solving.  The model bill, which was introduced in legislatures 53 times during the past eight years, mandates judges' rulings be void if based on a foreign law or doctrine that violates the rights granted to U.S. citizens under the Constitution or state law.  Even backers struggle to identify situations where this has occurred.  “This is a solution looking for a problem,” said Ahmed Abdelnaby, an engineer who testified against the bill last year at the Idaho Legislature because he felt it fomented hate against his Muslim faith.  While proponents are unable to cite court cases where U.S. law has been supplanted by Sharia or some other doctrine, those lobbying for it collected about $206 million in donations between 2008 and 2013, according to a study released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.  “They wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t making a buck,” said Robert McCaw, government relations director for CAIR.  Minnesota state Rep. Steve Drazkowski, who co-sponsored similar legislation in 2016, said some people fear Sharia law will be applied in the U.S., but he does not.  Drazkowski also pushed a bill in 2011 to declare English as the official language of Minnesota and prohibit conducting routine business in foreign languages, including driver’s license exams. The bill was strikingly similar to model legislation by a group called ProEnglish, which calls itself the “nation's leading advocate for official English.”  The Saint Paul Pioneer Press editorialized that Drazkowski was using it to ensure his reelection by “pandering to the mostly conservative and card-carrying residents of … the paranoid states of America.”  Drazkowski said he is aware of ProEnglish but couldn’t remember where he got the language for his English-only bill.  “The use of these model bills is not the end of the world,” he said, noting that immigrants are more successful when they learn English. “The idea that one organization or group is somehow controlling legislation or legislators or states, that’s a fallacy.”  For Susan Edwards, it seemed like a godsend when Arizona lawmakers introduced a bill to create a new kind of school voucher for students with disabilities.  With the money – funded by dollars taken from a recipient’s local district school – the mother of two children on the autism spectrum could send her kids to a private school where they would receive specialized attention they wouldn’t get elsewhere.  With a sympathetic group of students as the face of the legislation, Democrats and Republicans rallied behind the 2011 bill which borrowed language from the Goldwater Institute, ALEC, and American Federation for Children, the pro-school choice group founded by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.  Edwards’ opinion of the program, however, changed drastically as legislators later introduced bill after bill to give vouchers to more students, culminating in lawmakers approving them for all students.  None of those bills, however, guaranteed Edwards’ sons and others with disabilities could keep their vouchers as more students were added. She didn’t know it at the time, but lawmakers were drawing their ideas from model legislation.  Edwards said she realized in retrospect that students with disabilities were used as a Trojan horse to put on the legislative agenda a fringe idea that was part of a much bigger campaign. In the years that followed, 19 other states debated 93 nearly identical proposals based on model legislation. They became law in Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina and Tennessee.  "Every single, little expansion, if you look at who's behind it, it is the people that want to get that door kicked open for private religious education," Edwards said. "All we (families with disabled students) are was the way for them to crack open the door.”  Riches, Goldwater's CEO, said starting the Empowerment Scholarship Account voucher program with a small group of students and expanding it was the best approach.  "When you are talking about a big idea, a new idea, usually the best way of approaching it is to wade into it and demonstrate it can work on a smaller level and then grow it from there,” Riches said.  The groups behind Arizona’s move toward universal vouchers, however, were shown in indisputable terms that the public opposed their ideas.  It was only the most recent example of model legislation that didn’t reflect the will of voters, USA TODAY/Arizona Republic found.  Model-legislation factories have increasingly proposed what are known as "preemption" bills. These laws, in effect, allow state legislators to dictate to city councils and county governing boards what they can and cannot do within their jurisdiction—including preventing them from raising the minimum wage, banning plastic grocery bags, and destroying guns.  USA TODAY’s algorithm found more than 100 such bills had been introduced on an expanding array of topics.  Kansas stopped local efforts to require restaurants to list calories on their menus.  Arizona and New Hampshire prevented local regulations on home rentals. Airbnb has lobbied against home-sharing restrictions, often with the Goldwater Institute's assistance.  One model pushed by ALEC and the Goldwater Institute prohibits local jurisdictions from creating occupational licensing requirements. It reflects conservatives’ and libertarians’ belief that job licensing stifles competition and hurts the economy, and should only be required when it involves health and safety.  Drazkowski, the Minnesota representative, said he introduced such a bill “so you don’t have a patchwork kind of discombobulated mess of different ordinances from one community to the next.”  But Riches said his group stopped promoting similar model legislation because of the public outcry.  “We found very quickly that you bring people out of the woodwork when you try to get rid of occupational licenses,” he said. “What I would refer to as the status-quo crowd.”  Goldwater returned with another that allows anyone who's been harmed by occupational regulation to sue for damages, including harm that occurred before the law was enacted.  It was introduced in at least five states and passed in Arizona. But Riches acknowledged no one has used it to file suit, and the only beneficiary he can point to is a person with ties to the administration of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a vocal supporter of occupational licensing restrictions.  Because preemption bills have almost exclusively been advanced by Republicans, many of whom rail against the excessive mandates of Washington, D.C., critics see such legislation as the height of hypocrisy.  "There's real ... hypocrisy in many of these so-called conservative legislators trying to rip away local control when they preached for years that a government that's closest to you ... is most responsive to you," said Dawn Penich-Thacker, who campaigned to overturn Arizona's school-voucher expansion with a public vote.  Penich-Thacker saw a similar disregard for the will of voters when within hours of Arizonans’ vote to overturn universal school vouchers, the Goldwater Institute and American Federation Children declared they would continue to feed their model proposals to state lawmakers.  Bills to modify Arizona's voucher program were soon introduced. One bore a striking resemblance to model legislation from the Heartland Institute, granting vouchers to any parent who feels their child is unsafe or being bullied at school.  Edwards, the voucher supporter-turned opponent, noted that just like the first Arizona bill granting vouchers to children with disabilities, Bolick had sympathetic victims—kids who'd been bullied—to help sell her bill.  “It really does seem like you are fighting against the tide,” Edwards said of the influence of model legislation and the groups behind it. “They are ignoring the vote of the people.”  A letter to the editor appeared in The Arizona Republic defending renewed efforts to expand the voucher program despite defeat at the ballot box.  The letter’s author, Scott Kaufman, wasn’t a concerned parent, or even an Arizona resident.  He had sent his letter from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, from a model-bill factory: the American Legislative Exchange Council.