"Brandon Sun" reporter Curtis Brown plugs this blog on his....

So, "Brandon Sun" reporter Curtis Brown has done a post on his personal blogger regarding the religion issue I've stirred up{or rather, just brought back to the forefront, though I and my passionate letters are not thw ONLY reason it has} in the city, in which he also plugs my blog "The Iconoclast Project"{this blog}, which is one of my 3 blogs{the other two beeing "Day of Reason"- http://day-of-reason.blogspot.com , and "Raving Madman"- http://raving-madman.blogspot.com }. Below I will copy/paste what he wrote and also my response to it in his "comments" box for it. Thank you to Curtis Brown{if he reads this}. Peace all. Now to to the comments{ Oh, and by the way, Curtis's site is called "Endless SpinCycle" and it's address is http://endlessspin.blogspot.com/ };



Tempest in a Teapot 2005: Civic Jesus{By Curtis Brown}
Anyone who has ever covered politics for a newspaper in a small city like Brandon will appreciate the fact that nothing newsworthy happens in the summer. The effect of this, of course, is that stories that would get moderate play during the rest of the year are blown up to crisis proportions during July and August.I spent most of last summer reporting on a ridiculous dispute where the city unilaterally turned downtown public parking meters over to the fire department without telling nearby merchants. When I wasn't talking to merchants who were upset about this, I was skulking the dark recesses of city hall, chatting with several civic employees who - under the cloak of anonymity, of course - wanted to speak about how sapped morale was in the building.Move ahead to this summer we have another summer tempest in a teapot to keep ourselves occupied. The scandal du jour is prayer - specifically, whether or not a group of Christians should have the right to pray on city property.It all started with a letter to the editor myself or my other colleagues would typically dismiss as just another kooky raving. Bill Baker has written a lot of letters to the paper over the past year about the spread of Christian fundamentalism. Piddling stuff, really, about Christian charity groups, the predominance of Christmas and a bunch of trash-talking about Pope John Paul II. Whatever.So Bill Baker wrote a letter in early June about a prayer meeting that had taken place in the mayor's office. It sat for a few days, but there was nagging questions left in people around work's minds after it was published. Why was this group there? Who authorized them to be there? Has this always gone on?Those questions wouldn't be there had it not been for a story that had been written the previous summer - again, during the silly season - about senior civic employees driving city vans, on the city's dime, with representatives of a few local churches to a leadership conference hosted by an evangelical Christian group in Chicago. Since this loosely tied to that and a few other strange goings-on, we felt compelled to check it out. We did and ever since then, this issue has refused to die.It culminated Tuesday in myself and Sun photographer Colin Corneau attending the prayer meeting. There was nothing really threatening about it. These people were kind enough to pray for me, Colin and many other people. No one from the city took part and after the hour was up, everyone filed out of there. It would seem to be no big deal, except for the question I haven't heard a satisfactory answer to yet: why are they there? Why must they be in city hall?I believe strongly in keeping religion and government separate. I admire countries like France that believe in civic republicanism and secularism, even though France it takes it to an almost-ridiculous extent when it bans skullcaps and hijabs in schools. And like my boss, Ewan Pow, I too am strongly skeptical of any group's claims not to have a specific agenda when it insists on occupying places where political decisions are made for prayer and advancing definite stands on social policy.Bill Baker has a blog where he's been doing running commentary on all this. He appears to be happy as hell he started this whole thing. He doesn't understand the true reason why the Sun has chosen to cover this issue, but that's his business. It's a free country and he can write and think what he wants. That's what this is all about.However, this whole issue, like most debates, has turned ugly and needs to stop. Frankly, it's getting old. While I'd still like to hear people's comments on here, I hope people do what one letter-writer has urged us to do and put this distraction to bed already.UPDATE ON ALREADY STUPIDLY-LONG POST: This is weird. If you go onto our spiffy new website, you'll see Google crawl ads for a bunch of religious stuff beside all the letters to the editor and commentaries under opinion.The Lord works in mysterious ways, indeed.
posted by Curtis Brown @ 10:18 PM 1 comments
Tuesday, August 02, 2005


The Irreverands comments posted in Curtis's Comments box:

Allright-APPARENTLY the comments can't be cut and pasted. So, "if" you're interested in reading the comments I left him and his readers, head on over to his blog and find the post "Tempest in a Teapot 2005: Civic Jesus " scroll down and click on his comments box under it and read. His site is =
"Endless Spin Cycle
The electronic continuation of Spin Cycle, the Saturday column I write in the Brandon Sun. For those readers outside the bounds of southwestern Manitoba, I'm the political reporter for the Sun, the regional daily paper in this corner of the world. Click here to find out not just my take on local and provincial politics, but also national and international stories from a Westman perspective. Hope you like. CB" at http://endlessspin.blogspot.com/

In Reason:
The very irreverand Bill Baker